Biden Now Has the Space to Pressure Putin
An extension of a flawed arms-control treaty will allow the U.S. to focus on other important issues.
Peace activists wearing masks engage in a dramatization.
Photographer: JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFPPresident Joe Biden and the Democratic Party spent the last four years warning that former president Donald Trump was compromised by Russia. Now the Biden administration has cut a deal with Moscow more favorable to Russia than the one the outgoing Trump team was trying to negotiate: Last month it extended for five years a major arms control treaty with Russia, known as New START.
Under Trump, the U.S. strategy was to press the Russians to freeze the development of nuclear warheads for weapons systems that are not covered in the treaty, such as artillery shells and short-range missiles. Ryan Tully, the senior director for European and Russian Affairs in Trump’s National Security Council until he resigned on Jan. 6, told me that he thought the New START treaty was flawed because it “covers almost the entirety of the U.S. deployed deterrent, but less than half of Russia’s.”