Dr Patricia Lewis
Welcome, everybody. My name is Patricia Lewis. I’m the Research Director here for Conflict, Science and Transformation, and I also head up the International Security Programme at Chatham House. I’m absolutely delighted to have with me Rose Gottemoeller, who’s going to talk to us about her experiences and the book she’s written on “Negotiating the New START Treaty”.
Just a few words of housekeeping. I would really appreciate it if you could all mute yourselves while Rose is speaking, and also to say this is on the record, so we’re really encouraging people to tweet using #CHEvents, if you could, please, that would be fantastic. If you want to put questions to Rose, and we would really encourage that, could you please put them in the Q&A box, which you will see at the bottom of your screen. And I can call on you to read those out, so you could just do a little precis of the question, or if you want, if you’d prefer, you could ask me to put the question to Rose. So, if you do want that, please let me know in the box and I will do that.
So, I think that’s it for housekeeping, so I’m going to go now into the substance of our event here today, and I’m absolutely delighted to welcome one of the most amazing people in the world of arms control and international security, Rose Gottemoeller, who was the US Chief Negotiator of the New START Treaty. And she has written a really insightful book on the experience, but also with lots of lessons about how to negotiate, how to manage people with different languages, different cultures, different approaches, how to manage your own home team, etc. And I do really recommend that those people who are interested in negotiation, in arms control, in dealing with international relations and international security, buy this book and read it, it’s excellent.
Rose is currently the Frank and Arthur Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and its Centre for International Security and Co-operation, and she’s a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Prior to that, Rose was the Deputy Secretary-General of NATO and she drove forward NATO’s adaptation to new security challenges in Europe, and particularly in the fight against terrorism. She served for five years as Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security at the US Department of State, where, of course, she was then the Chief Negotiator for the New START. Prior to that, she was a Senior Associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and she was the Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center in Moscow, Russia. And also, what it doesn’t say in her biography is that she spent quite a long time in London and she was at the Institute for – International Institute for Strategic Studies, IISS, one of our sister institutes, we like to think of it.
So, Rose, it’s absolutely wonderful to have you here. And I thought what we could do to get started is that you could perhaps set the scene for us, for the beginning of those negotiations. We had just come from the Bush era, into the Obama era, and there was a desire, if I remember rightly, to, kind of, reset that relationship and move on with arms control. Can you give us a flavour of the background and perhaps say to us something about what you were trying to achieve with the New START Treaty?
Rose Gottemoeller
Very good, Patricia, thank you so very much and thank you to Chatham House for hosting me today. It’s really a pleasure to be with you all, and yes, London is one of my favourite places on earth, despite your rainy summer. I would like to be there with you in person, but Zoom will have to do it for the moment.
In any event, yes, moving back to that period in 2009, in the spring, just after Obama took office in the United States, it seems very long ago and far away. Indeed, it was a period, as most American Presidents, actually, in living memory – perhaps Ronald Reagan was an exception when he took office, with his Evil Empire approach to the USSR at the time, but most American Presidents, including both Presidents Bush, were really hoping to reach out to the Russian Federation and look for ways to work together, and President Obama took that more or less positive approach and proposed the idea of a reset of relations with Russia to try to move into some, again, very wide-ranging co-operation, not only in the nuclear arms control sphere, but across the board.
And when President Obama first met with then President Dmitry Medvedev in April 2009 in London, it was to launch that reset, and they launched it in two ways. One way was a very narrow little instruction document, as I call it, for the, what became the New START Treaty negotiations, and that is really all important, I think, for any negotiator, is to have some succinct instructions from the highest possible level, and we got them out of that London meeting. But the second point was then there was a wider document agreed that had all kinds of working groups set up, and it was really to go across, right across the agenda of US-Russian relations and try to make substantive progress.
So, it was a much different moment in time than it is today, as we saw President Biden meet with President Putin in the middle of June, on June 16th. They came up, I think with some good, kind of, format for trying to move forward on particular tough issues, like cyberthreats, but those formats have yet to bear fruit. So, it’s a much different moment now, and we are indeed very concerned about the behaviour of the Russian Federation in the world and in regard to US-Russia and US-NATO relations, in particular. So a much different moment then, but it was a hopeful moment in which to launch our negotiations.
Dr Patricia Lewis
And the purpose of the New START Treaty, we’d had the START Treaty, which dealt with strategic nuclear arms, we then had the Strategic Offensive Arms Reduction Treaty, the SORT Treaty, which, sort of, kind of, built on that a little bit, but didn’t really push on the verification side, etc. And this was – the New START Treaty was – the aim of it, if I remember rightly, Rose, was to, you know, really start to re-cement the process of arms control and verification and predictability and confidence building with Russia. Is that how you saw it at the time?
Rose Gottemoeller
It was very much linked to President Obama’s desire to “seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” as he put in his famous Prague speech, also in April of 2009. It came just a few days after the London meeting. But it was already clear from President Obama’s campaign that he really wanted to make active measures, active work, negotiations to eliminate, reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons to the lowest possible level, and to really work to move the United States and its policy towards zero nuclear weapons, that this was a goal already very, very clear at that time. So that was the setting that we were also coming into, which was positive from the perspective of lending some momentum to the Obama administration’s efforts.
But I did want to point out for everyone listening today that this trajectory was part of a long history from the early 1970s, when the first Strategic Arms Limitation talks were begun with, at that time, the Soviet Politburo. The United States and USSR, now Russian Federation, had been on a long march toward reducing and eliminating nuclear weapons. From the high in the 1960s when the United States had over 32,000 nuclear warheads and the Russian Federation had over 40,000 nuclear warheads, we’ve steadily been reducing and eliminating warheads so that we’re now down to a level of around 4,000 each. That’s still too many warheads, but it has been a steady progression. And reducing, through the Strategic Arms Limitation and Reduction talks, delivery vehicles for nuclear warheads: missiles, bombers, submarines, all of the hardware, the paraphernalia, by which nuclear warheads, if that horrible day every arrived, would be delivered to their targets.
