The surprise is that the treaty is now so unlamented. Mark Fitzpatrick, proliferation analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said that the US’s exit “didn’t turn out to be a huge problem”. The US and Russia used the chance to make deep cuts in their stockpiles of nuclear warheads – and they have agreed to more cuts by 2012.
By Bronwen Maddox
At last, George Bush Sr has been able to help to soothe his son’s troubled international relationships, if only by contributing his fishing boat to yesterday’s “lobster summit” with Vladimir Putin. His anxiety over the Iraq war is well known, and his self-restraint in not challenging his son on it has been presumed, but at least now, when the headlines have been warning of a new Cold War between the US and Russia, he has found a small role for his mediation.
It is astonishing how much the tone has changed since George W. Bush first hosted the Russian President at his Texan ranch two months after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Then, it was cordial and excited; “agreeing to disagree” was as bad as it got.
Now, after six months of Putin’s sour accusations about US imperialism, and shrill threats to point Russian missiles at Europe, it is chilly. Much of Putin’s antiUS ranting is self-serving, but he has one good point: his complaint about the younger Bush’s disregard for arms control treaties.
The first four years of George W.’s presidency were characterised by a rush to discard a stack of arms control treaties crafted over a quarter of a century of the Cold War. It is hard now to relive the sense of threat, with two nuclear arsenals pointed at each other – and the huge weight attached to these treaties, when solemnly signed.
The biggest fuss came over Bush’s decision to walk out of the once-sacred 1972 AntiBallistic Missile (ABM) treaty, the earliest of the big treaties and the first to fall.
The treaty banned the creation of ballistic missile defences so that, under the doctrine of mutally assured destruction, each country could be confident that its deterrent would deter. The US’s motive in abrogating it was partly to pursue “Star Wars” technology, to shoot down missiles in the air, although this never worked.
The surprise is that the treaty is now so unlamented. Mark Fitzpatrick, proliferation analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said that the US’s exit “didn’t turn out to be a huge problem”. The US and Russia used the chance to make deep cuts in their stockpiles of nuclear warheads – and they have agreed to more cuts by 2012.
But the US’s unilateral exit stung Russia. Putin’s fierce objections to new US plans to base small missile defences in Poland and the Czech Republic spring, the Kremlin says, from a belief that they could be the base of a huge defence system against Russia – the kind of thing the ABM would probably have barred.
That old sore is one cause of Putin’s present sense of grievance. “It’s been an accumulation of things,” said Fitzpatrick, including stationing forces (albeit not many) in former Warsaw Pact countries. But the US’s high-handedness towards other treaties also played a part. Bush (as did President Clinton before him) refused to push for Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban treaty. He issued a Pentagon strategy paper stating that nuclear devices were indispensable war-fighting weapons, and began developing new ones. He has declined to pursue talks on tightening curbs on biological weapons, and also decided to press ahead with space-based defence systems, which has made it harder, many argue, to protest against China’s testing of missiles in space.
Putin should be taken seriously on his complaint about the US’s approach to arms control. Not because the US and Russia are on the verge of a new Cold War; they are not. But arms control treaties are not anachronistic, particularly when threats may come from smaller countries who have managed to get unpleasant weapons.
They provide an example of good behaviour to those regimes, and a framework for testing compliance and rewarding them for staying within a set of rules. They also provide a model for future grand treaties – for instance between the US and China. Most of Putin’s sourness is unjustified – but he makes one good point.
