President Obama has completed his first ever Russia Summit dealing with The Big Issue. Actually, I guess the status of nuclear forces used to be The Big Issue, those days are gone. Still, I have to admit to a certain sense of expectancy at seeing the U.S. and Russian presidents meet to discuss nuclear weapons (historic agreements could be in the offing, after all), and a sense of disappointment to find that few share this feeling. After all, how important could it be if it’s not even a trending topic on Twitter? I’m also rather disappointed at the outcome of the summit. Jaded cynics who pay attention to these things learned long ago that countries often craft the summit declarations in advance of the meeting so that even if they fail to find agreement during their deliberations they can at least release to the press a nice communique about what they did agree on, and everyone walks away a winner. In this case, President Obama and President Medvedev reached an agreement to agree in the future to cut nuclear arsenals by a fraction of current levels. No actual treaty was signed, it’s just a basic understanding of what they want to do when they get serous about doing it…in the future. In that way the headline can read “US and Russia agree nuclear weapons cut,” which is true, sort of, even as the reality is much more complex.

So, that’s the good news from the summit, the bad news is that there was no agreement on the Iranian nuclear program, no agreement on European missile defense, and no agreement about the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Georgia. And the worse news is that today Russia announced that the agreement of yesterday will be in jeopardy if the U.S. refuses to abandon missile defense. As summits go, I’m hard pressed to find the silver lining. Russia did agree to new transit rights to supply the war effort in Afghanistan, allowing up to ten flights a day through Russian airspace. So, we can point to one very practical accomplishment. Is that enough to call it a successful summit?

Photo Credit: The Associated Press