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sound you hear amid the hue and cry over John Bolton's remarks in
Moscow — in which he said the U.S. would withdraw from the ABM Treaty
if there isn't progress on revising it with the Russians by November
— may be the beginnings of a deal.
Or at least
the predicate for a deal. Because the Russians will never talk seriously
about "moving beyond" the treaty (in the administration's
phrase), unless they know we are determined to leave it.
Otherwise,
the Russians will count on some combination of the Putin Democrats
in Washington — Levin, Biden & Co. — the Europeans, and Colin
Powell, to keep the administration from ever pulling the trigger.
At work here
is a variant of the principle Donald Kagan outlined in his brilliant
book, On
the Origins of War: "It is a paradoxical truth that
for a nation to lead a coalition into risky actions it needs to
show its willingness to act alone, while an unwillingness to act
without prior agreement encourages hesitation."
In a similar
way, there will never be a deal unless the U.S. shows it doesn't
much care whether there's a deal. And, in fact, it shouldn't matter
too much whether there is a new and improved ABM treaty.
The treaty
deserves to be treated the way fraternities at my alma mater treated
old furniture during the annual "Potlatch" rite: tossing
it out of a second-story window, smashing it to bits, and burning
it, while standing around laughing and drinking Milwaukee's Best.
Assuming this
is politically unrealistic, the best alternative would be for the
administration to unilaterally withdraw (lurching us definitively
into the post-ABM treaty world), and then hammer out a minimal follow-on
agreement with the Russians:
— providing
that our system won't be built with the Russian strategic force
as its object;
— keeping
open all technical avenues so that a system can change to deal with
emerging threats, and with those "countermeasures" the
missile-defense skeptics always talk about; and
— stipulating
that the agreement will lapse in ten years — both to avoid another
confrontation between a parchment relic and new strategic realities,
and in recognition that, by then, the U.S.-Russia relationship will
have moved beyond its MAD-phase.
To make it
all go down easier, President Bush can assure the world that Putin
is the warmest-hearted leader Russia has ever had, and also has
a soft voice and deep, mysterious eyes.
But let's hope
the administration is serious this time (discerning NRO readers
were aware of a
shift in tone last week). It may be that the Bushies just don't
have any choice, if they want to continue with a robust testing
program.
Liberals like
Sen. Biden have talked about the desirability of a "boost-phase"
defense, which would knock down a missile before it really got started.
But the ABM Treaty bans mobile interceptors, making boost-phase
defense — which would be based on ships — illegal.
Indeed, even
testing boost-phase capabilities is banned. The treaty says
that a system not explicitly designed for missile-defense can't
be tested for the purpose of missile defense (this rules out tests
with the AEGIS radar).
It's amusing
to watch liberals demand more and more testing before we withdraw
from the ABM Treaty, when the very testing they demand is foreclosed
by it. Thomas Friedman recently provided a sterling example of this
impulse at work, in a
column that was either willfully contradictory or simply ill-informed.
So there's
another reason to dispatch with the ABM treaty: It will save Friedman
and Co. from many unnecessary contortions over the coming months.
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