As the Obama administration becomes increasingly desperate to get its New START Treaty ratified, it has enlisted the help of assorted people thought to be influential with a handful of Republican Senators who will determine whether this accord is rammed through their chamber during the impending lame-duck session.
President Obama has invoked George Schultz and even Ronald Reagan in his quest to rid the world of nuclear weapons – a deeply problematic and in any event unachievable goal he insists New START will advance. The former’s enthusiasm for this denuclearization enterprise seems increasingly disconnected from reality; the latter, sadly, cannot speak for himself.
Obama’s team has also trotted out a succession of former and current civilian and military endorsers whose authority is meant to encourage members of the Senate not to look too closely at the treaty’s myriad, serious defects. The pitch seems to be: Take their word for it, Senator! Whatever you do, don’t do your own due-diligence – or you might find out that most of these eminences haven’t done theirs.
But perhaps the most curious call for the Senate to abandon past precedent and take up a major arms control accord in a lame-duck session – which, by its nature, precludes the sort of serious deliberation and debate such a pact demands – came last Wednesday from Robert Kagan in the op.ed. page of the Washington Post. Kagan is a member of a distinguished family of national security academics and analysts and is associated with such influential right-of-center outfits as the Weekly Standard and the Foreign Policy Initiative.
Under the headline “Why Republicans Should Pass New START Treaty,” the Post columnist argued that the agreement was such a “nothingburger,” so “minor a treaty” that the risks associated with not approving it far exceed whatever downsides there might be to its ratification.
With friends like Robert Kagan, New START’s supporters may not need enemies. His thesis is, to say the least, off-message for an administration that is anxious to persuade undecided Republicans that the treaty will make an enormous contribution to U.S. security.
Kagan also argues that the GOP better agree to ratification so it can properly blame Obama for the coming failure of his vaunted “reset” of Russo-American relations, a prospect that actually makes even less desirable the sorts of unverifiable cuts in our nuclear forces required by this treaty. Kagan effectively, and cynically, is arguing that if Senate Republicans go along with rubber-stamping the New START accord, Team Obama won’t be able to claim that they were responsible for the unfriendly things Vladimir Putin will do in the future. Of course, this ignores those he has been engaged in for years, from Iran to Venezuela.
Fortunately, fourteen men who previously served in the United States Senate have just provided what amounts to a thoughtful – and hopefully decisive – counterpoint to the Kagan recommendation that what has been dubbed “the world’s greatest deliberative body” allow this “nothingburger” of a treaty to blow through to ratification without serious deliberation or debate.
In an open letter to former colleagues Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, these Senators observed: “Never before in the history of the U.S. Senate has the ratification of a strategic arms treaty been considered in a lame-duck session. This precedent should be followed with respect to New START, as well.”
The signers went on to express the view that New START, far from an insignificant accord, “has serious problems” with “far-reaching implications.” Accordingly, they argued:
“…It would be wholly inappropriate for a Senate made up of many members whose replacements have just been elected to deny the latter the opportunity to advise and consent to an accord that will be implemented on their watch. It is hard to imagine, moreover, that the three Senators who are expected to be seated in time for the lame-duck session will be in a position to make informed decisions about this treaty. That is especially the case since, in such circumstances, they would be denied the opportunity to participate in or closely study the hearings on the treaty held to date, let alone the more comprehensive and balanced reviews that are in order but have yet to be conducted.”
Lest these arguments prove persuasive to GOP Senators, President Obama is now blatantly trying to buy them off. Under the direction of Vice President Joe Biden, himself a former Senator and chairman of the chamber’s Foreign Relations Committee, the administration has been promising tens of billions of dollars to upgrade parts of the obsolete nuclear weapons complex, some of which actually date to the Manhattan Project.
Welcome and long-overdue as these commitments are, they ring utterly hollow for several reasons: First, much of these funds will only be made available in the “out-years” – well beyond this president’s first term, and in some cases after a second one (should that be in the cards). Consider these promises to be the equivalent of playing with Monopoly money.
Second, this President couldn’t be more clear that he wants to “rid the world of nuclear weapons.” Obama’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) unveiled earlier this year didn’t provide for such upgrades in the weapons complex because he wants to take the United States – and, oh yes, the rest of the planet – out of the nuclear weapons business. This reality does not exactly inspire confidence in Team Obama’s pledges.
And third, the administration has begun putting the word out that its willingness to put money towards fixing up the nuclear weapons complex will disappear unless the Senate ratifies New START during the lame duck session. An unnamed “senior administration official” put it this way in the Financial Times on November 11: “There is a risk that not moving ahead [in the Senate now] could shatter the fragile consensus on modernizing the nuclear complex. New START puts nuclear modernization in the right context for those who worry how it could send the wrong signal to the world and undermine our non-proliferation efforts.”
In other words, the administration really does not see the need to upgrade the complex since it wants to shut it down (see above). The only way Team Obama will take steps to actually keep it a going concern – to say nothing of modernizing the arsenal itself (not just the facilities that are needed to maintain our deterrent) – is if the Congress forces it to do so. That means deferring action on New START until its defects are thoroughly understood and alleviated. And the chances of all that happening are vastly higher after January, when the new Senate is seated, than if yesterday’s Senate accepts this transparent bait-and-switch now.
Memo to Republican Senators: To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, now is no time to go wobbly on New START, a seriously defective treaty that should not be blown through the Senate – either on the basis of underestimations of its implications or because of some Faustian deal, however well-intentioned on the part of some Senators it might be, made with an utterly unreliable Obama administration.
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