So, we have had a long history together on this and the New START Treaty negotiations were really meant to replace the START Treaty, which came into force in 1994 and brought the number of deployed warheads down from 12,000 to 6,000. Now, it was good, because START remained in force, and so its verification regime was the implementation mechanism by which the SORT Treaty was implemented. That was President Bush’s treaty with President Putin in 2002, and it brought those numbers down further, from 6,000 to approximately 2,200 deployed nuclear warheads on both the US and Russian sides. But the START Treaty was still in force, so we could use its verification regime. START was going out of force, however. It was going to live out its life in December of 2009, so we had an urgent need to replace START and it was in that context that we got our negotiations started in April of 2009.
Unbelievably difficult task. I was very glad that the press didn’t actually notice that we only had eight months to try to replace the START Treaty, because the START negotiations themselves took six years, on and off, to complete, so this was mission impossible. I used to hear that old, you know, tape from the Mission Impossible TV show from the 1970s in my head as I was starting these negotiations, because it was really an unprecedented tasking to get this thing done so quickly. We almost managed.
Dr Patricia Lewis
And indeed, you know, one of the things that I – when I was reading this, it brought to my mind, you know, nothing is possible until it happens, right? And you, in your writing, say, “Ignore the Cassandras. You know, don’t listen to those who tell you that you cannot do it.” So when they were singing the tune of Mission Impossible every time you walked down the corridor, how did you manage that?
Rose Gottemoeller
Well, as I said, luckily, we didn’t have too much press attention. It was fly it from the public and the media attention, so we had an opportunity to join the battles on the inside without having to fight back against public scepticism and media scepticism, so that was very helpful. But I think there were just some natural and at the same time, I thought of them as horrible sceptics, within the Obama administration, with the President himself keen to proceed on this Prague Initiative and reduce and eliminate as many nuclear weapons as they could during his time in office, as well as nuclear delivery vehicles. At the same time, there were some people working for him who just didn’t believe it was a viable goal, it was a practical goal, and they were the ones who repeatedly said to me, “Ah, you’ll never succeed, you’ll never get there.” And I really have to say I was scratching my head throughout and I still am scratching my head, that there was so much scepticism at senior levels in the Obama administration, that the President’s goals could be achieved, because he told me to do it, so I was going to do my very best to do it. Indeed, I also want to say that across the interagency, I had absolutely great support from highly technical, capable – technically capable experts and they were ones who, I think, knew that we could get this done. But sometimes the political level wasn’t quite so confident and quite so supportive.
Dr Patricia Lewis
I often say, you know, “When you want the impossible done, ask a woman,” and I know that being a woman was, you know, an unusual thing for the Russians to see, the head of the arms control negotiations being led by a woman, and, you know, there were some issues with gender politics in the negotiations. Do you want to talk to us about it? Because they’re quite amusing, but I think they show some of the, sort of, hard-edged games that gets played at negotiations.
Rose Gottemoeller
First of all, as I say in the book, the Russians were not the most difficult problem, from my perspective. They are tough negotiators; they are excellent diplomats. My counterpart, Anatoly Antonov, very experienced hand. He’d been the Director of the Office – the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, responsible for arms control and non-proliferation, for some time. He has a reputation in Washington, where he is now the Ambassador of the Russian Federation, of being a very tough and, I must say, sometimes nasty, diplomat to deal with. So, he can definitely get those hard-edged messages across without too much problem.
But in my case, I think we were lucky, he and I, that I had just spent three years in Moscow as the Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. I was outside of government, but nevertheless, I invited him from time to time to come and speak at Carnegie. We’d had opportunities, informal opportunities, to have lunch and get together and talk over arms control policy in an informal way. So, I think that acquaintance really helped to smooth the way for us getting to the negotiating table and starting working right away. Oftentimes there’s a, kind of, kabuki dance that goes on as you’re trying to get to know your counterpart at the negotiating table.
Now, the problem we ran into between Antonov and me was on account of, in this case, some Russian media attention, where a Russian military newspaper put out a, kind of, nasty article saying, “Oh, you know, the Americans have this woman heading up their delegation. She’s really tough. Our side’s never going to be able to get the better of her.” I call it the tough girl negotiator incident. As a matter of fact, it was not directed at me, this article, I think it was directed at Anatoly. For some reason, somebody was after him. So, I knew that there would be two options. One that he would be removed and replaced by somebody else, then I would have to start that kabuki dance. The other possibility was that there would be some tough games on his side, as he had to prove to his own side, as well as to us, that he was indeed a tough negotiator. Luckily, it was those really mischievous and very tough games that ensued, they were hard to get through. He was shutting me out of important meetings in the Kremlin, that type of thing was going on. But we got through it, and we came back to work together, I think, with a good degree of mutual, again, respect, but also mutual confidence, which even developed further during the negotiations, as both of us had to solve tough problems with our delegations and with our capitals.
I’ll just mention one thing that was super surprising to me, was how much pressure I came under on the US side for needing to show that I could be tough with the Russians. And the men on my delegation went after me after several plenaries where I was just being very serious and, you know, making my points, but I wasn’t really getting angry, and so my guys said, “You have got to show some spirit. You’ve got to show some anger at the negotiating table, so the Russians know you mean business.” So, one day, I decided to comply and I just, you know, shouted at the Russians, because they kept bringing up missile defence constraints, which were not part of our initial instructions. Our initial instructions from Medvedev and Obama were very clear in London. This negotiation would be about reducing strategic offensive forces, nothing to do with missile defences. So they kept bringing this up and bringing this up. I finally just threw a tantrum one day and my men, afterwards, were jubilant. They said, “You turned bright red. The Russians were really surprised. That’s great,” and I thought, “Alright, fine.” I never really had to throw a tantrum again, although I did once, later in the negotiations, when the Russians took some important compromises off the table in November of 2009, but I never had to throw another tantrum. That was a lesson for me, sometimes you do have to engage a little street theatre to address some concerns, maybe among your own camp.
