Eugene Rumer, director of the Russian-Eurasian program at the Carnegie Endowment, and Richard Sokolski, who worked in the State Department on military and political issues, consider it important to negotiate a new arms control treaty between the two countries after the START extension.
According to TASS, in a joint article published on Sunday in Politico magazine, the director of the Russian-Eurasian program at the Carnegie Endowment, Eugene Rumer, and Richard Sokolski, who worked in the State Department on military-political issues, expressed the opinion that the United States, for a new arms control agreement, should go to concessions to Russia and abandon the deployment of the latest missiles in Europe.
They recalled that the United States, as a result of negotiations with the USSR in connection with the Cuban missile crisis (1962), made concessions and withdrew its missiles from Turkey.
“In the same vein, the United States could refrain from deploying new ground-based missiles in Europe that could reach targets in central Russia, even if they can do so after the INF Treaty ends. The United States could consider other unilateral steps as well. If Russia meets halfway, this could be a step towards a new mechanism for managing competition. Otherwise, these steps can always be canceled”, – the authors of the article emphasized.
Experts consider it important to negotiate a new arms control treaty between the two countries after a five-year extension of the Russian-American Treaty on Measures to Further Reduce and Limit Strategic Offensive Arms (START, unofficially called START-3). They are confident that the new agreements should cover the latest weapons and defense technologies “that promise to be much more destabilizing”, not just nuclear warheads and missiles. However, Rumer and Sokolski believe that any agreement in this area will face obstacles in Congress. So, according to them, a possible agreement should get the support of two-thirds of the Senate, whose members may be against the agreement with Moscow. The experts recommended that the US and Russia “start a frank dialogue about their differences” in the field of arms control.