The Foreign Service Journal, October 2022

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2022 31 Rose Gottemoeller is the Steven C. Házy Lecturer at the Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. Before joining Stanford, she was the deputy secretary general of NATO from 2016 to 2019. Prior to NATO, she served for nearly five years as the under secretary for arms control and international security at the U.S. Department of State. While assistant secretary of State for arms control, verification and compliance in 2009 and 2010, she was the chief U.S. negotiator of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with the Russian Federation. Prior to government service, she was a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She served as the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center from 2006 to 2008, and is currently a nonresident fellow in Carnegie’s Nuclear Policy Program. She is also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. Her previous article for the FSJ was a look at U.S.-Russian Nuclear Arms Control Negotiations, May 2020. The Russian invasion threw the Budapest Memorandum’s efficacy into question. Here are thoughts from a lead negotiator for that important arms control milestone. BY ROSE GOTTEMOE L L ER A s one does at this time of life, late in a career, I have been cleaning out closets. Recently I found a letter that I received from President Bill Clinton on Dec. 9, 1994. He signed it on the day that I was leaving his National Security Council staff to take up a post at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. The president wrote: “Two of your accomplishments … deserve special praise. The first was your tireless work in conceiving and helping to negotiate the Trilateral Statement among Russia, Ukraine, and the United States that will lead to the removal of all nuclear weapons fromUkraine. The second …was your leadership … in securing the adherence PERSPECTIVES ON UKRAINE FOCUS Nuclear Weapons? of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.…These are the achievements of a lifetime.” Reading this letter now, I have to examine my conscience: Were these really achievements worth celebrating? Or should my colleagues and I in the Clinton administration have foreseen the evil that would befall Ukraine 30 years later? Impossible for me to know, but at least I can say how I thought about it at the time. The Budapest Memorandum Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus each received assurances in Budapest on Dec. 5, 1994, that once they handed over their nuclear weapons, they would be secure from attack. The Russian Federation, the United States, and the United Kingdom “reaf- firmed their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force Should Ukraine Have Kept