Dr Patricia Lewis
Yes, I can imagine that, and you know, one of the things that I felt in reading what you wrote, Rose, is that you’re very honest. You’re very open about the things that went right, the things that went wrong, the difficulties you had, sometimes, trying to get things through back in Washington. Are you a bit too hard on yourself sometimes, do you think? Do you think that’s part of – is that a good thing? Is it part of your own personality, or do you think that’s something that all negotiators do, that they, sort of, go back and they think, a bit like Football Players, you know, what was the – where were the mistakes that I made on that particular pitch, you know, what can I learn from it?
Rose Gottemoeller
I think part of my problem, I will say, was the fact that I was Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center for three years, right before President Obama came into office. I was not part of the Obama gang, so to say. I hadn’t worked on his campaign for him. I, you know, wasn’t really involved in the transition. I was wrapping up work in Moscow. So, I didn’t really get to know people in the same way. They’d been in the trenches together for a long time and they knew each other very, very well, so I was a bit of an outsider coming in, and I do think that that was a problem for me. And I should have – I think, looking back, I should have recognised it. Yes, your idea of the Football Player on the pitch thinking about the mistakes he made afterwards, I think that was one of them.
So I needed to be communicating better with Washington, making sure I was getting through to the right people, demanding to be in touch with them if I needed to. But from that perspective, I think I was counting too much on official channels of communication and it just wasn’t working. Personal touch is always needed at the upper levels of government to make yourself heard and to make your concerns known, so that was my mistake.
On the flipside, however, I would say that every single Chief Negotiator of a strategic arms limitation or reduction negotiation, as far as I know, has run into rough weather with the Capital, has run into rough weather with Washington, because, you know, you’re out there with your team, you see what’s happening on the ground, you know the technical details inside and out, you know how people are reacting on a, kind of, tactical level, day in, day out, in the negotiations, on the Soviet, on the Russian side. You can see where progress is being made and where there are barriers in place. But on the side of the Capital, they have a more amorphous view, and for them, it may look like there’s some, you know, dogs wrestling under the rug, and they have no idea what’s going on, and it doesn’t look like enough progress is being made. And I think that’s what I ran into, because as I said at the outset, President Obama was very keen to get this treaty done so it could replace the START Treaty by December of 2009. Again, mission impossible, but that was my task, and that was Anatoly’s task. Good thing, too, Medvedev had agreed with that timing, because the Russians weren’t able to slow roll us, which they’re very good at doing.
So there was that difference, though, I think, in – it wasn’t a perception. I knew that we were under the gun, but a difference in recognition of the reality, that with a highly technical agreement like New START, where we were taking steps to change some of the critical aspects of how we monitor warheads on top of delivery vehicles, on top of missiles, for example, these technical details were taking some time to work out and Washington just didn’t get it. They were very cross with us at times.
Dr Patricia Lewis
And then there were some, what you might call acts of God, or strokes of luck, that play for you. So, you know, at a time when Washington was really upset with you, there was some – a very interesting stroke of luck, wasn’t there? Do you want to talk to us about that and airports?
Rose Gottemoeller
Yes. Yes, this was actually – we had already signed the treaty itself in April of 2009, but there was a team that was doing a final conforming, a Russian and American team, doing a final conforming, which is the process by which the technical experts, the legal experts, and the Linguists get together. These were the final, basically, annexes, that are like a guidebook for the Inspectors, highly technical details. Where does an Inspector get to go when he gets to the base? All of these very technical details, and we had to be very precise about the language, that the Russians understood exactly what we meant in English and vice versa. It’s very, I would say, tedious and exacting work. We had great teams on both sides.
But after the treaty was signed, I think those two groups got, kind of, sick of each other. They were tired out. They’d been working flat out for months, they were tired, and at some point, the Russian team just threw up their hands and said, “We’re going back to Moscow, we need a little break. We’ll be back.” They didn’t specify when they’d be back, but they said, “We’ll be back soon.” So I get this call from my lead person in Geneva. I was back in Washington. He said, “Well, Rose, the Russians are going back to Moscow for a while. They say they need a rest and they’re already on their way to the airport.” And I said, “Oh dear,” and I called upstairs to my then boss, Under Secretary of State Ellen Tauscher. I knew that she would not be happy. And indeed, in about 30 seconds, I got a call back from her office, and she laid into me. She said, “I keep defending you from the White House and you keep screwing up. You let the Moscow – Russians leave the table and go back to Moscow.” I said, “Well, I didn’t actually let them go back to Moscow, they just left.” And that’s when she said, “What are you going to do about it?” So, I said, “Alright, I’ll figure out how to get our team to follow them to Moscow and they can continue work in Moscow and get this all done.” So, that itself, presented difficulties, because the Russians had to be willing to give them visas to get in, all of a sudden, to Russia. The Russians were very helpful, I have to say.
But the funniest thing and the greatest act of God, as the Russians were on their way to the airport – this was all happening within about 40 minutes. As the Russians were on their way to the airport, Geneva Airport closed down because of the smoke and the ash from the volcano in Iceland that was erupting at that point. And Patricia, please don’t ask me to pronounce it, I’ve tried many times, and my Icelandic friends just laugh at me. But it’s that big, long name one that closed down the airports in Europe in the summer of 2010. And so, the Russian team had to turn around and come back and Anatoly and I had a good laugh about it afterwards. I called him on his mobile and we decided we’d let them have the weekend off to rest, and they could get back to work on Monday in Geneva, and that’s what happened, and soon afterwards, they were finished with their work. But that was the most remarkable thing, and it was one occasion when, again, my own boss got very angry at me, but if the White House had ever found out, they would’ve been super angry at me.
