President Biden’s high-stakes summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to be dominated by friction over everything from Russia-linked cyberattacks and election interference to human rights abuses and what U.S. officials see as a meddlesome Kremlin foreign policy aimed at undermining efforts to promote stability and democracy around the world.
But beyond the headline clashes, there lurks a growing shared concern in both Washington and Moscow over China’s rise as a rising, nuclear-armed global power, one not constrained by once-revered but now increasingly outmoded U.S.-Russia nuclear arms control architecture.
Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin are unlikely to see eye-to-eye in their one-day summit in Switzerland on how to deal with China, let alone find a way to cooperate on containing Beijing‘s increasingly advanced weapons development and ability to project power.
But some analysts believe the two leaders could agree in Geneva on the need for future talks aimed at updating what the crumbling slate of Cold War-era agreements designed to stave off global nuclear war.
“If there is a real agreement on anything during this summit, it will be an agreement between the two sides to talk more about this issue,” says Donald Jensen, a former senior U.S. diplomat who heads the Russia and Strategic Stability project at the United States Institute of Peace.
“What you’re likely to see is an agreement to discuss strategic stability in a changing international environment, and Issue No.1 in that changing environment is the growth of China as a new great power with more than 300 nuclear warheads,” Mr. Jensen said in an interview.
He added that China’s rise is not the only issue at play.
“No. 2 is the fact that the Russians, and perhaps the U.S. eventually, are debating whether to modernize their own strategic nuclear forces,” Mr. Jensen said. “And, No. 3 is the development of new weapons systems that are not covered by existing treaties, meaning space- and cyber-related developments, as well as other stuff such as hypervelocity weapons.”
An analysis circulated Monday by the Arms Control Association underscored how recent years have seen the decades-old U.S.-Russia strategic relationship has been “complicated by the development and fielding by each side of emerging technologies.”
“Russia has wantonly violated several arms control and nonproliferation agreements, is developing new nuclear weapons delivery systems that echo some of the worst excesses of the Cold War, and may be increasing its total warhead stockpile for the first time in decades,” said the analysis. “Amid rising tensions and growing nuclear competition between the world’s two largest nuclear-weapon states, nuclear risk reduction and disarmament discussions have been pushed to the back burner.”
It’s a reality that was on display in February when Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin extended the existing Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) by five years, rather than renegotiate it now to address the evolving landscape of new weapons and threats. Critics said the extension amounted to a punt that ignores China’s emergence as a major nuclear power and likely cedes leverage to Moscow over future negotiations.
Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin are both likely to air other non-nuclear grievances over a wide range of other problems, not least of which being the rising tide of ransomware and other cyber attacks that U.S. intelligence sources say the Kremlin is tacitly supporting against U.S. companies and government agencies.
Unpredictable
Heading into the summit, the Biden administration has claimed it seeks a more predictable relationship with the Kremlin, stemming Moscow’s pressure campaign in Ukraine, the Kremlin’s attacks on Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and his followers, and the Russian president’s backing of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenk.
“What [President Biden] is going to make clear to President Putin is that we seek a more stable, predictable relationship with Russia, and if so, there are areas where our interests overlap, and we may be able to find ways to work together,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said over the weekend.
“But if Russia chooses to continue reckless and aggressive actions, we will respond forcefully, as the President has already demonstrated that he would when it comes to election interference or the SolarWinds cyber attack or the attempt to murder Mr. Navalny with a chemical weapon,” Mr. Blinken said during an appearance Sunday on CNN.
On arms control, there are concerns over the extent to which the two sides can even agree at the moment on how to structure discussions on START or other so-called “strategic stability” matters, even putting the China concerns to the side.
The Trump administration had pressed for significant revisions to START to cover newer Russian armaments and unsuccessfully insisted China should be included given its fast-growing arsenal. But Mr. Trump left office with the agreement’s fate still hanging in the air.
His administration did, however, cite similar concerns over Russian violations of — and China’s absence from — the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which both Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin deemed obsolete and let lapse in 2019.
Negotiated back in 1987 by President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the INF Treaty had prohibited the U.S. and Russia from building or deploying missiles and launch systems with a range from 300 to 3,400 miles. As the agreement was falling apart two years ago, then-Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Robert P. Ashley Jr. told an audience at the Hudson Institute in Washington that China and Russia see themselves in a new nuclear and missile competition both with the United States and with each other.
Moscow, in particular, has been abandoning decades of nuclear-reduction efforts in favor of a fresh stockpile that’s “likely to grow significantly,” Mr. Ashley said at the time.
Analysts in India, which views China as a nuclear-armed rival, have focused more intensely on Beijing’s advancing capabilities, not only with conventional nuclear weapons realm, but also with possible new submarine-launched ballistic missiles that could carry nuclear warheads.
An April study circulated by the Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation noted that China already operates four Jin-class ballistic missile nuclear submarines capable of carrying up to 12 JL-2 submarine-launched ballistic missile that can “clock up to [4,500 miles], which enables China to target India, Russia, Guam, Hawaii and Alaska, but not the continental U.S. if it uses the South China Sea as a naval bastion.”
China conundrum
Intelligence sources have told The Times that there is an ongoing debate in the U.S. national security agencies over whether Washington should be seeking to drive a wedge between Russia and China, drawing the Kremlin into the campaign to rope China into future arms control deals.
Mr. Jensen said that he sees such talk as a “dead end,” as there are simply too many geopolitical variables at play with regard to Russian strategic interests in the context of China’s rise.
Anna Borshchevskaya, a senior Washington Institute fellow focused on Russia, also cast doubt on the notion that Moscow could be drawn into U.S. efforts to counter Beijing. “I just don’t think Russia is going to help us confront China,” she said in an interview ahead of the Putin–Biden summit.
“I realize that that’s kind of a popular notion from a Western analytical perspective, because if you look at it objectively, it is true that the real concern for Russia should be China,” she said. “But I think it’s fruitless to try to hope that Russia, if given a good deal or proper deal, will help confront China.”
Ms. Borshchevskaya also expressed concern about the Biden administration’s claim to seek a “predictable relationship” with Mr. Putin “so that they can put Russia on the back-burner of American foreign policy and prioritize China.”
“I don’t think it works like that, because Russia doesn’t want a predictable relationship,” she said.
China’s Global Times newspaper, which has close links to the ruling Communist Party, recently carried an eye-opening interview with Russian Ambassador to Beijing Andrey Denisov on the U.S.-Russia–China strategic dance.
Asked if a U.S. push to ease tensions with Russia in order to concentrate on China could work, Mr. Denisov responded bluntly that “this view is too short-sighted.”
“It can’t happen,” he said. “I think we’re smarter than what the Americans think.”
At the same time, Mr. Denisov appeared to leave open the prospect of a U.S.-Russia agreement on great power nuclear issues, even as he spoke of growing Russia–China alignment.
When asked what position Russia would take in the event of an armed conflict between China and the U.S., the ambassador responded, “There will be no answer to this question because I am convinced that there will be no armed conflict between China and the U.S., just as there will be no armed conflict between Russia and the U.S., because such a conflict would exterminate all mankind, and then there would be no point in taking sides.”
“However,” Mr. Denisov said, “if you are asking about the judgment of the international situation and major issues, then Russia‘s position is clearly much closer to China’s.”