Barack Obama & Russia

OBAMA FOR USA. The United States and Russia, seeking to move forward on one of the most significant arms control treaties since the end of the cold war, announced on July 6, 2009, that they had reached a preliminary agreement on cutting each country's stockpiles of strategic nuclear weapons. The so-called framework agreement was put together by negotiators as President Obama arrived in Moscow for his first Russian-American summit meeting, and it was approved by Mr. Obama and Russia's president, Dmitri A. Medvedev. They announced it at a news conference.

"We have a mutual interest in protecting both of our populations from the kinds of danger that weapons proliferation is presenting today," Mr. Obama said. The agreement commits both sides to modest reductions in the legal limits on nuclear arsenals as they draft a new arms control treaty for the next generation.

Both sides say they hope that the nuclear agreement will effectively set the stage for a successor to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, a cold war-era pact that expires in December. Beyond that, they said they wanted to build momentum for a broader agreement to be negotiated starting in 2010 to impose deeper cuts in their nuclear arsenals and put the world on a path toward eliminating nuclear weapons altogether.

Mr. Obama said the specter of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and North Korea raised deep concerns, and he called for the United States to host a summit on global nuclear security. Mr. Medvedev said that although Russia and the United States were trying to repair their relationship, differences still remained on missile defense and other issues. But Mr. Obama expressed a hope that the countries might be able to find common ground on missile defense.

Russia has repeatedly objected to an American antimissile system in Eastern Europe. American officials say the system is intended to ward off attacks from countries like Iran, but the Kremlin views it as a threat to Russia. It appeared at the meeting that the two sides had decided to postpone addressing the missile system; they issued a joint statement indicating that they would continue to discuss it. They also agreed to undertake a joint assessment of any threats presented by Iran.

By the end of the visit, President Obama had kicked off a new chapter in Russian-American relations with significant progress on several fronts. About a year after the relationship ruptured over the war in Georgia, the two sides are now back at the table and doing business. But while Mr. Obama and President Medvedev declared a reconciliation, they did so partly by agreeing to disagree on important issues and by selectively interpreting the same words in sharply different ways. Moreover, they made promises of cooperation that ultimately might prove easier to translate into words than reality.

A case in point: Mr. Obama and Mr. Medvedev announced an agreement to open a joint early-warning center to share data on missile launchings. But Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris N. Yeltsin announced the same agreement in 1998. Mr. Clinton then announced it again with President Vladimir V. Putin in 2000. Mr. Putin and President George W. Bush recommitted to it as recently as 2007. And none of them ever actually built the center.

White House aides agreed that the hard part was ahead, but they argued that the progress eclipsed that of any Russian-American summit meeting in decades. In addition to the agreement to slash strategic nuclear arsenals, they agreed to resume military contacts suspended after the war with Georgia and open an air corridor across Russia for up to 4,500 flights of United States troops and weapons to Afghanistan each year.