U.S. Has Lost the Capacity to Negotiate With Russia — SkimNews
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- Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met with Putin and Zelensky in Moscow and Kyiv, but their meetings produced no breakthrough after more than half a year of drift in U.S.-brokered talks.
- U.S.-Russia diplomacy must extend well beyond Ukraine to nuclear risk, strategic stability, outer space, the Arctic, pandemics, and disaster response — issues that require sustained engagement, not shuttle diplomacy.
- More than a decade of pressure and isolation since 2014 has stripped the U.S. government of the human and institutional infrastructure needed for sustained negotiation, and the generation of officials trained through repeated engagement is leaving government.
- Rose Gottemoeller, who negotiated the New START treaty, described Russian counterparts as "crack negotiators" — extremely well trained, technically capable, and often possessing a language advantage.
- Cold War–era precedents — the 1958 Lacy-Zarubin exchange agreement, the 1980s Shultz-Shevardnadze "four-part" agenda, the Gore-Chernomyrdin commission, and the Obama-Medvedev commission — show structured bilateral machinery endured even amid deep hostility.
- The article proposes four immediate steps: systematic debriefing of veteran negotiators, realistic simulations of Russian institutions and chains of authority, rebuilding maps of the next generation of Russian officials, and keeping crisis, nuclear-risk, and military-deconfliction channels operational regardless of political weather.
Why it matters: The piece recasts Ukraine from a stand-alone war into the first of many U.S.-Russia negotiating files — nuclear risk, the Arctic, space, and crisis hotlines all require sustained official channels, and the article warns the bench of American officials who know how to operate those channels is retiring without successors. A U.S. that can only do episodic shuttle diplomacy, as Witkoff and Kushner's fruitless trip illustrates, enters every future crisis with a structural deficit.
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