Taking a Deep Breath after New START Treaty Expiration

Following a flurried week of op-eds and articles about the expiration of the New START Treaty (NST), the death of arms control, and the looming nuclear arms race, NST’s final day opened with a scoop that the United States had “agreed with Russia to operate in good faith and to start a discussion about ways it could be updated” over the next six months. Later that day, the U.S. president announced that NST would not be extended but would be replaced by a “new, improved, and modernized Treaty.” A State Department speech the next day highlighted that “today marks the end of one era of arms control and hopefully the beginning of a new one.” It was altogether a more optimistic note that the week began on. But will this provide breathing room to get something meaningful done on arms control?

There is the important recognition already that next steps will not be “quick or easy.” This is partly due to process, with a bilateral and trilateral bureaucracy that is slow to move and prone to interruption. Negotiating the NST took almost a year and that was with an agreed starting point in the START I Treaty, mutual political will, and a strong track record of bilateral work. After that, the United States and Russia were unable to negotiate an NST successor either in the initial ten years the Treaty was in force or during the five years of the Treaty’s extension. Even holding strategic stability talks were difficult given the mounting number of problems in the U.S.-Russian relationship. Nor have successive U.S. administrations managed to either successfully incentivize or threaten China into being involved in nuclear dialogues or the next round of strategic arms control negotiations.

But the main issue remains the purpose behind future negotiations: what national security problem is the United States trying to solve via arms control and what will it offer in return. There are a host of things that the United States, Russia, and China are doing militarily that the others find problematic regarding nuclear warheads, strategic and dual-capable delivery systems, conventional strike systems, missile defenses, and space and cyberspace capabilities. The U.S. administration once again has laid out broadly what it wants in arms control: something that addresses all Russian warheads, something that addresses all Russian strategic delivery systems, and something involving China. The ill-defined list resembles closely the arms control next steps outlined in the last administration, and in the administration before that.

While there is a list of U.S. demands, there is little articulation of a negotiating plan or how arms control will solve the challenges these topics present. “It’s not fair these things the other side has aren’t included” is a convenient criticism of existing agreements, but it does not explain how future arms control agreements will solve a specific armaments challenge. Take for example the Chinese nuclear force buildup. Is the goal to have China included in a new arms control agreement, which would allow it to build up its forces to levels on par with the United States and Russia? This does not solve the U.S.-relevant security challenges of the two-peer problem. Or is the goal to try and convince China to stop building strategic nuclear weapons? This would seem a wholly unrealistic goal for an arms control agreement, given what China would ask in return. This is the same with Russian tactical nuclear weapons. Is the goal to have Russia reduce down to levels of the United States, given that the Russians have many more of them? The United States will have to pay a high price in exchange for one-sided numerical reductions by Russia. Or is the real problem that Russia has threatened to use them against its neighbors? In which case numbers are largely irrelevant, and arms control may not be the best approach to the problem. In the absence of an understanding of specific goals and likely trade costs, there is a fine line between staking out maximalist negotiating goals, setting unrealistic preconditions, and planting intended or unintended poison pills to stymie any future progress.

Given these underlying factors of limited time, bilateral and trilateral complexities, and unclear negotiating goals, aims can and should be kept limited and achievable over the short term (the next six months), the medium term (the remainder of the current U.S. administration), and the long term (the next U.S. administration). What do these aims look like?

In the short term, the United States and Russia should nail down what exactly they need to “operate in good faith” as responsible nuclear powers in the absence of formal agreements. This could be a short list of meaningful things, salvaged from the wreck of NST, to bridge the gap to the next round of formal negotiations: a continuation of ballistic missile launch agreements; a pledge of noninterference in each side’s national technical means to monitor the other side’s nuclear forces; a pared-down list of NST notifications on things like missile production, elimination, or movements that would keep nuclear risk reduction centers on both sides up and running; and biannual exchanges of NST data. Such a narrow list would help avoid the worst-case assumptions of what might be happening in an unconstrained world. This could be agreed at a strategic stability dialogue meeting.

In the medium term, the focus should be to set the stage for meaningful U.S.-Russian negotiations. This requires recognizing three likelihoods. First, “work on a new, improved, and modernized Treaty that can last long into the future” to replace NST will require the broader arms control interagency processes to do the heavy lifting. Other high-level bilateral issues will take much of the bandwidth of senior interlocutors. Second, NST provides the best initial starting point for U.S.-Russian mutual work on a future arms control agreement. It can be renovated to allow for predictability in the U.S.-Russian bilateral relationship and to provide the flexibility for the United States to respond to China’s strategic force expansion. Interagencies on both sides can start with the key questions: What is useful in NST and should be kept? What is outdated in NST and should be discarded or updated? What new should be added? Where is the trade space for keeping, adding, and subtracting? Rather than starting from scratch, building on the relevant parts of past agreements allows for something to be negotiated and ratified in the remaining time left to this administration. Third, it must be recognized that China has little incentive to join the process at this time. This is a reality of where they are midstream in their nuclear modernization program. Preconditioning any arms control effort on China’s participation likely means the effort is dead at the start.

If Chinese participation is in fact a real goal of arms control rather than simply a poison pill, the longer term should be focused on creating the conditions where China decides to join the table. China must make the calculation itself that there is more value to engaging in the process rather than sitting on the sidelines, that its best alternative to a negotiated agreement, or BATNA, is worse than a U.S.-proposed agreement. This calculation will likely require a multifront effort. One front is the demonstrated ability of the United States to respond to China’s nuclear buildup in a way that shows the downsides of an unconstrained world. But tangible displays of “leverage” or “peace through strength” have limits to what they can achieve; strategic competition must be coupled with a cooperative strategy of non-military inducements. The P5 nuclear process (a framework involving the nuclear-weapon states China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) should be used to show China, but also the United Kingdom and France, how strategic arms control is beneficial to be involved in and is not a “trick” or “trap” designed to make one vulnerable to espionage or strikes. There must be an expressed willingness to discuss Chinese issues of concern in a future negotiation. Nonnuclear states have an important role to play in this process. If the United States and Russia are meaningfully engaging, states should direct pointed questions to China on why they are not, despite their nuclear buildup, and should push back on China’s narrative that it is a responsible player in the nuclear nonproliferation space. This effort, on multiple vectors and over many years, is likely what is needed to bring Beijing into the types of negotiations it has long rejected.

Mike Albertson is the deputy director of the Center for Global Security Research (CGSR) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The views expressed in this post are the personal views of the author and should not be attributed to his employer or any of its sponsors.

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