Dr Patricia Lewis
So what – coming up to the time when we’re going to turn to the rest of the audience, but just, you know, one last question, what advice do you have now, perhaps, for a young person starting out on negotiations, be it in business, be it in – you know, as a civil society organisation advisor, or be it in government? What advice would you give them about going into negotiations with counterparts that are not necessarily on the same page, and getting to yes isn’t a given? How would you – how would – what advice would you give them as to where they would start – how they should start thinking about it, how they should prepare themselves?
Rose Gottemoeller
Two very basic pieces of advice to begin with, and I’ll be interested if the audience has more questions about this, or their own experience to impart. First of all, I always say, “Be confident in your natural ability as a negotiator. Everyone is negotiating every day to get things that you want, and if you need something that you want, you have to give a little to make sure that the other party agrees to go forward in that way.” As I always joke, “If you have a teenager who wants the car keys on a Friday night, and you want him or her back by midnight/1 am, you have to negotiate how those arrangements will be worked out, and, we hope, complied with.” That’s the important thing about any arms control treaty, it must be complied with, no cheating allowed. It goes for teenagers on Friday night, as well, or with a toddler, if he wants three stories before bed, and you only want to read him two, how do you work out the compromise in that circumstance? So, I always say, “You are a natural negotiator, and think through how you make things happen on your own behalf on a day in, day out basis, because those are natural skills that then apply at the negotiating table.”
The second and very small piece of advice is – well, it’s not actually so very small, you need to think carefully where your interests lie. Like, your – if you are negotiating in back – on behalf of your country, you think through with your government what the national interests are of the country in negotiating a treaty, and that is really all important, to have a clear vision of where you want to go, what you want to achieve with a particular negotiation. So that’s the big – that’s a big piece of advice.
And actually, I will give a third, and back to a tiny piece of advice. You would be surprised how important it is to hold the pen, and I think this is important particularly for young people starting out. If you are trying to figure out how to make your mark on a big team and a big delegation, if you have a talent for drafting and are good at it, and you have to understand the substance, but if you can be the one holding the pen and getting the words down on paper, of course, in English, if you’re negotiating in English, that’s a powerful role and it helps you to advance, then, I think, through the delegation and in the delegation work. So if you’re a younger person, think about that. You have to know your stuff, but if you’re willing to hold the pen and do the hard work on the drafting, that can impart a power of its own.
Dr Patricia Lewis
I completely agree. Creative wordsmithing and knowing where to place commas, very important, so yeah, I completely agree. I’m going to turn to the audience now, Rose. We’ve got a few questions already in the Q&A. I’m going to ask Julia, my colleague Julia Cournoyer, to unmute herself and ask her first question. I know you’ve got a second one, Julia, I’ll come back to you on that, if you don’t mind.
Julia Cournoyer
Hi there, thank you so much for taking my question and thank you, Rose, for an excellent book, I really enjoyed it. I was wondering if you could share a little bit on your perspective as to why the New START Treaty was given room for only one extension of five years after the initial 10, and is arms control today where you had envisioned it being or hoped it to be, back when the treaty was being drafted? Thanks.
Rose Gottemoeller
Thank you, Julia, excellent questions. The second question is easier to answer than the first. No, when we completed the New START Treaty, we were in a very hopeful moment. Again, borne out of the President’s Prague Initiative, President Obama’s Prague Initiative, the President himself expected at least one more treaty in his time of – in office – perhaps two, to further reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons. So the problem was twofold. Number one, the Russians weren’t ready to reduce and eliminate in the same way and that was, I think, a very significant problem. In fact, President Putin, very early on, conveyed that he was not going to be ready to sign another treaty with President Obama, because he conveyed – and it was the Russian official position from early on, after the completion of New START, that until the final process of implementing the treaty was completed, both sides had seven years to come to the central limits of the treaty, that is, to reduce their existing delivery vehicle numbers and missiles and launchers down the central limits of the treaty, 700 deployed delivery vehicles, 800 deployed and non-deployed launchers, and the warheads that go with them, 1,550 operationally deployed warheads. So, each side had seven years to bring those numbers down, and basically, Putin said early on, “Until we get to 2018, February of 2018, we, the Russian Federation, are not going to be willing to engage in further reduction negotiations.” So that was an early signal that Putin wanted nothing to do with another reduction negotiation with Barack Obama, and they stuck hard to that position.
In the meantime, then, the political circumstances changed radically. It was all part of the same dynamic, I think, but with the Russian seizure of Crimea in 2014, the relationship was already worsening, but it really went south after that point. So, I think those were two very important factors in why we haven’t been able to move forward with the Russians. I think, in addition, to be honest with you, and this is an American factor, I think the President was a little surprised at how difficult it was to get a treaty so manifestly in the national security interest of the United States through the US Senate. So it was very difficult. I write in the book about that process. I think it’s doable, even with a new treaty. As long as there are some substantive parts included in it that are bipartisan in their interest, I think we can succeed in getting another treaty through the advice and consent process to ratification in the Senate. But it wasn’t easy for the New START Treaty, and I think that affected actors in the administration, starting with the President himself. So, that’s where we ended up.
As far as an extension of the New START Treaty, I was – myself and my Lawyer, we came up with notion of an additional five-year extension in the New START Treaty. I’m glad, at the end of the day, President Biden decided to extend it for the full five years. It gives us time to work on the next treaty. It won’t be easy, but it won’t be easy because – and this is why I say we don’t want to extend – have multiple extensions for a single treaty. It won’t be easy because we’ve gone on to new and more taxing objectives, and particularly getting direct limits on all warheads. And this will involve some very, very difficult negotiation work to put in place a highly technical and complex verification regime, and we also wanted to tackle some new technologies in the new negotiations, particularly the so-called ‘exotic systems’ that the Russians put in place. So, I think, you know, one five-year extension makes sense, but if you keep piling the extensions on, you never get to these new and more difficult technical problems, and to tackling new technologies, and I think everybody agrees that it’s in our interest to begin directly limiting warheads now. So I, myself, would not argue for another five-year extension, because we wouldn’t get where we want to go with new objectives in strategic nuclear reduction and control.
