On the recordDecember 17, 2010
Any lawyer--and we are both lawyers here--knows that if you have an ambiguity in a contract, you are asking for trouble. You are asking for litigation or dispute down the road. It may not be all that important between two parties or two companies, but when you have two major countries such as Russia and the United States with a lot of tenuous relationships--there are a lot of things on which we agree and some on which we do not agree, very important matters that can arise. If you have a major dispute between the countries, you can affect international relationships not just between the two of us but affecting a whole lot of others in the world as well. You do not want to build in potential conflicts. There is a double conflict here. The first conflict is between the United States and Russia. The Russians say: If you improve your missile defenses, we get to withdraw from the treaty. The State Department signing statement says: Don't worry, we are only going to protect against regional or intermediate range threats. But the White House, at the same time, talks about having a letter from the President, or a statement from maybe the Secretary of Defense or somebody, that says: But we are, in fact, going to go forward and develop these kinds of missile defenses, which would, in fact, qualitatively improve our position vis-a-vis Russia.
