WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama emphatically put his personal prestige behind the pending New START arms-control treaty with Russia, calling it a “national security imperative” that the Senate pass it by year’s end, as he huddled Thursday at the White House with a bipartisan cast of foreign-policy luminaries from previous administrations.
Obama, who will arrive today at a NATO summit in Portugal without the assurances he’d hoped to give Russia on the treaty, said it’s essential to restore U.S. inspections to track Russia’s nuclear weapons. He also said it’s “a cornerstone of our relations with Russia” and vital to their cooperation in pressuring Iran, among other things.
Obama insisted that if Republicans in the lame-duck Senate continue to block passage, they’ll endanger the nation.
“The stakes for American national security are clear, and they are high,” the president said.
Even as Obama spoke, however, an effort between Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., and key Republicans to forge a bipartisan agreement behind the treaty was foundering.
McClatchy Newspapers
