Obama is quite pleased with his START agreement and sees this as evidence of his reset with the Russians. But there are serious questions — about the linkage to our missile defense programs and about modernization of our nuclear stockpile. It seems there just aren’t the votes in the U.S. Senate now to ratify the deal:

The new nuclear arms reduction treaty signed last week is unlikely to be ratified by the Senate this year, a GOP leader suggested Monday evening.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), the third-ranking GOP member of the Senate, said that it would take longer than the end of the year to get together the 67 votes necessary to ratify the nuclear arms treaty President Barack Obama signed last week with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

“No, not this year. That’s my view,” Alexander said during an appearance on Fox News when asked if the Senate would ratify the treaty this year.

“We have a lot of questions,” he said. “We need to get the right answers and then it might get 67 votes.”

And if there aren’t the votes this year, I’ll go out on a limb and predict there certainly won’t be the votes next year. So the shining “achievement” of the Obami’s year-long suck-uppery to the Russians is an unratifiable agreement and the Russian refusal to agree to more than pin-prick sanctions against Iran. Alas, our Eastern European allies were thrown under the bus for precious little.