Will, Krauthammer Make Case For Missile Defense

(Washington, D.C.): Two of the Nation’s premier syndicated columnists have made signal
contributions in recent days to the national security debate with essays underscoring the need for
effective, near-term missile defenses. In his column appearing in Sunday’s Washington
Post,
George F. Will assailed the Clinton-Gore Administration for its efforts to
breathe new life into
the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and urged instead the prompt U.S. deployment of
sea-based missile defenses. Similar themes featured prominently in two extraordinary essays by
Charles Krauthammer, the first of which ran in last Friday’s Washington
Post, the second
appearing in this week’s edition of Time Magazine. Taken together, these analyses
signal that
missile defense has come of age as a political and strategic issue. If so, Election 2000 should
translate into a mandate for deployment and an end to artificial, obsolete and increasingly
reckless arms control obstacles to a defended America.

Washington Post, 11 June 2000

Missile Defense Charade

By George F. Will

Al Gore may be assuming that the country’s complacency about peace in our (and our
children’s
and grandchildren’s) time, and the administration’s charade concerning defense against ballistic
missiles, will prevent this from becoming an important campaign issue. To understand why it
should be a central issue, consider two hypotheticals:

After Congress approves normalized trade relations with China, Beijing moves militarily
against
Taiwan. China invokes the possibility of a nuclear response if the United States interferes, and
the U.S. president, governing a nation incapable of defending itself from even a single ballistic
missile, is militarily paralyzed.

In 2005 Saddam Hussein reinvades Kuwait, and announces that he has nuclear warheads on
six
ICBMs capable of striking European capitals. Without being able to offer our European allies
defenses against ballistic missiles, the U.S. president probably hesitates to act against Iraq. If he
does not hesitate, Congress probably does. And if both want to act, they probably must do so
without European allies.

By 2005 the United States could deploy at sea, near Iraq or North Korea, fast interceptors
capable of striking an ICBM when doing so is relatively easy–in the boost phase, when the
ICBM is hot, hence easy to target, and slow, hence easy to hit. But the Anti-Ballistic Missile
treaty, signed in 1972 with an entity now deceased (the Soviet Union), prohibits sea-based
systems with fast interceptors.

The treaty is larded with ambiguities useful to Russia, which wants to stop U.S. defenses (in
order to inhibit America’s global power; see the hypotheticals above), and useful to the
Clinton-Gore administration, which wants to be stopped from deploying an effective missile
defense. The
treaty permits sea-based “theater” defenses but not “strategic” defenses. A protocol the Clinton
administration accepted from Russia in 1997, but never submitted to the Senate for approval,
would severely limit the speed of interceptors.

Furthermore, sea-based systems would be best if served by space-based sensors that could
track
the early path of missiles. (When Iraq launched Scud missiles during the gulf war, satellites
could detect bright lights but could not provide accurate tracking information necessary for
missile interceptors.) However, the ABM treaty prohibits space-based defenses.

Our European allies worry that U.S. missile defenses that protect only America would
encourage
a “fortress America” disengagement from Europe. This worry is exacerbated by President
Clinton’s proposal for a minimalist system (100 interceptors, with one vulnerable radar, in
Alaska) that would provide our allies no defense.

It would provide precious little to the United States. But then, Clinton does not believe in
missile
defense (hence his eight years of dilatory behavior). And the Alaska gambit would satisfy his
highest priority, which is to assuage, with minimal action, the public’s fear of defenselessness,
and to do so in a way that requires minimal modification of the treaty.

Russian officials must be delighted, if mystified, that we are eager to be held hostage by
Russia
because of our reverence for the ABM treaty. That treaty should, by right, be without force
unless resubmitted to the Senate: Under the law properly construed, Russia is not the successor
state to the Soviet Union. But Clinton is, to say no more, not a stickler for legality, and he knows
the Senate would reject the treaty were it resubmitted.

It is surreal that the Clinton-Gore policy is to continue treating Russia as a nation with which
the
United States must multiply bilateral agreements designed to maintain a “strategic balance.” At
the beginning of the 20th century the Ottoman Empire was called “the sick man of Europe.”
Today that title belongs to Russia, which is gripped by a public health crisis without precedent in
an industrialized nation with mass education. As its population shrinks and its economy
contracts, it is, increasingly, a Third World country that cannot afford even to maintain the First
World nuclear arsenal that is the sole basis of its claim to great power status.

The dialectic, now several millennia old, whereby offensive and defensive capabilities
alternate
in dominating military affairs, did not end with the development of ballistic missiles. The
offensive threat they pose will produce increasingly sophisticated defenses. The fundamental
question, says Paul Wolfowitz, undersecretary of defense under President Bush, is whether
misplaced American reverence for the ABM treaty will enable Russia to restrict America to only
those defenses permitted under a minimally modified ABM treaty.

