Russia vs. America: Is Another Arms Race Afoot?

By Jane M. O. Sharp, MIT Center for International Studies. Posted November 16, 2007.

During the Cold War years we learned that successful arms control agreements with the Soviet Union were those that codified parity, or at least a mutually acceptable status quo. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO) in 1991, a much diminished Russia saw all its WTO allies and three former Soviet republics join NATO, making parity harder to achieve. But there are still compelling reasons to shape agreements that satisfy all parties.

During the 1990s, under Boris Yeltsin, Russia strove to be represented as an equal to the United States in arms control diplomacy and in negotiations concerning the future of former Yugoslavia. President Bill Clinton tried to meet Yeltsin's concerns, but there has been little constructive cooperation on arms control between George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin. Indeed, since 2000, Bush has been hostile to any kind of multilateral diplomacy. He began his presidency with a new generation of ballistic missile defenses (BMD) and withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, an agreement that had stabilized U.S.-Soviet relations for two decades.

In Russia, an increasingly belligerent Putin, flush with oil money, is now determined to be accorded great power status in his dealings with the West. He is asserting himself in many areas: trying to block independence for Kosovo; countering U.S. sanctions against Iran; and renegotiating arms control agreements concluded when Russia was weak. While Putin is viewed with increasing wariness in the West, on arms control he has some points that need to be taken seriously.

Putin's Proposals

Specifically, the Russian president wants to extend the life of the 1994 START-I agreement (due to expire in December 2009) that constrains U.S. and Russian ICBMs, offensive missiles he cannot afford to upgrade, and would prefer new negotiations to reduce. Putin is also determined to rewrite or abrogate agreements that he claims are unequal and discriminatory. In particular, he is focusing on the bilateral 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) treaty banning U.S. and Soviet intermediate-range ballistic and cruise missiles (range 500-5500km), and the multilateral 1990 treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE), which codified the balance between NATO and the then WTO in five categories of ground force equipment.

The INF treaty resulted in the destruction of 846 U.S. and 1,846 Soviet intermediate-range missiles, including those that caused so much anxiety in Europe, particularly in West Germany in the 1980s. In February 2006, however, at the annual Wehrkunde meeting in Munich, Sergei Ivanov (then Russian defense minister) denounced the INF treaty as "a Cold War relic," while Putin said that Russia could no longer comply with a bilateral treaty that does not constrain non-signatory states that already have or might soon acquire INF. In October 2007, Putin threatened to abrogate the 1987 treaty unilaterally unless it is made global.

The CFE treaty is seen in NATO as the bedrock of post-Cold War stability in Europe because of the transparency and predictability of its compliance mechanism, which mandates regular exchanges of information and on-site inspections. Nevertheless, as an inter-bloc agreement, CFE was overtaken by events when the WTO disintegrated in 1991. Boris Yeltsin started to complain about the impact of NATO enlargement on CFE in 1993 and, soon afterwards, about the constraints CFE imposed on Moscow's ability to deal with unrest in the Caucasus.

After successive amendments in Russia's favor, including more generous ceilings for Russia in the flank zones, a new Adapted CFE (ACFE) treaty was signed in Istanbul in November 1999. Yeltsin also agreed to withdraw Russian forces from Moldova and Georgia -- a precondition for NATO to ratify the new treaty. Putin did not attend the November 1999 meeting, however, and has always denied the link between Yeltsin's commitment to withdraw from Georgia and Moldova and NATO's ratification of the new treaty. He would also exclude Russian "peacekeeping forces" from the withdrawal commitment.

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Jane M.O. Sharp is a visiting senior research fellow in the Department of War Studies, Kings College London, and the author of Striving for Military Stability in Europe: Negotiation, Implementation and Adaptation of the CFE Treaty (Routledge, 2006).

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