| Daily News Brief March 24, 2014 |
Top of the Agenda
Nuclear Summit Begins
U.S. president Barack Obama began a week of international travel on Monday,
arriving in the Netherlands for the start of the Nuclear Security
Summit. The biannual meeting opened with Japan's announcement that it
would turn over its nuclear stockpile to the United States (NYT).
The crisis in Ukraine, however, is expected to overshadow the official
agenda on nuclear terrorism. G7 members will meet on the summit's
sidelines to discuss economic aid to Ukraine. Ukraine on Monday
ordered the withdrawal of its forces from Crimea after Russian troops
overran a base there, following NATO commander General Philip
Breedlove's warning that Russian forces may move into the eastern part of the country (FT).
Meanwhile, the summit offers Obama the opportunity to maintain
relations with foreign leaders: he is slated to meet with Chinese
president Xi Jinping on Monday, and on Tuesday with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean president Park Geun-hye, two U.S. allies among whom relations have been strained (AP).
Analysis
"Russia's provocative actions in Crimea and the deterioration in U.S.-Russian relations certainly make the pursuit of a cooperative agenda even more challenging
and there is more than a theoretical danger of backsliding. Yet, even
in the darkest days of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet
Union shared a common interest in reducing nuclear risks and found ways
to overcome ideological differences to pursue joint initiatives and
agreements designed to reduce those risks and strengthen strategic
stability," writes the Arms Control Association.
"Mr. Obama deserves praise for initiating the biannual nuclear summits in 2010. But the process has reached mainly for low-hanging fruit.
A more worthy goal would be the worldwide elimination of highly
enriched uranium for reactor fuel, which could sharply reduce risks of
nuclear proliferation and terrorism," writes Alan J. Kuperman and Frank
N. von Hippel in the New York Times.
"Governments
can no longer act in isolation, as though nuclear security were
exclusively a 'sovereign' responsibility. States depend on one another
for their nuclear security, and they can be deeply affected by other
states' actions. The weakest link in the security chain threatens everyone,
and that means a system is needed to identify and strengthen the weak
links – a system in which states take steps to build confidence in – and
accountability for – their security performance," writes Joan Rohlfing
for Project Syndicate.
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