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 resident
Bush appeared to be stiffed by Vladimir Putin at the Crawford summit
a few weeks ago.
Bush gave and
gave and gave — offensive-missile reductions, help getting
into the WTO, relief from Jackson-Vanik — and got nothing from
Putin except for a big nyet on the ABM Treaty.
Bush wanted
to bend the treaty merely to give the U.S. flexibility to test all
options necessary to eventually create a layered — land-, sea-,
air-, and maybe space-based — defense for the U.S. Putin smiled,
told cute jokes for the Crawford schoolchildren, and remained utterly
unbendable.
As Strobe Talbott
puts it in Bradley Graham's new book on missile defense, Hit
to Kill, "Unlike most Russians who say no when they mean
yes, Putin says yes when he means no."
Putin's intransigence
left Bush, as we wrote in the last NR,
no choice but to exercise the U.S.'s right to give six months' notice
prior to withdrawing from the treaty, which is a triumph of desiccated
1970s thinking over reality and common sense.
The treaty
wouldn't just prevent deployment of a system, but even the testing
of new technology.
For instance,
the administration recently had to scrap plans for a missile-defense
test that included the AEGIS system, which could provide a "boost-phase"
defense. Since AEGIS wasn't originally designed for long-range missile
defense, the ABM treaty makes testing it in such a capacity strictly
off-limits.
After all the
moaning about how the treaty is the foundation of world security,
we'll now hear the Russians change their tune. They will come up
with a flurry of revisions of the treaty or ideas for replacing
it, in an attempt to limit as much as possible the U.S. ability
to build a defense in the new environment.
The U.S. response
should be that we are now such good friends that there is no need
to write a new treaty keeping either of us from defending ourselves
against missile threats. The U.S. will just do what we do with other
friends, like the British and French: give periodic updates of progress,
perhaps allow one-time inspections of interceptors, give advance
notice of testing, etc.
But that will
be wrangling for another day. For now, conservatives can marvel
at Bush's resolve: He said he would give notice for withdrawal from
the treaty if it got in the way, and now he has done it. It must
be a strange experience for Putin — dealing with a leader who
means "yes" when he says "yes," and "no"
when he says "no."
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