The meeting of G20 foreign ministers hosted by India on Thursday ended in disarray, with the customary joint communique scuttled by “divergences that could not be reconciled,” according to Indian Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar.
TALLINN, Estonia (AP) – Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview broadcast Sunday that Russia has no choice but to take into account NATO’s nuclear capabilities, in remarks justifying Russia’s recent suspension of its participation in the New START treaty.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin announced in a nearly two-hour speech on Tuesday the unilateral suspension of the longstanding New START agreement that limits American and Russian nuclear development, describing Western support for Ukraine amid an ongoing Russian invasion as an existential threat to Russia.
The editor-in-chief of China’s Global Times, its most belligerent English-language state newspaper, demanded on Thursday that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) “rapidly increase the number of commissioned nuclear warheads” in response to an allegedly growing threat of war from the United States.
The lower house of the Russian parliament ratified a five-year extension of the New START arms control treaty Wednesday, locking in an extremely generous offer President Joe Biden made with remarkable haste to Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Biden’s political party previously regarded as the primary global villain of the century.
The White House said on Thursday that President Joe Biden will offer a five-year extension of New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) to Russia, an offer far more generous than the Russians were expecting. Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed a one-year extension of New START in October.
President Donald Trump will send a U.S. delegation to arms control talks in Geneva this week with Russia that could lay the groundwork for a trilateral agreement including China.
The deadline for Russia and the United States to meet the nuclear warhead reductions mandated by 2011’s Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (New START) arrived Monday.
In his Thursday interview with Reuters, President Donald Trump was strongly critical of the New START arms control treaty with Russia, dismissing it as “just another bad deal that the country made.”
On Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton discussed the significance of President Trump’s apparent openness to a “one-state” rather than “two-state” solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The best move for President Trump would not be to discourage a Russia probe, but to widen it, back to President Barack Obama’s 2007-8 campaign.
The debate over providing “fast track” authority for President Barack Obama to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and other trade deals has touched on constitutional, economic, and political arguments. Yet the most important question is whether Obama should be allowed to negotiate anything at all after a dismal track record. When Obama is negotiating with anyone other than congressional Republicans, who fold easily, he makes one bad deal after another.
Democrats are pushing back against the letter, circulated by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and signed by 47 Senators in all, that warns the Iranian regime that any deal it signs with President Barack Obama could be voided by the next president if it is not ratified by the Senate under the U.S. Constitution. They have enlisted Vice President Joe Biden and even retired Sen. Richard Lugar to disparage the effort. In so doing, they have proved Cotton’s point–and checkmated the administration.
