 | | 04/08/2010 | | Obama's False START Just hours before President Barack Obama unveiled his Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) on Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters in Moscow that the Kremlin maintained the right to withdraw from the new START agreement if the United States pursued its missile defense program. Late last night, the White House responded to Lavrov's statement, insisting: "The Russian statement does no more than give the United States fair notice that it may decide to pull out of the New START Treaty if Russia believes our missile defense system affects strategic stability. We believe it doesn't."
But the Russians could care less what the Obama administration believes about missile defense. The Russians have made it exceedingly clear that Kremlin compliance with the treaty will evaporate at any point when Moscow decides our missile defense program threatens them. And the Russians have already said repeatedly that they believe it does. There is a good reason that neither Russian President Dmitri Medvedev nor Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have uttered a word about the treaty in public. As New York University professor of Russian Studies and History Stephen Cohen told MSNBC just seconds after Presidents Obama and Medvedev signed the agreement: "Politically it is an unstable treaty." Why should the U.S. Senate ratify a treaty that Russia maintains it can exit at any time? | | |
