Obama’s new missile defense plan had one unintended, but welcome, consequence. For the first time since before Reagan’s “Star Wars” speech, building a limited American missile defense had broad bipartisan support in Congress. That was no small thing.
RUSSIA
The Obama administration’s desire to “reset” the relationship with Russia got off to an awkward start. Hillary had her first meeting with Russian foreign minister Lavrov in Geneva on March 6, and someone persuaded her to present him with a big red button, with the word “reset” printed on the top in Russian. Unfortunately, the Russian word on the button actually said “overcharge.” This reaffirmed my strong view that gimmicks in foreign policy generally backfire. They are right up there with presidents putting on funny hats—they result in pictures you have to live with forever.
Russian behavior in 2009–10 vis-à-vis Iran was mixed. At one point early on, Medvedev conceded to Obama that the United States had been right about Iran’s nuclear and missile ambitions (words that could never have crossed Putin’s lips). The Russians would not block efforts to get new sanctions against Iran approved by the UN, even though they would continue to work to water them down. They refrained from sending the Iranians a very sophisticated new air defense system—the S-300—which would have made an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities considerably harder. Putin had promised Bush he would not send the system to Iran and, after Obama became president, actually broke the contract with the Iranians.
When it came to missile defense in Europe, however, the Russians almost immediately concluded that the new approach announced by Obama was potentially a bigger problem for them than the Bush plan had been. They were worried about the possibility of future modifications to the systems that would, in fact, give them capabilities against Russian ICBMs. They came to believe the potential deployment of hundreds of advanced SM-3 missiles that we were planning between 2018 and 2020 posed an even bigger threat to them than the GBIs. From that point—a few weeks after the September announcement—the Russians mounted an even more aggressive campaign against the new approach than they had the old, and they would continue to do so for the rest of my time as secretary and beyond. Discussion of potential partnering on missile defense continued for political purposes on both sides, but in reality, a slim chance had become no chance. Missile defense would continue to be the Russians’ principal target in meetings of the NATO-Russia Council and in bilateral meetings with all senior U.S. officials. The Iranian threat simply did not outweigh concerns over their own long-term security. How ironic that U.S. critics of the new approach had portrayed it as a big concession to the Russians. It would have been nice to hear a critic in Washington—just once in my career—say, Well, I got that wrong.
With one exception, I played a minor role in the U.S.-Russian relationship during my time in the Obama administration. Where Condi Rice and I had traveled to Russia on several occasions for “two plus two” meetings with our counterparts and to meet with Putin and Medvedev, I visited Russia only once during my two and a half years working for Obama, and that was near the end of my tenure in 2011. There was not a single “two plus two” meeting during that period. I had regular bilateral discussions with Russian minister of defense Serdyukov at NATO sessions when the NATO-Russia Council met, but these rarely lasted more than half an hour and, with translation, provided little opportunity for serious dialogue; he usually had only enough time to poke a stick in my eye over missile defense.
The one exception was negotiation of a new treaty imposing further reductions on the strategic nuclear delivery systems of both countries. I had a personal history with this decades-long endeavor. I had been a junior intelligence adviser to the U.S. delegation negotiating the first such treaty with the Soviets in the early 1970s (SALT I—Strategic Arms Limitation Talks I), and a junior member of the U.S. delegation present in Vienna when President Carter signed the second such treaty in 1979 (SALT II), which was never ratified by the U.S. Senate because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Negotiations for additional limits on both sides’ nuclear arsenals continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s (the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty—START—talks), but not much was actually accomplished. Under Bush 43, the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT, also known as the Moscow Treaty), reducing the nuclear arsenals of both sides to between 1,700 and 2,200 operational deployed warheads, was signed in 2002, to expire at the end of 2012 if not superseded by a new treaty.
In early 2009, SALT, START, and SORT—acronym hell—gave way to “New Start,” an Obama administration effort to negotiate the next strategic arms limitations treaty. Medvedev signed on that spring. All the presidents I worked for except Carter found the details of arms control negotiations mind-numbing and excruciatingly boring. Most of the hard work was done by the negotiators and the sub–cabinet level experts in Washington, with only major issues or obstacles put before the principals. The broad outlines of an agreement emerged within a matter of weeks, limiting the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550 and the number of strategic missile launchers and bombers to 800. Included were very important provisions for satellite and remote monitoring—for the first time, monitoring tags would be on each bomber and missile—and for eighteen on-site inspections each year. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commander of Strategic Command were supportive of the provisions, as was I. General Cartwright and Jim Miller, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, were expert in the strategic nuclear world and played a prominent role in shaping the views of senior leaders in the Pentagon, including mine.
Agreement was reached on the terms of the treaty on March 26, 2010, and Presidents Obama and Medvedev signed it in Prague on April 8. I informed the president a few days later that at the exact moment of the signing ceremony, the Russian military had been conducting a nuclear attack exercise against the United States. A nice Putin touch, I thought.
Critics of the treaty in the United States wasted no time in describing its purported shortcomings. It was said the treaty would inhibit our ability to deploy missile defenses, to modernize our strategic systems, and to develop capabilities for conventional global strike (using ICBMs with conventional warheads for long-range precision targeting).
Because the treaty limited the number of U.S. and Russian nuclear warheads, the viability of our aging nuclear warheads and production facilities became a growing concern during the ratification process. (A number of our nuclear weapons production facilities had been built for the Manhattan Project during World War II.) Principals had met on several occasions to discuss modernization, not new capabilities. The cost of replacement and upgraded facilities would be significant—$80 billion over ten years. Given Obama’s ultimate goal of zero nuclear weapons, the idea of modernization met with stiff resistance at the subcabinet level and in the White House and NSS.
Obama was the fourth president I had worked for who said outright that he wanted to eliminate all nuclear weapons (Carter, Reagan, and Bush 41 were the others). Former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former defense secretary Bill Perry, and former senator Sam Nunn had also called for “going to zero.” The only problem, in my view, was that I hadn’t heard the leaders of any other nuclear country—Britain, France, Russia, China, India, or Pakistan—signal the same intent. If we were going to have nuclear weapons, we’d damn well better ensure they would work and were safe from both terrorists and accidents—and that meant incorporating new designs and technologies.