Why Clinton talked about Bushehr: a dissent

A friend of mine, who is least as knowledgeable as I am about Russia and vastly more knowledgeable than I am about international relations generally, didn’t particularly enjoy my post from this morning. In fact, he wrote a short, albeit high-quality, rebuttal to it that I think is worth sharing. I still don’t agree with him, but he made some points that are certainly worth taking into consideration:

Clinton talked about Bushehr because hours before she landed in Moscow, Putin announced that it would come online by this summer.  This was a deliberate statement by Putin to hijack Clinton’s meeting on START.  Clinton had no choice but to waste precious minutes of her meetings in Moscow to talk about the Russian-built nuclear reactor.

Bushehr ceased to be a bilateral Russian-Iranian issue once it became clear that Iran, as an NPT signatory, was abrogating its safeguards agreements with the IAEA as well as multiple UN Security Council resolutions that Russia has not opposed.  At that point, any nuclear cooperation with Iran becomes an “international community” issue.  To have not mentioned Bushehr hours after Putin announced the summer start-up timeline would have made Clinton appear “impotent and weak.”

Where you see some kind of neoconservative strain of unilateral brow-beating, I see a strong commitment by the administration to uphold the rules of the liberal internationalist system built by the United States and its allies since WWII.