Expectations are low that Biden and Putin can reach any significant accommodation during their first presidential summit on Wednesday in Geneva — with one possible exception: nuclear arms control
Russian President Vladimir Putin is set to meet President Joe Biden in Switzerland. | Maxim Blinov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via APExpectations are low that Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin can reach any significant accommodation during their first presidential summit on Wednesday in Geneva — with one possible exception: nuclear arms control.
The fact that these recommendations come from military and diplomatic veterans in both countries sets the issue apart from the host of other thorny security issues crowding the summit agenda where there appears to be little if any diplomatic daylight. Those include Russian election meddling and cyber attacks to its invasion of Ukraine and support of the Syrian government’s massacre of civilians.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan expressed the administration’s desire to get back to a regular dialogue with Moscow on nuclear matters as a first step. “We believe the starting point for strategic stability talks should be the very complex set of nuclear arms issues that face our two countries,” he told reporters ahead of Biden’s European trip.
Former nuclear officials and arms control experts in the United States, Europe and Russia have jointly issued a flurry of recommendations for how to revive a formal dialogue to reduce the nuclear danger. “I think arms control is seen as the only area where progress is possible,” said Nikolai Sokov, a former Russian Foreign Ministry official who helped negotiate several arms control agreements between the United States and Russia. “Both sides want to isolate arms control from the rest of the issues.”
“Strategic stability talks are fundamentally about reducing the factors that can increase the risk of conflict spilling into the nuclear realm,” he added.Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev meets with President Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office on Dec. 9, 1987. The two formed an unlikely partnership to reduce the number of nuclear weapons around the globe. | Barry Thumma/AP Photo
One of the most complex issues involves shorter-range nuclear-tipped missiles that were previously banned by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a 1987 pact that Russia violated and both countries recently scrapped. “Russia has deployed nuclear missiles in Europe. That’s why the INF Treaty doesn’t exist anymore,” said Tim Morrison, a senior fellow at the hawkish Hudson Institute who was deputy assistant to President Donald Trump for national security. “So are we making a unilateral concession? That’s never a good idea. Even if it was a bilateral agreement that either the U.S. or Russia deploy nuclear missiles in Europe, Russia couldn't honor it when it was a treaty.
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