Per Gary Schmitt and Tom Donnelly a little after noon today:
On Monday, President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a "Joint Understanding" on the parameters for a follow-on to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which expires this December. The White House press release on the joint understanding highlighted the mutual agreement to cut strategic warheads from current levels to a range of 1500-1675 and strategic delivery vehicles to somewhere between 500-1100. What the White House did not release was the actual text of the "Joint Understanding."
But thank God the Kremlin does not seem to be as reluctant to publish the actual text. And with good reason. Points 5 and 6 of the "Joint Understanding" commit the U.S. to negotiate provisions "on the interrelationship of strategic offensive and strategic defensive arms" and "on the impact on strategic stability of intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles in a non-nuclear configuration." Through this back door, Moscow has once again tied Washington into linking missile defenses with strategic arms control and, equally problematic, gotten the Obama administration to negotiate about one of the most promising conventional capabilities the US military will be able to field in the future: highly-accurate, non-nuclear, long-range strike weapons. Why we would want to resurrect the Cold War-era way of linking missile defenses with offensive strategic weapons is anybody's guess. And why we would want to limit a capability that, for example, could be used for attacking North Korean or Iranian missiles on a launch pad without resorting to far more damaging alternatives is also anybody's guess.
A few hours later, the White House posted its own version of the Joint Understanding. It is troubling that the Kremlin was, in this case, more transparent than the Obama administration, which for whatever reason was apparently reluctant to show the world the fruits of their direct presidential diplomacy. And when the White House finally posted the memorandum, it had obviously been hastily put together as evidenced by the numerous formatting errors in the document at the time of this writing -- and the fact that Obama's name is spelled wrong in the document.
Obama promised to use the tools of his tech savvy campaign to make his administration the most transparent in history. He's taken some hits for failing to post the text of all legislation he intends to sign at least five days before that signing -- something he's only done twice. Perhaps he overpromised on that. But to get out transparencied by the Kremlin...
