This Week’s Highlights
A very useful step for Moscow and Washington
would be to revive the practice of convening bi-annual U.S.-Russian meetings at the assistant/under-secretary or deputy foreign minister level, suggest Prof. William C. Potter, founding director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, and Anton Khlopkov,
founding director of the Center for Energy and Security Studies in Moscow. They also note that it would be worthwhile to resurrect a number of the arms control, nuclear energy and nuclear security working groups that were originally established under the bilateral U.S.-Russian Presidential Commission.
Both Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President-elect Joe Biden have said that, in principle, they want to invoke a provision of the New START treaty, write Anton Troianovski and David E. Sanger of the New York Times. One complicating factor, however, is that critical members of Biden s cabinet may not yet be confirmed by the Senate in
As the world enters the new year with a new US administration waiting in the wings, it is tempting to assume that the downward spiral in US-Russian relations can be slowed, if not reversed. Nowhere is the need for this change in trajectory more acute than in the sphere of nuclear arms control, where little remains of the once robust mix of formal accords, informal policy coordination, and routine consultations. The situation, arguably, is the worst it has been since Washington and Moscow ushered in the nuclear nonproliferation regime more than 50 years ago.
Speaking in an interview on CNN in early January 2021, Jake Sullivan, the incoming national security advisor, said he “very much believe[d] that the United States and Russia can act in their national interests to advance an arms control and strategic stability agenda”. He added that Moscow and Washington cooperated on arms control and nuclear nonproliferation issues even at the height of the Cold War.