Putin’s Offer To Extend The New START Is A Goodwill Gesture To Trump

Goodwill gestures are meant to make the recipient trust whoever does them with the expectation that they’ll then be reciprocated for improving their relations.

Putin offered in late September to extend the New START, which is the last arms control pact between Russia and the US, for another year following its expiry in early February. He then reaffirmed his proposal in early October, emphasizing that there’s still time to extend this crucial agreement if the US has the political will, which appears to be the case given Trump’s recent praise of it as “a good idea”. Regardless of whatever happens, Putin’s offer is a goodwill gesture to Trump, which will now be explained.

For background, Putin announced Russia’s suspension of the New START in February 2023 in response to NATO’s involvement in Ukraine’s drone attacks against his country’s strategic aviation bases several months prior, which was analyzed here as the right thing to do at the right time. Nearly a year later in January 2024, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov then declared that talks on this issue won’t resume till the Ukrainian Conflict ends, arguing that doing otherwise would put Russia at a disadvantage.

With that in mind, it was expected at the start of the year that “Mutual Interest In Resuming Arms Control Talks Can Speed Up The Ukrainian Peace Process”, yet that didn’t come to pass with Russian-US tensions escalating shortly after mid-August’s Anchorage Summit. Nevertheless, Putin still publicly praised Trump for working towards peace and proposed extending New START for another year, thus representing a change in Russia’s position as articulated by Lavrov over 18 months earlier.

Goodwill gestures are meant to make the recipient trust whoever does them with the expectation that they’ll then be reciprocated for improving their relations. That doesn’t always happen though as proven by Russia’s goodwill gesture of withdrawing from Kiev during spring 2022’s peace talks being seen as weakness by Ukraine, the UK, and Poland, the last two of which then convinced Ukraine to keep fighting. The possibility thus exists that Trump might perceive Putin’s latest goodwill gesture in the same way.

It’s crucial to mention that Putin reassured his people that Russia can ensure its national security even in the absence of extending New START and that any unilateral moves by the US to further upset the strategic balance between their countries would render this pact null and void. What he probably had in mind was Trump’s “Golden Dome” initiative, previously known as the “Iron Dome”, for reviving Reagan’s “Star Wars” plan for space-based interceptors and likely secret space-based offensive missiles too.

Taking his trade deals as precedent, he always wants the US to maintain the dominant position in any “compromise”, so he might either insist on continuing to build the “Golden Dome” despite this ruining any New START extension or secretly continuing to do so even if he says he won’t. If the CIA assesses that Russia might transfer cutting-edge nuclear weapons technology to China and/or North Korea in that case, and that this would in turn jeopardize US national security interests, then he might reconsider.

Putin’s goodwill gesture to Trump of offering to extend New START is therefore a pivotal moment in their ties since it’ll allow Russia to learn whether the US is serious about compromising. If Trump doesn’t ditch the “Golden Dome” or dupes Putin about freezing work on it, then even though the new Burevestnik missile could still pierce through it, Russia might still opt to transfer this tech to its nuclear-armed allies in order to raise the costs to the US of rejecting Russia’s proposal so that it doesn’t reject future ones too.