Laborious Disarmament

Just before Christmas, Barack Obama could have lost everything. But at the last second, he could still find a couple Republicans in the Senate who are ready to approve the arms reduction treaty with Russia. Obama, who has won the Nobel Peace Prize for his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons, can stick to his biggest foreign policy goal.

But Obama has also shown that he can still accomplish his main goals despite fierce resistance. If the president, after the flops at the climate summits in Cancun and Copenhagen, hadn’t found a majority for the new START treaty at home, it would surely have become fairly difficult for him to negotiate any treaties at all with other countries. There would surely be few remaining heads of state willing to count on the word of the U.S. president.

But Obama has hardly won anything. There is hardly another nuclear power out there actually willing to shrink its own nuclear arsenal and participate in scrapping all the world’s nuclear warheads without the acknowledgment of the United States. The new START treaty fulfills only the obligation for more disarmament talks. Given the difficult domestic negotiations of the last months, we can only guess how hard the next steps will be for Obama. How will the Republicans, who perennially say no, react to a treaty that forbids nuclear weapons tests? The world can only hope that Obama can again find enough Republicans for whom world peace is not only a ball in the political game.