Revenge of the Arms Controllers
Has the Bush administration done an about-face?

By Frank J. Gaffney Jr., president & CEO of the Center for Security Policy
February 11, 2002 9:55 a.m.

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.