RPT: ANALYSIS - US Insists On Trilateralizing Arms Talks With Russia To Justify 'Killing' New START Treaty

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 27th June, 2020) The Donald Trump administration is obviously seeking to use the so-called trilateralization of nuclear talks with Russia as a future excuse to walk away from extending the New START treaty, blaming everything on China's reluctance to join the disarmament process, experts told Sputnik.

On Monday, Russia and the United States held high-stakes nuclear talks in Vienna in an effort to rescue their last major arms control treaty, which is set to expire in February 2021.

China, which is believed to have a far smaller nuclear arsenal than those of Russia and the United States, declined the invitation to join the talks, once again dashing Washington's hopes of making them trilateral.

Ahead of the meeting, Special Presidential Envoy for Arms Control Marshall Billingslea, who led the US delegation, slammed China for a "no-show" in Vienna, posting a picture of a table with small Russian, American and Chinese flags.

Russia, which repeatedly accused Washington of being reluctant to extend the core treaty, disputed the veracity of the picture. The delegation said that there were no Chinese flags in the meeting room at the Russian-US bilateral consultations, and "there could not be any in principle."

According to arms control expert Miles Pomper, the US administration is actually pursuing two goals. One of them is a "genuine" wish to somehow engage Beijing in the arms control process.

"The other is political and lies with the administration's willingness to kill the new START treaty but blame it on Russia and especially China--which the president's reelection campaign is using as an all-purpose bogeyman," Pomper, a senior fellow at the Washington D.C. office of the Middlebury Institute's James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, told Sputnik.

If the United States tries to make China's participation a precondition for the New START extension, its talks with Russia will obviously not advance much further, the expert went on.

As for the idea of China being a part of the arms control process, Pomper sees it as important, albeit noting that "it does not need to be in the context of New START extension."

The top arms proliferation expert at the Geneva Center for Security Policy, in turn, believes that the push to include China in Russian-US nuclear talks is absolutely unjustified due to a huge disparity in their arms arsenals.

"The huge dominance in nuclear arsenals by the United States and Russia (over 90% of world arsenals) does not justify adding China to the bilateral negotiations between those two countries," Marc Finaud told Sputnik.

In a comment to Sputnik, Gary Samore, senior executive director of the Crown Center for middle East Studies and professor of the practice in politics at Brandeis University, agreed that it is simply "unrealistic to expect China (or any of the other nuclear powers) to join any arms control agreement that places them in an inferior position."

According to Finaud, the US' "obsession" with China is a part of its long-lasting efforts to portray the latter as a threat, including of a military nature. All this, the expert believes, boils down to "global competition between a declining United States and a rising China, including economically."

"However, the bilateral US-Russia relation is already complex and the number of issues to be tackled bilaterally so high that making Chinese participation a condition of future talks could be seen as a pretext for killing any chance of a bilateral agreement," Finaud stated.

The Russian deputy foreign minister in charge of non-proliferation, Sergey Ryabkov, who led the delegation at the Vienna talks, earlier notably accused the US of foisting the "Chinese factor" on the future of its arms control talks with Russia, even though there are "no signs" that Beijing will change its stance.

IS THERE ANY HOPE TO SAVE TREATY?

The US and Russia have said that they agreed at the Vienna talks to launch a number of technical working groups. Ryabkov at the same time noted that Russia did not feel in Vienna that the US was ready to extend New START.

Joshua Pollack, a senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, located in the state of California, is skeptical about the prospect of New START under the Trump administration.

"Washington has raised two matters to justify its inaction on extending New START: China's absence from the treaty and the treaty's lack of application to nonstrategic nuclear weapons ... Neither realistically can be addressed within the framework of New START," Pollack told Sputnik.

Both Pollack and Pomper suppose that Russia and the US can still extend the treaty, albeit under the next American administration.

"If Trump loses the election, Joe Biden and Russia could agree on an extension," Pomper said.

"Of course, this assumes that the Trump administration won't simply tear up New START before it leaves office, which is always possible," Pollack noted.