US President Barack Obama’s hopes to win US Senate approval of a landmark arms control treaty with Russia this year faded abruptly on Tuesday, hampering his embattled quest to improve ties with Moscow.
The White House’s Republican foes threatened to block any effort to ratify the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) in the year-end “lame duck” session, drawing a sharp warning from US Vice President Joe Biden.
“Failure to pass the New START Treaty this year would endanger our national security,” said Biden, who stressed “the time to act is now and we will continue to seek its approval by the Senate before the end of the year.”
The agreement “is a fundamental part of our relationship with Russia, which has been critical to our ability to supply our troops in Afghanistan and to impose and enforce strong sanctions on the Iranian government,” he said.
The blow to one of Obama’s top foreign policy priorities came when No. 2 Senate Republican Jon Kyl, his party’s point man on the treaty, said he doubted he could green light a ratification vote by year’s end.
Senate ratification requires 67 votes out of 100 — a difficult enough task for the White House before Nov. 2 elections bumped Republicans up to 47 seats from the 41 they will hold until the new Congress convenes in January.
The START — signed by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Obama in Prague in April — restricts each nation to a maximum of 1,550 deployed warheads, a cut of about 30 percent from a limit set in 2002.
It would also return US inspectors who have been barred from Russia’s arsenal since the agreement’s predecessor lapsed in December last year.
However, Republicans have said they need to be sure that the US nuclear arsenal would be modernized to remain a credible deterrent and that the treaty would not hamper US missile defense efforts, opposed by Moscow.
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