Dr Patricia Lewis
Thanks, Rose. So, next question is from Marshin Kasmarsky. Marshin, do you want to ask your question, please?
Marshin Kasmarsky
Thank you, and thank you for your insights, Rose. I would like to ask you about the – your opinion, or your assessment of the incentives on the Russian side. So, apart from security and strategic stability considerations, was there any role in Moscow’s decisions to agree to the New START, of a great power state – of great power status and great power prestige, so, the perception of the treaty as elevating Russia as a unique form of a dialogue with the US? Thank you.
Rose Gottemoeller
I think that is an aspect, Marshin, and by the way, it’s nice to see you again, even if only virtually. I think it is an aspect, and clearly for the Russian Federation today, the trappings of power are few, compared, perhaps, to the past, and particularly in terms of, you know, some of the things that are happening in the country, just in terms of demographic weakness and so forth, economic weakness. They are not in the state they may have been. Well – although they entered into severe economic decline at the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union, things have not improved in the ensuing period.
So, to make a long story short, this is a factor of great power status. But to my mind, further, is this long campaign, as I put it, from the 1970s on, to reduce and eliminate the nuclear threat. And I think both of our countries, both the United States and the USSR, now the Russian Federation, really had a severe shock during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when we recognised the enormous destructive power at first hand, it came right to the brink of nuclear war and nuclear conflagration and to me, this spurred this long campaign to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons. So, I also think of that trajectory, that has been continuous, really, since the 1960s, with some of the treaties having their roots back then, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. We had, you know, I think a very, very dangerous lesson during the Cuban Missile Crisis, that has spurred us to keep on this path. And now they have a stability goal, they see that the United States, of course, has some technological edge in certain areas, and they want to ensure that our capabilities remain under control, as we want to ensure their capabilities remain under control. So, there’s a duality of the objectives to maintain strategic stability here. It’s a mutual interest matter, that I think continues to drive us. So, I think that’s how I’d emphasise what brings them to the negotiating table. They want to keep us under control as much as we want to keep them under control.
Dr Patricia Lewis
Thanks, Rose. I’m going to go to Michael Baker now, who is asking a question about China, and, of course, there’s been some recent satellite images of China’s activities, Rose, which you might want to address.
Michael Baker
Rose, your negotiations were demanding, for sure. I’ve done some negotiations with the Russians on oil and gas, but yours look ten times worse. Do you now believe that China should be included in the next generation of negotiations, since China and Russia seem to be already partly aligned and China’s relative strength and position is increasing quite fast? Thank you.
Rose Gottemoeller
I’m not sure - yes, thank you very much, Michael. I’m not sure. I’ve heard oil and gas negotiations can be very fierce with the Russians, so we should have a beer sometime and compare notes, no doubt. But honestly, I do agree with the position of the Trump administration, and they tried to bring China to the negotiating table. I think they went about it in the wrong way, in that they insisted, somehow, that China be brought into the follow-on for the New START Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. The reason is, you’re quite right, China is modernising and they’re modernising rather rapidly in terms of developing their strategic nuclear offensive forces, but they are still nowhere near the levels of the United States and the Russian Federation. As I mentioned, we have approximately 1,550 operationally deployed warheads, we and the Russians each, and that – in addition to which there are other warheads that are kept in storage. I mentioned also, earlier, that we each have about 4,000 warheads total. And the Chinese have a number of – it’s not clear exactly where in unclassified sources, but it’s around – it’s under 500, I’ll put it that way, 250, 350, you see various numbers out there.
So the comparison is still quite uneven between us and the Chinese. I agree, we have to keep a sharp eye on what they are doing and watch carefully how they are conducting their modernisation. But there are some areas where they have equivalence of forces, and that is, in particular, intermediate range ground launched missiles in Asia. And here, the United States are quite concerned about these kinds of capabilities. We consider them carrier killers. They are capabilities that can go after our carrier task groups in the Pacific Ocean. So – and there’s some equivalence there, and the Chinese are concerned. They have an interest, because they’re concerned about the US deploying such intermediate range ground launch systems in Asia. So, I think here we have a confluence of interest, and the Russians are also concerned. It’s, kind of, amusing to me that the Russians are mourning the loss of the INF Treaty, the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, because it was their violation of that treaty with the deployment of the so-called SSC-8 missile, that led to the demise of the INF Treaty. But now they too are looking for new controls on intermediate range ground launch missiles. So here, there’s a confluence of interest, and I think in this kind of arena, where China does have an equal interest and equal capabilities, we can get them to the negotiating table, and they should have an interest.
Other areas include new space-based assets, they have a lot of capability in space today, and their hypersonic glide vehicles, their so-called HGV systems. There’s some equivalence of capability there, and that’s where you can begin to hone and really convey to them that their interests should be in also negotiating to constrain capabilities for their own national security purposes. So I’m hopeful that China will come to the negotiating table before too long. It’s just not on limiting strategic offensive forces. Let’s keep a sharp eye on their modernisation but focus on areas where they will have an interest in coming to the table.
Dr Patricia Lewis
Thanks, Rose. I’m going to turn now to Trisha de Borchgrave, who’s asking about the UK’s recent announcement. Trisha?
Trisha de Borchgrave
Oh, sorry. I – can you hear me? I’m sorry, I was expecting Patricia to ask the question. It’s just a very – I’m sorry about that, it’s a very brief one. But I find it quite confusing, I think a lot of people have here, especially when the UK seems to have coincided with, sort of, reigning in a certain amount of expenditures to overseas aid, but at the same time, it signalled quite strongly its intent to raise its nuclear warhead capacity, capabilities. It’s only from 180 to 220, but how useful or how helpful is that kind of, signalling? Thanks so much.
