International security

America, You’re Not Listening to Us


You can’t have a conversation if one party won’t listen to the other.

Looking back on the discussions at the annual International Nuclear Policy Conference, hosted last month in Washington, D.C, by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, we have a strong feeling that all reasonable U.S. experts recognize an urgent lack of dialogue between Russia and the United States on key international security issues. As a result of this vacuum created in recent years, the number of unresolved problems continues to multiply — and therefore, so does the potential for conflict and the risks for global stability.

This issue grows more relevant as the United States reconsiders its attitude towards the international system of strategic stability agreements. As Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov noted on March 20 in his statement to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, “The U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, and now from the INF Treaty, paves a way to a large-scale arms race with unpredictable consequences.” The realities of today’s rapid technological progress suggest that such a race will occur, because many countries aspire to have their own nuclear and missile capabilities as the sole true guarantors of their national security.