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 he
mating dance, Washington/Moscow, almost takes us
back to the Cold War years — which continue to be informative.
The background. In 1972, there was the ABM Treaty, which is being
hallowed as the Constitutional Convention of the missile age. Its
postulates are that the signatories, the United States and Russia,
should not take measures to defend themselves against missiles headed
at each other. That way, the architects reasoned, any temptation
to first-strike offense would be mitigated by the knowledge that
retaliation was possible. If we couldn't defend ourselves against
Russian missiles, we wouldn't undertake to deliver our own.
What has happened, of course, is that there is no longer a balance
of terror between the two great superpowers. That, and an albescent
technology which holds out the hope, not that a flotilla of missiles
could be estopped in mid-air, but that a few missiles could be intercepted.
That is the reasoning behind the proposal by the Bush administration,
carrying on a vision of Ronald Reagan's, to build an antimissile
system, an enterprise very much in the works now, though at the
planning stage.
Russia opposes this emphatically. So emphatically that people have
begun to forget to ask the basic question: Why should this be so?
What have the Russians to lose from any success by the United States
in achieving some kind of protection from nuclear missiles?
The answer to this is that the only thing the Russians would stand
to lose is a projected world scene in which everybody had
an antimissile system, resulting in a loss of the military edge
Russia now has against potentially fractious nations which currently
behave themselves, knowing that the Great Bear is not to be trifled
with nuclearwise. But all projections have to be limited by reality,
and reality tells us that it is inconceivable that Moscow would
emerge, in an age of antimissile technology, fearing that Iran or
Iraq or India or Japan would proceed aggressively against Russia
with a sense of immunity to Russia's huge arsenal of nuclear weapons.
So what is it that Russia genuinely fears? It is the loss of the
grand status Russia has enjoyed (and profited from) in the past,
as the other nuclear superpower. If the United States, in five years,
developed an antimissile technology sufficient to deflect or deter
threat from minor potential aggressors, the standing of Russia would
be marginalized. If, in order to protect ourselves from Iran, we
could proceed without tripartite understandings with Russia, the
role of Russia would recede in strategic calculations. This grates
on Russian pride.
The American approach to the problem has been Yankee-oriented. We
have approached Mr. Putin and told him that the Russians had a whole
lot of things the United States would pay cash to get. We have talked
about Russian S-300 surface-to-air missiles, which are highly developed.
We would be willing to pay a lot of money for these; we've passed
the word on. And it is hardly as if we were purchasing a system
kept by Moscow only for its own use. The Russians have sold the
S-300 to "dozens of nations," in the language of Michael Wines of
the New York Times. But the offer to purchase the S-300 is
a part of a basket, designed to appeal to, and indeed to seduce,
Moscow. What is offered up is an idea of an interdependent system,
which would provide simultaneous protection to them and to us. Moreover,
the development of such a system would call for employing Soviet
missile scientists, a dispossessed class since the end of the Cold
War, an economic drag on Russia, and a footloose threat to the United
States, as there is always a market for scientists who can help
little countries, who want to be big threats, to become that.
So far, our inducements to Moscow have not worked, and as June 16
approaches, when Mr. Bush will meet with Mr. Putin in Slovenia,
no agenda has been formulated on which to proceed to discuss the
problem. Mr. Putin's position is that the ABM Treaty is, in the
language of Defense Minister Ivanov, the fundamental brick. "You
cannot take a brick out of a wall and hope that it will stand."
Well, of course you can. Depending on your priorities, you can come
up with another brick (alternative guarantees to Russia), or decide
that you really don't want or need that wall (proceed to rescind
the treaty). The principal leverage of Putin isn't his nuclear arsenal,
and his threat not to diminish the size of it. Nothing Bush proposes
to do in any way affects that question or its implications. His
leverage is the opinion of our allies. More accurately (is France
really an ally?), the opinion of other countries, and the continuing
hold liberal international pundits have on American policy.
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