Rose Gottemoeller
Well, of course, Trisha, it’s up to the UK Government to decide these policy matters. Obviously they’ve had their Integrated Review, they’ve thought quite hard about it. My position on this has been that I hope, in line with the Posture Review that is going on in the United States, the Nuclear Posture Review, and in fact, the United States is looking to do a more integrated review, also, as I suppose, there are some comparisons to what the UK has done across all capabilities, including missile defences, as well as offensive forces on a nuclear side, and conventional forces, as well. And to try to very carefully take account of what threats we will be facing in future and what we want to achieve in terms of further nuclear arms reduction and goals in the non-proliferation realm, as well. As this review is going on in the United States, I’ve been saying to UK colleagues, “I hope that you will take account of the results of this review in your own thinking about your nuclear weapons and their numbers.” And then it will be, of course, up to the UK Government to decide any further steps, but I do understand that this is thought of, this number of 220 is thought of as a ceiling to build up to, but not necessarily one that will be built up to. And so perhaps there could be some additional decisions down the line. But clearly, I have to say that’s going to be something for the UK Government to decide.
Dr Patricia Lewis
Thanks, Rose, very diplomatically put. I was quite taken by the fact – we’ve got two questions about bad faith. One from Dara McDowell, and one from James Nixey. So I’d like to bring them both on. They’re looking at it from different – quite different perspectives, so I think that’ll be quite interesting for you. So Dara, perhaps you could go first, and then, James, if you could go after.
Dara McDowell
Hi there, thank you so much, it was a wonderful talk, Rose. Just to start from the issue of treaty ratification. I do remember, I was finishing up my PhD around the time that New START was being ratified, you know, it was at the time a high watermark for Democrats in the Senate. And a lot of the Republican commentary around it, and opposition to it, was really grasping at straws. Mitt Romney quite famously wrote this op-ed in the Boston Globe claiming, “bits of the preamble were actually binding on missile defence research.” You know, it very much struck me as very bad faith and looking for an excuse to deny a foreign policy win for the Obama administration. There were about 13 Republicans in the Senate who obviously went against that. Now, the Republican Party, if anything, has become even more willing to, you know, politicise issues of national security, treaties with – you know, we saw the US withdraw from the Paris Accords under President Trump.
So, my question is, you know, are we looking at a point where it’s very difficult for the US to make credible commitments through treaties, through agreements, at least under Democratic Presidents? And again, even there, we – you know, there are some reports coming out now that if President Trump had won a second term, he was planning on unilateral withdrawal from NATO, you know, ending the alliance with South Korea and that, sort of, stuff. You know, and is that an issue you see going forward, for any negotiators sitting across the table?
Dr Patricia Lewis
Thanks, Dara, and if we could turn to James to ask his, sort of, mirror question?
James Nixey
[Pause] Sorry, thank you, just unmuting. Thank you, Patricia, yeah, it’s funny, Dara and I are actually good friends, but we didn’t collaborate on this question. Thank you very much indeed, Rose. Yeah, I wanted to ask you, as Patricia says, from the opposite side, ‘cause you alluded, well, you mentioned, Rose, a couple of times, that the Russians were also not acting in good faith, as well, sometimes. You said that they took compromises off the table and that you ended up shouting at them, which is actually – I mean, that in itself is quite an interesting tactic, by the way, and I wondered if – ‘cause it alludes to the idea that strength works with the Russians. A popular conception, if you consider shouting to be strength. But also, I, sort of, wondered, in terms of negotiating tactics, specifically with Russians, and not just on arms control, if you feel it’s always important to be in the room.
If you feel sometimes you’ve got to walk out of a room. If you feel sometimes, it’s not necessary to have the negotiations anyway – no negotiations anyway and that sometimes you need to accept that the relationship, in some respects, is bad and there’s nothing to be talked about, or perhaps because, in some cases, not with arms control and not with you, in some cases, perhaps the West is being played in negotiations. You know, perhaps the Minsk negotiations, the Minsk Treaty, is an example of that one. And we’ve just seen – perhaps today, we’ve seen examples of where Kerry and Lavrov are attempting to negotiate on climate, etc., etc. So, I suppose what my question is, really, is in terms of negotiating tactics, do you feel it’s – or, you know, not just the shouting, but do you feel it’s always important to be there with the Russians in the room, or is there sometimes, you know, an alternative to that?
Rose Gottemoeller
Yes, I see what you mean, Patricia, two very interesting questions from very, very different directions, but they do, I think, fit together in an odd way. I go back to my original point about we’re all natural negotiators and we all have this full, I would say, full toolkit, or panoply of tools, available, and it goes no differently with Senators on Capitol Hill, and sometimes they seem to be acting out the most illogical rationales and you just can’t imagine. I tell this story in the book about how we did think that we should be able to get John McCain to vote for the treaty. He was the ranking Republican Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee at that time and really someone who knows nuclear – or knew nuclear policy, God rest his soul, he’s passed on, as you know, but knew nuclear policy very, very well and had dealt with it very much in the past.
So, at that time, John Kerry was the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and we went to talk to McCain very late one evening on the – just off the Senate floor. McCain just lost his temper, but it was over a completely different issue. He was very worried about Obama’s new policy on gays in the military. Obama wanted to move beyond the Clinton era ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell,’ policy. And so we tried to talk to him about the value of the New START Treaty to US national security, but he was having none of it. He wasn’t interested in engaging on that issue. He just stormed out of the room and ended up voting against the treaty, in that signal McCain way you may recognise from the way he would very ostentatiously vote at times during the Trump administration. He’d come up, turn his thumb down and stride away, and he did that on the New START Treaty.
It just goes to show that that first and most important thing is to engage someone’s interests and if they feel that other interests are trumping what you’re trying to sell to them through the negotiation in the treaty, they are going to walk away and sometimes do it in ways that are very tough. In our case, we didn’t actually need his vote at the end of the day. We had enough Republican votes to get the treaty across the finish line, but that was a very, very difficult moment.
