The practices of strategic arms control negotiations: insights from a diplomacy of trusting in the US-Russian relations

This thesis offers a new understanding of the relationship between trust and verification in nuclear arms control negotiations. Combining insights from psychology, sociology, and social constructivism in IR, it develops a new conceptual framework to explain the importance of trust in shaping leaders’ decision-making during nuclear arms control negotiations. The key proposition is that trust can be conceived as a practice – the diplomacy of trusting – and that only by interrogating the diplomatic process by which actors come to trust through negotiations can a proper understanding be gained of how the verification provisions that make an agreement possible are decided. The concept of the Diplomacy of Trusting is predicated on the idea that trust is created and performed through the practices of both the trustor (the actor who trusts) and the trustee (the actor who is trusted). It is this co-creation of trust that constitutes the diplomacy of trusting. To demonstrate the framework’s utility in providing a better understanding of how agreements are reached on verification in strategic nuclear arms control negotiations, it is applied to three case studies: the 1979 SALT II Treaty; the 2002 Moscow Treaty (SORT), and the 2010 New START Treaty