Matthew Yglesias says the amount of work that has gone into ratifying the New START should make us very pessimistic about the larger outlook for American diplomacy and non-proliferation efforts.
Simply put, START was supposed to be the easy lift. The START vote is a huge deal on its own terms, but that’s primarily because the implications of not ratifying the treaty are enormous. The treaty was negotiated because the original START, negotiated by President Ronald Regan and signed by President George H.W. Bush, was expiring. Without a new treaty in place, the United States has no mechanism for verifying the status of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. Russia, conversely, can’t do any monitoring of our own facilities. If the United States has a secret plan to conduct a massive strategic arms buildup and launch a sneak attack on Russia, this is excellent news. If not, then non-ratification is an unmitigated disaster. We’ll be left in the position of crossing our fingers in the hope that nothing goes wrong in Russia, and praying that Russians interpret this as a sign of utter political dysfunction rather than the existence of a secret plan to launch a nuclear first strike.
