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is official, or nearly so. According to a Reuters' report, the Bush
administration has begun briefing Congress that the President Bush
is "going to give formal notice in January of [his intention
to] withdraw...from the [1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty."
Pursuant to
the Treaty's Article XV, six months after such an announcement the
United States would no longer be subject to even the political obligation
to observe its myriad constraints. (According to a definitive legal
analysis performed for the Center for Security Policy by Douglas
J. Feith — who is now President Bush's undersecretary for policy
— and George Miron in 1999, the ABM Treaty ceased to be legally
binding on the United States in 1991 when the other party, the Soviet
Union, was formally disestablished.)
President Bush
most recently publicly signaled his intention to take such a step
in an important address today at the Citadel, marking the three-month
anniversary of the attacks that initiated the war on terrorism:
Last week
we conducted another promising test of our missile defense technology.
For the good of peace, we're moving forward with an active program
to determine what works and what does not work. In order to do
so, we must move beyond the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty,
a treaty that was written in a different era, for a different
enemy.
America and
our allies must not be bound to the past. We must be able to build
the defenses we need against the enemies of the 21st century.
To its credit,
the United States has not only made known its intention to congressional
figures but to the Kremlin. Reuters noted in its wire story today
that "The Russian news agency Itar-Tass reported separately
on Tuesday that the Bush administration will soon officially announce
it is leaving the treaty."
If these reports
are in fact true, President Bush is to be heartily commended for
taking the only step vis a vis the ABM Treaty that is compatible
with his declared purpose of defending the American people against
the real and growing ballistic missile threat. The Center for Security
Policy (and NR) has long urged both him and his predecessors to
take precisely this action and it would be particularly gratifying
were he now to do so in lieu of adopting the course some of his
subordinates and others have been urging upon him — i.e., preserving
the ABM Treaty for the time being but securing (somehow) from the
Russians permission to conduct certain anti-missile development
tests prohibited by that accord. This was a snare and delusion that
would inevitably have continued to hobble the development,
let alone any deployment of effective missile defenses. Mr. Bush
will deserve great credit if he rejects it as such.
The question
occurs, however: Why wait until January? The leaks about Mr. Bush's
impending decision are certain to engender, both here and abroad,
whatever (probably vestigial) opposition remains in the wake of
9/11 to the United States defending its people. No good can come
from creating a window in which that opposition might be fanned
and orchestrated in the hope of dissuading the president from acting
— or, at least, adding to the political costs of his doing
so. Even if he acts at once, it will still be six more months
before there is any relief from the treaty. During that period,
missile-defense tests will have to continue to be made less realistic
and less useful than they might otherwise be. Deployment-related
activities for sea-, air- or space-based systems will remain illegal.
Why add an extra month to the already too long list of unjustified
costs of what Mr. Bush has correctly called an "obsolete,"
"outdated" and "dangerous" treaty?
In the words
of a great marketing campaign: Just do it. Reuters' competitor,
the Associated Press, is at this writing running an item saying
Mr. Bush "will announce the decision in the next several days."
That's better. The time to move beyond the ABM Treaty is now.
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