START Up May Be a START Down

by Herbert I. London
April 19, 2010 at 4:30 am

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/1157/start-up-may-be-a-start-down

by Herbert London

The Utopian idea in the current administration of “the zero option,” of eliminating nuclear weapons, of a globe where lions and lambs live in harmony, is alive and well and evident in the new START treaty.

It would be wonderful, of course, if we had a world without nuclear weapons, but the genie is out of the bottle and weapons of mass destruction offer influence, prestige and power even for nations that cannot adequately feed their people.

While the START treaty reduces the delivery capacity of Russian and the U.S. missiles, planes and submarines by using arcane accounting methods, the real issue is that Russia reserves the right to withdraw from the treaty if it deems missile defense deployment in Eastern Europe threatening.

The question is: Why should the United States Senate ratify a “conditional” arrangement? If the treaty is ratified, the United States is committing itself to a one-sided, unilateral compliance. Russia can, on its own, determine whether the treaty remains in effect - a matter that may violate national security interests.

Further, in an effort to convince other nuclear powers to embrace our impulse to disarm, the president has circumscribed “no first-use policy” to adversaries employing nuclear weapons, and has announced that the U.S. will not develop a new generation of nuclear weapons. This heartfelt gesture must have resonated appropriately with Kim Jung Il and Ahmadinejad. It would take a leap of illogical proportions to assume that if the U.S. does not modernize, China, Iran, North Korea and Pakistan will follow suit.

This treaty also means that that President Obama will not upgrade U.S. missile defenses. If he were to do so, the Russians might pull out of the treaty.

The bargaining-chip former President Reagan had in his negotiations with the Soviet Union was Star Wars, or missile defense. The Obama team is willing to give it away and receive nothing in return. The only way to describe this negotiating strategy is political ambition wrapped in naiveté.

The president appears to be operating from what he would like the world to be, not what the world is. Unfortunately the globe is an unwieldy place where national interests invariably trump international equilibrium. There is no way to eliminate nuclear weapons so long as rogue nations cheat, the non-proliferation treaty is ignored without penalty, and nuclear weapons offer nations political clout. Who would care about a backward nation like North Korea if it did not possess nuclear weapons?

The fear for those of us who believe in “peace through strength” is that this START agreement is merely the beginning of a unilateral disarmament campaign, following Obama’s life-long adolescent vision for a world without military toxin in the air. It is already rumored that the president will attempt to join the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and limit defense deployment in space. What can allies like Taiwan, Japan, and Canada, for example, be thinking when the U.S. nuclear umbrella that affords deterrence is now sievelike with holes?

The voluntary abandonment of U.S. superiority in space technology and nuclear weapons could haunt our people and our allies. It is as if the U.S. is suffering from leadership-fatigue and wishes to halt the course of history. Historical forces, however, march to their own drumbeat. What we may want - whatever utopia we may envision - is often undermined by the constraints of reality. President Obama dies not seem to have learned this lesson. We can only hope that our enemies are not looking and listening too closely.

There is a Russian tale that takes place in a zoo; a lion and a lamb reside together in the same cage. At one point, an astonished sightseer asks the zookeeper how this can be. “Oh,” says the zookeeper, “it isn’t difficult: we put a new lamb in the cage each morning.” If only President Obama knew this.

Related Topics:  Herbert I. London receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free gatestone institute mailing list