So, they question is today, can we talk enough Senators into voting for a new treaty? I referred earlier to the fact that we have to find some areas of absolute bipartisan accord to nest inside the treaty, to make an inherent part of the structure of a new treaty, and this issue, in my view, is direct limits on nuclear warheads. For many years it’s been a bipartisan agreement, consensus, in Washington, that the Russians have too many non-strategic nuclear warheads, too many so-called ‘tac nukes’. So, if we directly limit all warheads in a new treaty, with a significant reduction inherent on non-strategic nuclear warheads, this will be the foundation, in my view, for consensus on the treaty between Republicans and Democrats, but it will be necessary to have a very strong and very, well, as someone put it to me, a very harsh verification regime. But there will have to be a good verification regime that really gets at the problem of properly monitoring warheads. So, it’s not going to be easy, it going to be very difficult.
But I think there are ways that the new treaty can be structured to have a national security appeal to people on both sides of the aisle. So, in question to – in answer to your question, Dara, I’m not giving up on it, by any means, and in fact, I think it’s ridiculous if the Senate is going to continue to insist that they can’t give advice and consent to treaties. That is their constitutional responsibility under the US Constitution and if they’re going to simply say no from now on, then they are doing the United States out of a very important legal instrument, not only for arms control, but for, you know, trade and economic reasons. The idea that the United States will never ratify another trade treaty, that’s ridiculous. It’s not, again, in US interest to be thinking in that way. So we’ll see how this goes, but I’m going to stick with my view that it is possible to get a treaty through the Senate. We did it New START, it was not easy, but we did it.
James’s question, I’m going to come back to my toolbox kit point. James, of course, every good negotiator has a range of tools available to them. Walking out is always a possibility if things are not going well, and sometimes it can be used to great effect. I think we didn’t need it in the New START Treaty negotiations, because both sides had a fire lit under them by the demise of the START Treaty. Both sides, again, the Russians wanted to keep us under control, we wanted to keep them under control. And where strategic offensive forces are concerned, that is a pre-eminent national security goal. So, the fact that both sides agreed to this tight deadline, both sides agreed to work hard to replace New START, it was out of that supreme national interest, so to say, and it also prevented the Russians from slow rolling. I tell the story, of course, how Khrushchev told his Foreign Minister – or he always told the tale that his Foreign Minister would “sit on a block of ice as long as was necessary to get the other side to capitulate.” In these New START Treaty negotiations we had none of that problem, again, because I think both sides saw a supreme national interest in getting the new treaty done.
So, of course, you have to keep all kinds of tools in your toolkit. You have to be able to shout sometimes. Sometimes you have to be able to whisper but carry a big stick. If they know you have a great deal of capability emerging in a modernisation programme, they’re keeping a sharp eye on that, they want to get some controls in place. So, I always say, “Keep everything available if and when you need it.” And sometimes, well, yeah, sometimes the moment is not right for a negotiation. We see that now in the way both the United States and Russia are talking about engaging in the strategic stability dialogue, first in discussions, to even set the table for a new negotiation. It’s not time yet to start negotiating on the follow-on to New START, because we both have very different concepts of what should go into the new treaty. So, that is going to take some time to work out, to figure out what the table will look like, what the issues will be that go into the follow-on to New START. So, it takes some time and effort to think all these issues through, but luckily, we have a good deal of experience at this point, to take advantage of.
Dr Patricia Lewis
Thanks, Rose. So, I mean, during the Trump administration, of course, very little progress was made on arms control. But there was one area where there was a big departure, of course, from the norm and that was with North Korea. So Edward Howell has a question about the North Korean situation. Edward, if you want to ask this question?
Edward Howell
Thank you. So, beyond large scale nuclear deals, do you think that the so-called Small Nuclear Deal is actually possible between the US and other actors and North Korea, noting the Biden administration’s recent completion of the US-North Korea Policy Review? Thank you.
Rose Gottemoeller
Yes, I do, and it’s based on my past experience, Edward, and it was way back when. It was during the Clinton administration and working on, at that time, our efforts to return them to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and to take particular steps to shut down aspects of their nuclear programme, and then in a step-by-step way, to provide them with some additional capability, including the benighted, the difficult effort to provide them with nuclear energy reactors, which came to nought in the end. So, it’s not a perfect example. I don’t want to overemphasise nor argue that we should return to the Clinton administration era policies. But it’s only to say that I saw examples during that period of where we actually made some real progress with the North Koreans. I was working at the time in the Energy Department. I was responsible for the Non-Proliferation Programmes, and one of the things we did was can up the spent fuel rods at the Nyongbyon Reactor so that they could no longer be reprocessed to produce plutonium. And that was a – you know, it was a small step. It’s since, unfortunately, come to nought, but we were able – that proved to me that we were able to, and could work with, North Koreans to take a, you know, a small series of steps to, again, put barriers in the way of their nuclear programme, developing toward acquisition of warheads. At that time it was a much earlier moment. Now they have acquired warheads, they’ve tested warheads.
So again, it’s not a perfect example, but I am hopeful that the way the Biden administration has announced the results of their review means that they are thinking about some small steps that may be taken to begin to build up momentum toward what everyone continues to say is the goal, denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula. So we shall see where they end up going. The Trump administration, of course, tried the other approach, to go in big, to go in at the top, with summit meetings between President Trump and Kim Jong-un, in the hope that that top-down approach would produce results. I think that top leadership has to be engaged no matter what, but I also would argue for looking for pragmatic smaller steps to begin with, to try to engage the North Koreans and to begin that process of moving them away from their nuclear weapons programme. But it is not going to be easy. It is going to be extremely, extremely complicated and success rides on whether they truly want to move away from some of the severe economic penalties that they’ve been paying, in order to effect a healthier situation for their population overall. And again, that’s very, very uncertain at this moment. So it ain’t going to be easy, but nevertheless, I would argue for small and pragmatic steps and let’s see where we can go.
