Will New START Help the Middle East?

Thursday’s conclusion of the START nuclear arms reduction treaty in Prague is undoubtedly a positive step in the course of relations between the protagonists of the Cold War, as they map out their ties in the 21st century.

The START treaty arrangements are not an innovation, as they resume an earlier process, but one that had been allowed to lapse with the expiration of the last such treaty, signed way back in 1991.

The mid-1940s through the late 1960s were among the “hottest” decades of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, as the 1970s and 1980s ushered in the period of intermittent talks, and official treaties on reducing nuclear arsenals. In the 1990s and ever since, despite the rhetoric of cordial ties during the Clinton-Yeltsin and Bush-Putin eras, the institutional follow-up of the US-Russian relationship was neglected, for a variety of reasons.