Almost two decades since the effective collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, the United States and  Russia, now much reduced in physical size and geopolitical outreach, have signed an agreement designed to continue their original pursuit, first agreed between President Reagan and President  Gorbachev in December 1987, of a persistent reduction of nuclear weapons. Last week, Presidents Obama and Medvedev signed the treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, following now on the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. This week, the new agreement is being followed by a conference on nuclear weapons disarmament, or at least reduction, among a more extensive group of countries, under the auspices of the United States Government.

The new agreement has a significance for global relations wider than that of relations merely  between the two powers. For it suggests a renewed attempt at reformulation towards a further normalization of the relations between the US and Russia, which have had a certain tentativeness since the demise of the Soviet Union. In the Russian view, from 1992 the United States saw itself emerging as the sole superpower. Russia  was now perceived as not only having  lost its diplomatic dominance and influence over a wide sphere of the globe, but also that with a decline of the new Russian economy, its economic strength and outreach had also diminished. President George Bush, less sympathetic to the fate of post-Soviet Russia than either his father (who was in office when the old regime collapsed) or President Clinton, seemed, in the Russian view, to treat their country as well below the US in ranking. And in that context, in Russia’s perspective, Bush proceeded to make arrangements pertaining to the critical issue of the emplacement of strategic weapons in areas once considered by the USSR to be within its sphere of geopolitical and cultural influence.

The United States under Bush indeed proceeded to pursue a search for influence and presence in these areas, concluding arrangements for the establishment of American military bases in former Asian parts of the old Soviet Union itself, as we are being reminded by the current contention over one such base in Kyrgystan, now in the fury of civil war. In the context of the movement of many of the Central and Eastern European countries into the European Union, Bush also came to feel that he could take unilateral decisions about the placement of strategic missiles in some of these states, for example Poland and Ukraine, without any meaningful consultation with the new Russia. Then President Putin and subsequently President Medvedev, have however taken the view that such a move constitutes an attempt at a decisive change of the balance of power in Europe, and a deliberate change in the nature and scope of the functions of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), even in the face of the demise of its Cold War counterpart, the Soviet-organised Warsaw Pact.

So there has been a degree of stalemate in Russian-US relations particularly as these have concerned Europe. The Russians, not accepting the US/NATO view that the placement of missiles in the lands of their former allies is related to pre-emptive action against Iran, have in turn begun to shore up their relations with these countries, whether by seeking to ensure, for example, that she retains substantial influence in a country like Ukraine, or in the Caucasus region – most lately by its own military intervention in Georgia – or by establishing military facilities in some of the countries of the former Soviet Asia. In the context of their own displeasure then, Putin-Medvedev will have been relieved by President Obama’s early decision to abandon the establishment of strategic weapons in East-Central Europe, and specifically in Poland, a decision which has induced them to respond to Obama’s initiative for further agreements on the reduction of nuclear weapons held by the two countries. This initiative has now borne fruit.

It is obvious that in the meantime, however, both the Russians and the United States have recognized changes in the global strategic situation, even as the US retains a certain strategic dominance. First, the defeat of President Saddam Hussein and the destruction of the Iraqi state has not been well received by global public opinion in general, and has really not enhanced American diplomatic influence in the Middle East. The active re-intervention of the United States in Afghanistan itself has been met by less than enthusiastic support from America’s NATO allies, and a belief in other countries that the US does not recognize that developments  there are as much a concern for its neighbours, including Russia and Iran, as they are for the US and its ally Pakistan. And that in turn leads to a conclusion that the time has past when the US can take a virtually unilateralist position on political developments and arrangements in Asia and the Far East.

The attempt by Israel to link its own maintenance and further development of nuclear weapons to the still incipient Iranian capabilities, has also inhibited American success in gaining support for strong international measures against Iran. The unwillingness of Brazil to support further sanctions against Iran is undoubtedly influenced by this. And the US’s inability to influence the back-and-forth wavering of China in terms of its support for sanctions against Iran, suggests an unwillingness on China’s part to see a situation in which an acceptance by Iran of diminution of nuclear energy efforts could be perceived as a strategic diplomatic victory for the United States itself. China obviously wishes to see a greater US commitment in dealing with the post-Cold War world, to a multilateralism that takes account of other countries’ assertions of their own strategic perspectives. China, too, notes that the United States has taken, over the last two decades, a much more tolerant posture towards both India and Pakistan as those countries have pursued nuclear capabilities, the latest example of this, for China, being the agreement signed by President Bush with India, ignoring in the process that India, like Pakistan and Israel, has not acceded the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty. It is not unlikely that China would perceive the recent India-US agreement in the context of American interest in a rapidly growing Indian economy, in much the same way that many in the West now see China’s reluctance to be too diplomatically forthcoming on the Afghanistan issue, in terms of her recent interest investments in Afghanistan’s copper resources.

It is in that general international context, of differing perspectives of strategic developments over the post-Cold War globe, that the signing last week of a new START Treaty between the US and Russia can be seen as a decisive attempt by President Obama to jump-start global reconsideration of the state of developments in the realm of strategic weapons’ developments in a world much less ordered than that of the Cold War era; and in a world also much less susceptible to United States control or influence than US strategists thought possible at the end of the Cold War.

President Obama’s commitment to the summoning of the global conference on Securing Nuclear Weapons and Weapons Material being held in Washington might also be seen from that perspective. We can view it as a further demonstration of the evolution of a United States view that few problems of this nature can now be dealt with unilaterally, and therefore of a recommitment, by the still dominant strategic power to the process of multilateralism in coping with the spread of nuclear power. Russia, conscious of a relatively high degree of instability and uncertainty in the conduct of many of the regimes of post-Soviet Asia and the East, would, in that context, have an interest in supporting President Obama’s initiative of this week.