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The recent President Putin’s Address to the Federal Assembly turned out to be a colorful overview of new futuristic weapons – nuclear powered cruise missiles, underwater drones, exotic laser strike systems, and so on. Military and technical experts – in Russia and abroad – now discuss whether the Kremlin already has such advanced weapons at its disposal and if some of them can ever be developed and deployed. Most observers nevertheless agree that the list of strategic hardware presented by the Russian leader is quite impressive and it will have a visible impact on the global balance in years to come.

However, this demonstration of specific artefacts of Kremlin’s military might and ambitions should not conceal a more fundamental change in the Russian strategic thinking articulated by Vladimir Putin: the country is drifting in the direction of strategic isolationism. This is a clear and important deviation from both the traditional Russian (and the Soviet) strategic thinking with very serious implications for the global strategic stability.

Since the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, Moscow and Washington have been chained to each other by the common need to manage their respective strategic arsenals in a mutually satisfactory way. Even during the most difficult moments of the Cold War, the two sides did their best to preserve the bilateral strategic arms control regime and to keep the mil-to-mil communication lines open and active. The arms control infrastructure grew over time; it developed its own negotiation culture and produced highly professional communities of ‘arms controllers’ on both sides. Experts and diplomats from Moscow and from Washington spent countless hours in Geneva, Vienna and other places looking for ways to reconcile strategic interest, priorities and concerns of the two sides, mustering the art of balancing concessions and fine-tuning compromises.

The mutual strategic interdependence survived the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991; for almost three decades, the Russian Federation took pride in the fact that it remained one of the two nuclear superpowers and that it inherited from the Soviet Union the special responsibility for maintaining the global peace and stability.

The statement of Vladimir Putin might be a signal to Russia’s partners and Russia’s foes alike that this time is ending. According to Mr. Putin, Russia would still prefer to maintain a strategic arms control regime with the United States, but it can no longer take the US goodwill and commitment for granted. Indeed, Russia does have reasons to be frustrated with the US performance. In 2002, Washington walked out of the US – Russian ABM Treaty of 1972 and later on opted for deploying components of ballistic missile defense systems in Romania and in Poland. The future of the INF Treaty remains unclear; both sides accuse each other of significant violations. The Trump Administration questioned the value of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on the Iranian nuclear program that had been negotiated with Tehran in 2015 by all the five permanent members of the US Security Council together with Germany.

The Kremlin apparently concluded that the appetite for further bilateral or multilateral agreements on nuclear weapons is very low in both the White House and in Pentagon, and the US Senate is highly unlikely to ratify any meaningful strategic arms control agreement with Moscow. If so, Russia should look for other ways to ensure its security in a less than friendly and cooperative world.

Strategic isolationism is not something unique or unprecedented in the nuclear world. In fact, except for the United States and Russia, all other nuclear powers currently pursue this policy – in the sense that they do not consider themselves to be constrained by any existing arms control agreements. The so called “third nuclear powers” (China, United Kingdom, France, etc.) always argued that their nuclear arsenals were too modest to have a significant impact on the global strategic balance and that it would not be fair for them to take any obligations in this area until the Big Two commit themselves to radical strategic cuts. Moscow and Washington have implicitly accepted this logic; though after the end of the Cold War there have been many discussions on how to turn strategic arms control into a multilateral enterprise.

However, Russia is not just another “third” nuclear power – like China, Pakistan or India. It is one of the two core pillars of the global strategic stability. If President Putin no longer considers strategic arms control as Russia’s top security priority; if from now on Moscow relies primarily on strengthening its strategic arsenal with new futuristic weapons, it means a fundamental change in the global strategic equation. The concept of strategic stability as we have known it since early 1960s becomes antiquated and immaterial. It is not yet clear, what kind of a new arrangement may replace the old one. Another thing is clear: next years and even decades will be a bumpy road for all of us.

*(President Putin Delivers Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly. Image credit: Kremlin.ru)