Description
The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) extension secured by the United States and Russia in February 2021 has prompted a surge in discussions among academics and policymakers on the future of arms control negotiations. While, overall, a positive development for arms control, multiple challenges such as effectively managing nuclear-weapons capabilities, encompassing emerging technologies, halting arms races, and negotiating China’s entry into arms control agreement persist. Fostering transparency and confidence building is key to resolving these challenges which, to a large extent, rest on trust between the negotiating parties. Arms control negotiations are interlinked with the social practices of political actors. These practices should be understood in their cultural and strategic context. The significance of trust and strategic culture in nuclear arms control negotiations has been largely neglected by mainstream International Relations scholars. In this paper, we propose a novel theoretical approach that combines these two variables to address the current limitations of nuclear arms control theory with regard to how verification is negotiated. Using the New START extension as a case study, we explore the conditions under which trust shaped both Russian and American actors’ decision-making during the negotiations and the role of the cultural traits that underpinned it. We employ process-tracing and discourse analytic methods to determine how well this framework accounts for actors’ decision-making and how it can be utilized for future arms control negotiations.
