THE nuclear weapons treaty agreed between Russia and the United States may sound like a relic from the Cold War, but it has a very contemporary backbeat, and that backbeat is all about Iran.
Yes, Moscow and Washington have been signing such treaties since 1983, and the name of the new deal, Measures to Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, seems designed to trigger a yawn.
But this agreement is also intended t
o show the world in general, and Iran in particular, that, as far as the big powers are concerned, the Nuclear Club is closed to new members.
The deal will be signed, in Prague on 8 April, the anniversary of Barack Obama's speech last year in which he called for a nuclear-free world. Nobody expects such a day to come, but the speech, and treaty, underline the determination of Washington and Moscow to put their foot down hard on nuclear proliferation.
For more than four years, Iran has been playing a diplomatic dance with the outside world in its efforts to develop nuclear weapons. But this spring, the United Nations Security Council appears more or less united in its determination to oppose it.
In previous years, the Security Council was split, with Britain, France and the US on one side, calling for harsher sanctions, and China and Russia threatening to use their vetoes to block any such resolution. The key change came earlier this year when Russia's UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin indicated Moscow had had enough of Iran's stonewalling, and that sanctions might now be the only way.
That leaves China as the only hold-out on a sanctions resolution. But in the diplomatic dance that goes on in the Security Council, it is reluctant to block something unless the Russians are blocking it too. With Moscow finally on board with sanctions, Beijing is expected to acquiesce, clearing the way for sanctions tough enough to hurt. Hence the importance of the timing, rather than the substance, of the new weapons treaty, which falls right in the middle of negotiations in New York on the scale and scope of sanctions.
Mr Obama will hope also that the treaty, and the sanctions threat, will give him some foreign policy stars, vindicating his decision last year to appease Russia by delaying deployment of an anti-missile system to Eastern Europe, a decision that looks to have got Moscow to agree not just on the new treaty, but to step on board the Iran sanctions bus.
