Hardball with Sergey Lavrov

Wikimedia Commons Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev using a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License. 

Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov had the following to say about the U.S.-Russian arms control talks happening this week:

It’s impossible to achieve that without taking into account the situation in the missile defense sphere and many other factors, including [plans for] deployment of strike systems in space, plans for development of non-nuclear warheads and the situation with conventional weapons taking into consideration numerous innovative approaches

Not surprisingly, this list of grievances leads the article to conclude an agreement may not be hammered out by December 5.  The two major things to keep in mind are:

1. How much of this is diplomatic posturing? Negotiating, particularly with the Russians on arms control, is an arduous task.  They want to represent a big hand, particularly with concerns about the weakness of the Obama administration be too willing to give concessions without receiving much in return.  The United States needs to determine which of these, if any, it wants to engage with in the current negotations and what they will seek in return for concessions.

2. The punt factor- Negotiating a follow-on that includes a new verification system and deals with missile defense, conventional capabilities, space strike capabilities, etc. (not to mention major U.S. grievances like the TNW imbalance in Europe) is probably not possible by December 5.  Not an earth shattering revelation.  The question is what are the baseline or interim steps where the U.S. and Russians will try to find common ground. Negotating to these long-standing differences will be quite a task but carving out some basic agreements in the short-term can help the countries warm up the arms control engines, so to speak, and ensure that chaos does not ensue when the START treaty does expire on December 5.

While on the topic of Russian grievances, the U.S. decision to place a Patriot Missile unit in Poland probably won’t make them happy, as evidenced by their initial response.