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 hey're
back. Arms-control aficionados inside and out of the U.S. government
are feeling their oats now that Secretary of State Colin Powell
has told Congress that the United States would sign a "legally
binding" strategic arms-reduction agreement with Russia.
This represents
a new lease on life for devotees of such accords among the Clinton
holdovers in Washington and the U.S. embassy in Moscow and the professional
arms controllers burrowed into the foreign and civil services. They
had a collective near-death experience when President Bush took
office, insisting the Cold War was over and that the United States
and Russia were now able to be friends.
Under such
circumstances, Mr. Bush correctly observed, it made no sense for
the relationship between the two former rivals to have as its centerpiece
the weapons they once used to threaten one another. It followed
that the Cold War-style treaties that supposedly controlled such
threats were similarly passé.
Worse yet from
the arms controllers' perspective, in his first year in office,
"W." not only talked such heresy, he acted on it.
In short order,
the new administration: made known that it would not be seeking
Senate advice and consent for the Clinton Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty (CTBT); declined to participate in the completion of a so-called
"verification protocol" for the Biological Weapons Convention;
and balked at resuming negotiations with the Russians' North Korean
clients, intended to curb the latter's proliferation of longer-range
missiles.
Then, in December,
Mr. Bush took a wrecking ball to the treaty the arms controllers
called "the cornerstone of strategic stability": the 1972
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. He exercised the United States's
right to withdraw from that accord, which had been crafted under
entirely different strategic circumstances — namely, a bipolar
world in which the other power, the Soviet Union, had a virtual
monopoly on ballistic missiles of sufficient range to attack the
United States — and that prohibited Americans from being defended
against such missiles. When the Kremlin scarcely reacted, the President
appeared to have successfully delivered the coup de grâce
to the whole notion that arms control still had relevance to the
U.S.-Russian relationship.
That principle
seemed, moreover, to be powerfully reaffirmed by the Bush Nuclear
Posture Review (NPR) released last month. While it called for deep
reductions in U.S. strategic forces, the cuts were to be made on
a unilateral basis over the next ten years. This meant not only
that any adjustments the administration believed were necessary
could be made without having to wait for usually protracted negotiations
with the former Soviet Union. Cuts in the number of weapons in our
arsenal could also be revised, or perhaps even reversed, if changes
in the strategic environment warranted such a step by this president
or a successor.
Then, suddenly,
Secretary Powell is testifying not about a "new strategic framework"
with Russia in which we have neither any need for nor interest in
new bilateral arms-control treaties. Rather, he is advising senators
like Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden (D., DE)
who slavishly support the "arms-control process," that
what President Bush actually meant to say is that the administration
is committed to securing a legally binding agreement with Russia.
This complete
turnabout seems to be attributable to two factors: 1) President
Bush is anxious to "do something" for his friend, Vladimir
Putin, in recognition of Russia's playing ball with us on the war
on terrorism and being a pretty good sport about the ABM Treaty's
demise. Putin has made it pretty clear that what he wants is a new
accord formalizing — and making permanent — the cuts in
strategic forces that Washington and the Kremlin have individually
agreed to make.
2) The president appears not to have grasped how serious a setback
to his beliefs and policies he will sustain if, having so forcefully
rejected the siren's song of arms control, he were now to authorize
Colin Powell's State Department to resume its favorite type of "business
as usual": treaties or executive agreements rooted in the principle
of rough equality between the United States and the former USSR
and an unwarranted belief that Russia will actually live up to its
end of the bargain.
President Bush
had it right to begin with: Arms-control treaties are likely to
prove a hindrance to more normal relations with Russia, not a catalyst
for them. The Russians will seize on the negotiation and substance
of such accords as an opportunity to reestablish themselves as peers
of the United States and to manipulate the "process" for
advantage internationally and with sympathetic members of the American
academic, policy, and media elites. This will likely translate into,
among other things, a formal obligation not only to remove large
numbers of warheads from operational status but to destroy them
— a formula for compromising some of this country's most sensitive
secrets. It may also encourage congressional efforts to countermand
Mr. Bush's decision to withdraw from the ABM Treaty.
Even more troubling,
any resuscitation of traditional arms control would make it less
likely that President Bush will be able to pursue his strategy for
a new sort of arms control: Using regime change as an instrument
for ending the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and
their delivery systems. If allowed to get away with it once again,
Russia — which is actively contributing to such proliferation
— will doubtless revert to form, threatening to abandon or
impede the arms-control negotiations if its friends are threatened
by the U.S., and enlisting Americans heavily invested in that process
to echo their warnings.
Mr. Bush needs
to stay the course. Henceforth, he should contemplate only unilateral
changes to U.S. nuclear-force levels and capabilities. He should
pursue regime change, not negotiated arms control, to mitigate the
danger posed to us by real or potential enemies who cynically ignore
their commitments pursuant to such accords — and by those who
naively still think we can rely on the latter.
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