Vladimir Putin’s threat to suspend Russian participation in New Start, the last remaining nuclear arms treaty with the US, represents a blatant attempt to divide American opinion over the war on Ukraine by raising the specter of nuclear armageddon, experts and policymakers warned on Tuesday.
Putin announced his intention to halt participation in the agreement towards the end of a belligerent 100-minute speech in which he charged the US and western powers with trying to inflict “strategic defeat” on Russia. His fiery rhetoric prompted instant reaction across the political spectrum in Washington.
Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who was a Russian specialist at the White House National Security Council from 2017 to 2019, told the Guardian that Putin was “playing to the rifts in the United States”. The strategy was to increase political discord in an attempt to embolden calls for an end to US support for Ukraine.
“It’s playing to all those people who want Ukraine to surrender and capitulate to avoid a massive nuclear exchange and world war three, a kind of nuclear armageddon,” she said.
Thomas Graham, Russia director within George W Bush’s National Security Council, agreed that part of Putin’s calculation was to provoke “certain circles in the US to wonder whether the risks of supporting Ukraine are worth it”.
Graham, a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that given how politicized Washington has become, “there will be elements in the Republican party who will play this up as a way of casting aspersions on Biden’s foreign policy”.
Graham’s prediction appeared to have been fulfilled hours after Putin made his threat. Prominent rightwing Republicans heavily criticized Joe Biden’s surprise visit to Kyiv, accusing him of devoting more care to Ukraine than to his own people.
Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida who is eyeing a 2024 presidential run, told Fox News that “an open-ended blank cheque [for Ukraine] is unacceptable”. He compared Biden’s staunch support for Ukraine unfavorably with his approach to immigration at the Mexican border.
“I and many Americans are thinking to ourselves, OK, he’s very concerned about those borders halfway around the world, [but] he’s not done anything to secure our own border here at home.”
New Start was negotiated under the Obama presidency in 2010 and renewed for five years in February 2021. It was designed to ensure strategic stability between the US and Russia, which hold 90% of the world’s total number of nuclear warheads.
The practical implications of Putin’s threatened suspension are likely to be debated in Washington over the coming weeks. It is unlikely in the short term to change much on the ground, Graham pointed out, given that the treaty had already begun to unravel before the Russian president’s speech.
Last month the state department accused Russia of breaking its monitoring obligations by refusing to allow US inspectors into its nuclear weapons facilities.
Graham warned though that it will now be all but impossible to replace New Start once the treaty expires in February 2026. “We are looking at the final demise of the arms control architecture that was built up starting in the 1960s based largely on bilateral relations between the US and the Soviet Union and then Russia. We will have a much more difficult and complex environment to deal with.”
Russia experts expressed relief that the Kremlin had stopped short of withdrawing from the treaty altogether. “This does not signify that Putin is planning to use nuclear weapons on Ukraine anytime soon,” said Suzanne Loftus, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
But Loftus added that the longer-term prospects of nuclear stability were “ominous”. She said: “We’re losing the progress we’ve made on non-proliferation, even during the cold war.”
Putin’s audacious move puts the ball back in Washington’s court. Advocacy groups pressing for nuclear threat reduction urged the Biden administration to show restraint even in the face of the latest provocation.
“The goal here, as we see it, is to get Russia back into New Start, because the treaty serves the national interests of both countries,” said Emma Belcher, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a Washington and San Francisco-based funding organization devoted to reducing nuclear risk.
Belcher praised the way that Biden had so far refused to rise to Putin’s bait. In his speech to mark the first anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine in Warsaw on Tuesday, the US president pointedly declined to refer to his Russian counterpart’s threat to suspend participation.
Such restraint should continue to be the Biden administration’s response, Belcher said. “What the US should avoid is to use Putin’s statement to justify increasing its own nuclear arsenal – that would merely move the clock back.”
Christopher Chivvis, a senior fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, gave a more sombre assessment of the impact on US policy. Putin’s move would make it more difficult for the US to monitor Russia’s nuclear forces and how they were deployed, he said, and a growing lack of clarity about Russia’s nuclear actions would in turn darken the mood in Washington.
Chivvis said: “It will very likely drive Washington toward a more conservative, more hawkish, approach to the US’s own nuclear arsenal – just to err on the safe side.”
The result, Chivvis suggested, could be exactly the arms-race dynamics the New Start treaty was intended to prevent. The US and Russia would, he said, likely now increase spending on their nuclear arms, which is not what anyone – Russia included – would logically want.
Such a gloomy prognosis makes Hill’s warning that Putin was attempting to provoke rifts within American opinion all the more disconcerting. “Unity is extraordinarily important at this moment on the domestic front, because it determines our own ability to respond,” Hill said.
“Putin is looking for any cracks. We need to be united as Americans, and resist the temptation to play silly politics over this.”
