Arm wrestling.

• Author: Weitz, Richard
• Position: Critical essay

IN 2007, key pillars of the global arms-control architecture collapsed without any consensus on their replacement. The Russian-American dispute over the proposed deployment of U.S. ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems in eastern Europe has worsened security relations between the two countries in a number of dimensions. Despite Russian complaints, the Bush administration has refused to alter its BMD deployment plans or extend the Strategic Arms Control Reduction Treaty (START) when it expires in 2009. For their part, senior Russian officials appear eager to exploit their country's renewed economic and political strength to renounce arms-control measures that Moscow no longer considers in Russia's strategic interest.

The current U.S.-Russian strategic-arms-control architecture is flawed. It focuses on managing last century's security threats rather than addressing the main security challenges now facing both countries, especially nuclear proliferation and WMD terrorism. The problem is that the Russian and American governments have focused excessively on the negative agenda of dismantling the cold-war arms-control legacy, while not sufficiently exploring potential opportunities to move their security relationship into new directions with new partners. They have concentrated on secondary but divisive issues--such as missile defense--while neglecting potentially more promising bilateral and multinational arms-control opportunities.

The Arms-Control Crisis

THE BMD dispute highlights the faults in the current architecture. The main Russian argument is that the professed U.S. justification for the deployments--that the systems are needed to defend the United States and European countries against an emerging missile threat from Iran--lacks credibility given that Iran and other states of concern have yet to develop long-range missiles or the nuclear warheads that would make them especially threatening. The best means to discourage countries from pursuing weapons of mass destruction is by addressing their underlying security concerns rather than through military measures likely to trigger hostile counteractions.

Even before the recent, and very public, finding of the U.S. intelligence community that Iran is not presently pursuing nuclear weapons, Kremlin skeptics argued that Washington's real motivation for deploying missile defenses so close to their borders was to weaken Russia. In his February 2007 speech at the Munich security conference, President Vladimir Putin described the planned systems in Poland and the Czech Republic as one component of a larger American effort to negate Russia's nuclear deterrent and reinforce Washington's global influence. According to Putin, if the United States realizes its missile-defense plans in Europe and elsewhere, "The balance of power will be absolutely destroyed and one of the parties will benefit from the feeling of complete security. This means that its hands will be free not only in local but eventually also in global conflicts."

Moscow's initial response--vociferous complaints punctuated by vague threats of retaliation--failed to induce either Washington or its at-times unenthusiastic NATO allies to cancel the BMD programs. Russian representatives then pursued several diplomatic initiatives to avert the deployments--offers of unprecedented access to data on Iranian nuclear developments from the Russian-leased Gabala radar station in Azerbaijan and use of a nearly constructed BMD radar in southern Russia, located in Krasnodar Territory about seven hundred kilometers northwest of Iran. Putin further proposed establishing an ambitious pan-European BMD architecture that would integrate NATO and Russian defenses against common missile threats. The Bush administration, while expressing general interest in expanding BMD cooperation with Moscow, refused to accept Putin's specific propositions because they would have required abandoning the planned U.S. missile defenses in eastern Europe.

The cold-war-style face-off continues. The thrust of Russian arms-control diplomacy now...