BERLIN ¨C The lapse of the New START treaty has done more than remove numerical ceilings on the nuclear weapons arsenals of Russia and the United States. The treaty¡¯s demise has dismantled a system of shared knowledge ¡ª inspections, data exchanges and notification regimes ¡ª that made credible commitments possible.
This outcome reflects more than a discrete policy failure. It reflects Trump¡¯s worldview ¡ª call it a dealmaker¡¯s epistemology. In this view, durable institutional knowledge is not an asset but a constraint. Negotiations are not cumulative processes through which states learn about one another over time, but discrete transactions in which leverage matters more than memory.
Hence Trump¡¯s confidence in dispatching amateur envoys like Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner ¡ª unburdened by knowledge of prior negotiations ¡ª to resolve immensely complex conflicts. Inexperience is not a handicap in this view; it is a qualification.
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