Reducing the political space for dialogue with Russia was a “critical error” in U.S. foreign policy and will hamper efforts to negotiate a new strategic arms limitation treaty with Moscow, a former energy secretary said during a webinar this week.
There’s “a lot of interest” in a new arms control treaty on both sides of the debate, said Ernest Moniz, who served as secretary of energy from 2013 to 2017, at the Tuesday webinar hosted by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) where Moniz is now CEO.
“But frankly, until we increase the political space for having any kind of dialogue with Russia, none of this will happen,” Moniz said. The former energy secretary didn’t say who he thought was to blame for this decreased space, although he seemed to imply Congress was boxing in the administration by trying to limit terms of the dialogue.
Congress will need to take steps to make space for negotiations with Russia to have the “mutually beneficial interaction” of arms control restored, Moniz said. He didn’t specify what sort of action would need to be taken.
Rose Gottemoeller, former deputy secretary of NATO and Obama-era undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, said she was hopeful that joint research on arms control negotiations, which had been “on ice for a number of years for a number of political reasons,” would start back up.
Gottemoeller was chief negotiator on the 2011 New START treaty with Moscow, which was not only an arms limitation agreement but also created procedures for transparency between the U.S. and Russia, such as information sharing channels and onsite inspections of nuclear weapons.
“We have piled up a lot of ideas, concepts, and technologies. Now comes the time, I think, when we need to start putting them together,” Gottemoeller said.
The New START treaty is supposed to improve U.S. national security by placing verifiable limits on all Russian deployed intercontinental-range nuclear weapons, according to a Department of State website. The treaty lasts until Feb. 2026.
