Can U.S. leaders handle Russia, China?

Expert to discuss the lessons learned from two rounds of nuclear weapons negotiations

solve major problems in a bilateral way,” he said. “We are well on the way to having two potential rival superpowers, in Russia and in China.

“Question number one for the U.S going forward is do we have the will and the diplomatic skill to address either of these?” Robinson added. “The current U.N. will not be helpful in sorting out either of these.”

Robinson noted that Russia has begun to reverse years of decline in its nuclear weapons capacity and is upgrading other military capabilities as well. He said the U.S. adversary appears to be pursuing additional territory aside from Crimea, which the Russians annexed in 2014.

“Their claims over Ukraine, as well the former Soviet Georgia, seem not to have been halted,” he said.

Robinson said legendary Russian leaders Catherine the Great and Peter the Great attained their lofty posthumous titles because “they were able to conquer and add territory to the territory of Mother Russia.”

“The driving question today is whether Putin, who says publicly that the collapse of the U.S.S.R. is the worst thing that has ever happened to his country, harbors ambitions to be called Putin the Great,” Robinson said.

“The future of national boundaries could be a worrisome topic in the years ahead. Certainly the world is bound to get a lot more complicated … and it will be very important who leads the U.S. side, and how we play our hand in these issues.”

WASHINGTON – Having negotiated two nuclear agreements with the Soviet Union during the late 1980s, Paul Robinson knows a few things about dealing with the Russians.

In a Journal interview, the former Sandia and Los Alamos director recalled the dramatic, 30-year-old nuclear talks as if they were yesterday, describing Moscow negotiating rooms

WHEN: Friday, July 28 from 3-5 p.m.

choked with cigarette smoke and deep mistrust on both sides of the table.

“We were working 18 hours days and 110-hour weeks for five months,” Robinson said, recalling his role as chief U.S. negotiator in talks that yielded a renegotiation of the Threshold Test Ban Treaty. “We finally got an agreement that was three inches thick.”

The historic negotiations will serve as a backdrop to a lecture Robinson will deliver at the UNM Continuing Education center in Albuquerque on Friday in Albuquerque. The talk — part of the Albuquerque International Association’s ongoing lecture series — will explore how previous U.S.-Russian negotiations can inform U.S. policy in yet another era ripe with Russian intrigue.

After 1991, following the breakup of the U.S.S.R., the Russian Federation began to slip into the rear-view mirror of American foreign policy. But the Russians have crept back and are now front-and-center, nuclear-armed and assertive, and pressing on Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia. In order to avert a new Cold War — or worse, an actual war — President Donald Trump and his foreign policy team will have to negotiate and likely strike some difficult-to-attain deals, Robinson said.

“They (U.S.-Russian negotiations) are likely to get harder, primarily because we can no longer expect to