On the Right

We are approaching the days (weeks? months?) when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will hear the arguments for confirming the treaty arranged by Reagan-Shultz to remove intermediate nuclear weapons from Europe. The Panama Canal Treaty of 1979 kept the Senate committee listening to testimony for 16 weeks. Proponents of the treaty insisted that vital interests of the United States would not be jeopardized, rather they would be enhanced by the proposed treaty. A decade having gone by without a crisis in which the new arrangements in Panama have proved damaging, it is fair to say that at least in the short term the treaty was sound. Itisbyno means confidently said that a decade from now the vital interests of the United States will not have been affected by the proposed INF treaty.

The main trouble is that the damage is really done, and it makes little difference how the Senate acts. Dr. Henry Kissinger, for example, plans to testify. And he will give his reasons (as he has done eloquently in the current issue of Newsweek) why he thinks the treaty is not merely bad, but profoundly bad. But we cannot talk in the subjunctive mood about the damage the treaty would do if ratified.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

We are approaching the days (weeks? months?) when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will hear the arguments for confirming the treaty arranged by Reagan-Shultz to remove intermediate nuclear weapons from Europe. The Panama Canal Treaty of 1979 kept the Senate committee listening to testimony for 16 weeks. Proponents of the treaty insisted that vital interests of the United States would not be jeopardized, rather they would be enhanced by the proposed treaty. A decade having gone by without a crisis in which the new arrangements in Panama have proved damaging, it is fair to say that at least in the short term the treaty was sound. Itisbyno means confidently said that a decade from now the vital interests of the United States will not have been affected by the proposed INF treaty.

The main trouble is that the damage is really done, and it makes little difference how the Senate acts. Dr. Henry Kissinger, for example, plans to testify. And he will give his reasons (as he has done eloquently in the current issue of Newsweek) why he thinks the treaty is not merely bad, but profoundly bad. But we cannot talk in the subjunctive mood about the damage the treaty would do if ratified.