Dr Patricia Lewis
So, we’ve just about reached the end, but there’s two final questions I want to link together, and Carmen Hilaria, who’s asked me to read it for her, and if you don’t mind, Julia, I’ll do the same, in the interests of time. So, Carmen asks, “The current circumstances are very different from those in 2009, and on the basis of the experience that you’ve gathered, which steps would you consider necessary to carry over to reset a more positive trend? And post-2021, do you think an enlargement of the scope and stakeholders would be recommended?”
And Julia asks, you know, “Given how long it takes to negotiate a treaty and Washington not having understood this, how important is it to negotiate face-to-face with counterparts over an extended period of time?” And that’s obviously very important, ‘cause at the moment, diplomacy’s been doing a lot on Zoom and Teams and so on, and do you think Washington has learned from these experiences, or do you think that this is still an issue that future negotiators will have to grapple with? And I’d like to link that to one of the lessons that you bring out in your book which is, you know, “no drive by negotiations.” This sense of building long term capacity, building and digging in deep, if you like, rather than, sort of, skimming and doing a rough and ready job, and I think those two questions, sort of, really address that.
Rose Gottemoeller
Very good, and thank you all for very substantive, meaty questions. I know we could go on for a lot longer, but I’m very grateful for the calibre of the discussion this evening. It’s been great from my perspective.
Carmen’s question is – and I think I mentioned the fact that, already, we could see – well, by 2014, we’d had a sea change in the way the Russians were invading Ukraine, taking over Crimea, and things have really gone south since. But I do think, and here I will talk about what I was talking about quite a bit during the Biden-Putin summit of June 16th, and that is always strategic arms negotiation and reduction has had a special status in the US-Soviet, US-Russian relationship. At the height of the Cold War, we had very difficult circumstances with the USSR, but still, we were able to negotiate and make progress at certain times. At other times, and I do admit this, the externalities came to impinge on progress. SALT II never entered into force, it was brought up for ratification in the US Senate, because the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and so President Carter withdrew it.
So, there are obviously circumstances that impinge on efforts to reduce and eliminate strategic nuclear weapons. But in general, the mindset in Moscow and Washington is, “Let’s try to keep a wall around these issues and make progress, nevertheless.” And so I do feel, Carmen, that this will hold. We will see how the new strategic stability dialogue goes. I understand that the two sides are keen to get started and will even try to start this month, in July. We’ll see if they get off the ground. But the idea will be to, again, take a careful, deliberate approach to trying to scope the next negotiation. Not to dive into negotiations immediately, but scope what is necessary for both sides to, as Patricia put it earlier, to get to yes. And I know getting to yes will be a long and arduous campaign. So, I never give up hope just because the relationship is terrible, that we cannot engage on these issues, again, because of the existential threat of nuclear weapons that was brought home to the United States and the USSR during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Julia, excellent set of issues and questions. No drive by negotiations. It’s an excellent set of issues and questions. I think we’re all asking ourselves, “What will the long-term role of Zoom, what will the long-term role of remote engagement be, and how big a role will it play in government-to-government policymaking and negotiations?” Well, for one thing, I think we’re going to have to ensure that government-to-government links can be made secure against outside listeners. So, we have to have somehow more confidentiality inherent in these platforms for the governments to place full confidence in them. But to this – at this moment, already, you know, it was my experience in the EU, for example, and in Brussels, that people were using WhatsApp a lot to communicate and to send messages and even to talk via mobile phones. So, I think there’s a reality that certain of these instruments are already widely in use on the negotiating front.
But how now do we move forward from this point? I will continue to argue that I do think face-to-face work, where technical teams, particularly, can get down and drive through particularly complex issues, that is all important. It was my Verification Protocol Working Group that sat down and really, really hammered out these verification measures with regard to re-entry vehicle onsite inspection, essentially, warhead inspections in the New START Treaty negotiation, and they did so because they spoke the same language. They spoke the same technical language. They did not speak the same overarching language. One Russian team, one English-speaking team, of course, but they spoke the same technical language. And with the help of Interpreters, they had a true meeting of minds on how to work through all these issues, but it took time, and it took a lot of lifting, and it took some very difficult, I would say, arguments, to get to that point. But I don’t think you get that kind – I – my sense is you don’t get that, kind of, meeting of minds over Zoom. We shall see. We shall see what the future brings.
So, I guess I’m looking to the future of a, kind of, hybrid system, where we make good use of these remote platforms to move quickly on certain issues, to make progress. Indeed, telephone negotiations have been around for a long, long time. The President just called President Putin the other day, to again, raise his concerns, put down certain markers about these terrible ransomware attacks that have been going on. So, telephones have been used for a long time. I hope now we can also use these remote platforms, but they will not replace face-to-face negotiations and for that, I will continue to say, no drive by negotiations. The negotiators need to have a meeting of minds and that only goes when they are talking face-t0-face.
Dr Patricia Lewis
Rose, I could talk to you all evening and learn from your experience, and I think everybody on the call could. It’s a testament to you that almost everyone stayed on. So I just want to thank you so much. It’s been a great pleasure having you at Chatham House, again remotely, but not in person, but we’re looking forward to you coming back to London at the first possible opportunity. Thank you so much. We’re all watching what’s going on with the strategic stability framing of this. I think we’re all, of course, very worried about what might happen with North Korea and where that might go. I think – these things are just so very important, and yet we keep taking our eye off that ball in the wider, sort of, media, it seems to me, and not paying enough attention to it. So thank you for the book. It’s such an accessible book. It’s full of wisdom and amusing anecdotes, shall we say?
Rose Gottemoeller
Thank you so much, Patricia. It’s a pleasure always to be on with you. I hope the next time will be in person, there at Chatham House. And thank you so much to your team for putting this together, as well. It was a wonderful discussion today.
Dr Patricia Lewis
A great pleasure, thanks a lot, Rose, and thanks to everybody for attending and the great questions, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Thank you.
