President Obama explained that his comments to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev about being more flexible after the November elections were a result of well-known, practical restraints, not an alternative agenda, at a press conference in Seoul, Korea (from the pool report):
First of all,are the mikes on?What I said yesterday, Ben, is something that I think everyone in this room understands. Arms control is extraodrinarily complex, very technical, and the only way it gets done is if you can consult and build a strong understnading, both between countries and within countries. And, when you think about the New Start treaty that Dmitri and I were able to hammer out and ultimately get ratified, that was a paintstaking two year process.I don’t think it’s any surprise that you can’t start that a few months before Presidential and Congressional elections in the United States, and at a time when they just completed elections in Russia, and they’re in the process of a presidential transition where a new president’s going to be coming in in a little less than two months.It was a very simple point, and one that I repeated when I spoke to you guys yesterday, which is, that we’re going to spend the next nine, 10 months trying to work through some of the technical aspects of how we get past what is a major point of friction, one of the primary points of friction between our two countries, which is this whole missile defense issue.It involves a lot of complicated issues. If we can get out technical teams to clear out the underbrush, hopefully in 2013, there’s a foundation to actually make some significant progress on this and a lot of other bilateral issues.I think every body understands — if they don’t, they haven’t been listening to my speehces — that I want to reduce nuclear stockpiles. And one of the barriers to doing that is building trust and cooperation around missile defense issues. And so this is not a matter of hiding the ball. I’m on record, I made a speech about it to a whole bunch of Korean university students yesterday. I want to see us over time gradually, systematically reduce reliance on nuclear weapons.As Dimitri said, the United States and Russia, because of our history and becuase we are nuclear superpowers, have a special obliglation. That doesn’t make it easy because both countries are commited to their sovereignty and their defense.The only way I get this stuff done is If I’m consulting with the Pentagon, with Congress, if I’ve got bipartisan support and frankly, the current environment is not conducive to those kinds of thoughtful consultations. I think the stories you guys have been writing over the last 24 hours is pretty good evidence of that.
