generalspeaking

Re-Establishing Relations

They're at it again, Russia and the United States. Repairing relations, on the way to straining them all over again. They're both on the same treadmill, only they're running it furiously backward, not toward a sanguine future of like-mindedness. On the one hand, both countries remain aware of the danger inherent in a perpetually-unsettled global landscape with unstable regimes and their connection to terror groups attaining to nuclear ownership and, inevitably nuclear weapons.

They can, each of them, afford to surrender some of their MAD arsenal, since between them they hold about 90% of the world's such earth-scorching materiel, even if some of them are decrepit, dessicated, their usefulness questionable. And those old, first-generation nuclear devices should be disassembled, taken apart, destroyed. They're close to useless in all likelihood in any event, but even if, warehousing them, they fall into the wrong hands, their components and designs could be useful.

Instead, what's happening with the new Strategic arms Reduction Treaty (START), is a mutual agreement, signed by U.S.President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to warehouse a 'redundant proportion of nuclear warheads, each being permitted a maximum of 1,550 deployed warheads. Each retaining one and a half thousand nuclear warheads? How many would it take to rock Planet Earth off its orbit around the sun?

Not to quibble; President Obama characterizes this as "an extraordinary event", an "important milestone" for anti-proliferation, going far to heal strained U.S.-Russia relations. Signing this treaty "will move us further beyond the Cold War, strengthen the global non-proliferation regime, and make the United States, and the world, safer and more secure". Perhaps he brought some opiates back with him from his Afghanistan trip?

This, after all, is not quite all that Russia had hoped to achieve by its willingness to sign START. As President Medvedev also said of the treaty, it "enables us to rise to a higher level of co-operation between Russia and the United States". But oops, what happened to that co-operation, immediately post-signing of START? The U.S. has no intention of budging on the single top-of-mind-concern to Russia

"The U.S. president assured us we are still part of the Euro-Atlantic area", said Prime Minister Jan Fischer in Prague, after President Obama wined and dined there,meeting leaders from Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia representing central and eastern European countries once in the Soviet sphere of influence whose migration to NATO rankles Russia mightily.

Restricting to 700 warhead-carrying air-, ground- and submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles is fine and dandy, but Russia, in signing on so obligingly, felt some recompense should accrue, which it did not. Since Russia hoped that the United States would also agree, good-naturedly, to relent on its Europe-based anti-ballistic missiles and radar installations program, still on the horizon - purportedly as a defence and deterrent to Iran.

And for its part, Russia remains intent on having U.S. bases close to its territory, history. To that end, Russia played its conspiratorial hand in Kyrgyzstan, and that key air base to provision U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan now begins to look pretty shaky. Russia denies having had a hand in the Kyrgyzstan revolt, but its president had agreed to close the U.S. air base, and then reneged. And Russia intends to be the sole power with an air base in the country.

First Uzbekistan, and now Kyrgyzstan, how's that for cementing good relations and ensuring good fellowship? Perhaps a little bit of low-grade payback for American interference in arming and training mujaheddin insurgents while Russia was mired in Afghanistan? Memories, bad ones, are not so readily extinguished to make way for new partnerships. All the more so when the old ones are being joined to new ones.

Labels: Conflict, Political Realities, Russia, United States

posted by Pieface @ Friday, April 09, 2010