The United States and Russian officials are met in Finland yesterday to renegotiate the NEW START Nuclear weapon treaty. The U.S. Ambassador, Marshall Billingslea, and Sergei Ryabkov, the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister will continue talks held earlier over the summer in Vienna. There is not much time remaining on the proverbial clock. The NEW START treaty is due to expire on February 2021.
Part of the delay is attributed to the fact that the Trump administration wants China’s commitment to the treaty. Back in August, speaking after the negotiation rounds in Vienna, Billingslea said this:
“The next treaty will have to be multilateral, it will have to include China, and the framework that we are articulating together as two great powers, us and the Russians, will be the framework going forward that China will be expected to join,
The perspective from the Trump administration is that China should have skin in the game, and make concessions in the build-out of their nuclear weapons program.
Recent DOD reports show significant increases in China’s buildout of military capability. Increasingly, China is marrying its state-sponsored enterprises from the private sector economy with military applications. This includes nuclear arsenals and advanced missile technology.
What remains unclear is how advanced weaponry buildouts on the part of the Chinese will impact nuclear weapons negotiations between Russia and the U.S.
Today, Ambassador Billingslea mentioned, “important progress” was achieved, however, specific outcomes remain unclear.
Riley,
Great topic for your blog post! And we will be coming back in a few weeks to discuss arms control. It would appear that the Trump administration has painted itself into a corner, to some degree. With the election less than a month away now, they are desperate for a foreign policy “win”; and this would be such. But their demand that NEW START become a trilateral treaty involving the Chinese is a total non-starter, at least within the time remaining before the treaty expires in February. It’s at least possible that China might be convinced to join the treaty at a later date, but there is currently very little incentive for it to do so–especially since its nuclear arsenal is still a fraction of the warheads possessed by Russia and the US. And the danger, of course, of playing brinkmanship, and possibly allowing the treaty to expire, is that that would mean that there would NO constraints whatsoever on either the US or Russian nuclear weapons programs, meaning we could see a new arms race like the one that occurred in the 1950’s and ’60s. This would be very dangerous and potentially destabilizing. –Professor Wallerstein