That, says Wolfowitz, would mean trying to develop defenses “with one hand tied behind our
back and four fingers of the other hand tied together.” Which is, essentially, the position of the
Clinton-Gore administration.

Time, 12 June 2000

The End of Arms Control

By Charles Krauthammer

There have been two revolutions in nuclear theology since the doctrine of Mutual Assured
Destruction became dominant four decades ago. The first came in 1983. President Reagan
proposed that defensive weapons take precedence over offensive weapons. The second happened
last week. It came from George W. Bush and was almost universally misunderstood. Bush was
said to have proposed the primacy of defensive weapons over offensive weapons. That is old
news. In fact, he did something far more important: he proposed the end of arms control.

This seems strange to us. For more than a generation we have been living in a world in which
arms control is the norm. But for all of history before that, it was not: if you needed a weapon to
defend yourself and had the technology to build it, you did not go to your enemy to get his
agreement to let you do so.

When the world was dominated by two bitterly antagonistic superpowers, arms control made
sense. Barely. The world was made marginally safer by the U.S. and the Soviet Union having a
fairly good idea of, and a fairly good lid on, the nuclear weapons in each other’s hands.

For the U.S. it was important because of a rather arcane doctrine called extended deterrence:
we
pledged to defend Western Europe not by matching the huge Warsaw Pact tank forces (which
would have been outrageously costly) but by threatening nuclear retaliation against any
conventional invasion.

Not a very credible threat to begin with. And as the Soviets overcame the American nuclear
monopoly, it became less credible by the year. We needed arms control to ensure that there
would be enough American nuclear firepower (relative to Moscow’s) to make our security
guarantee to Europe at least plausible.

As I said, arcane. But then again, the whole arms race with the Soviets had a distinctly
academic,
almost unworldly quality. It was really a form of bean counting. Like money to billionaires, it
had little intrinsic meaning: it was just a way of keeping score.

Perhaps most important, arms control gave the Soviets and us something to talk about at a
time
when there was very little else to talk about. We were fighting over every inch of the globe, from
Berlin to Saigon. So, every few years, we would trade beans in Geneva, shake hands for the
cameras and thus reassure the world that we were not going to blow it up.

But now? That late-20th century world of superpowers and bipolarity and arms control is
dead.
There is no Warsaw Pact. There is no Soviet Union. What is the logic of tailoring our weapons
development against various threats around the world to suit the wishes of a
country–Russia–that is no longer either an enemy or a superpower?

Yet that is exactly what President Clinton has been intent on doing in Moscow this week. He
is
deeply enmeshed in arms-control negotiations 1) to revise the treaty that radically restricts
America’s ability to defend itself from missile attack (the ABM treaty) and 2) to set new
numbers for American and Russian offensive missiles (a START III treaty).

The parts of this prospective deal that are not anachronistic are, in fact, detrimental to
American
security. One of the reasons the development of an effective missile defense has been so slow
and costly is that the ABM treaty prevents us from testing the most promising technologies, such
as sea-based and space-based weapons. Even today, we cannot test a high-speed interceptor
against any incoming missile traveling faster than 5 km per SEC. because the Russians are afraid
it might be effective against their ICBMs. This is quite crazy. It means that because of a cold war
relic, the U.S. has to forgo building the most effective defense it can against nuclear attack by a
rogue state such as North Korea.

But Bush’s idea is significant because it goes beyond questioning why we should be tailoring
our
defensive weapons to Russian wishes. He asks, Why should we be tailoring offensive
weapons–indeed, any American military needs–to Russian wishes?

He proposes to reduce the American nuclear arsenal unilaterally. The Clinton idea–the idea
that
has dominated American thinking for a generation–is to hang on to superfluous nukes as
bargaining chips to get the Russians to reduce theirs.

Why? Let the Soviets keep, indeed build what they want. If they want to bankrupt
themselves
building an arsenal they will never use–and that lacks even the psychologically intimidating
effects it had during the cold war–let them.

We don’t need new agreements; we only need new thinking. If we want to cut our nuclear
arsenal, why wait on the Russians? If we want to build a defensive shield, why ask the Russians?
The new idea–extraordinarily simple and extraordinarily obvious–is that we build to order. Our
order.

Read my lips. No new treaties.

Washington Post, 9 June 2000

Missile Defense Destiny

By Charles Krauthammer

As President Clinton sends envoys to the Middle East in desperate search of a legacy, he
seems
unaware that his lasting foreign policy legacy is already established. He established it last week
in Moscow, despite himself.

The summit that the world rated as inconclusive in fact sealed Clinton’s legacy as the
president
who made an American missile defense a reality. Ronald Reagan was father of the idea. But
Clinton in Moscow–with the invaluable and unwitting assistance of Vladimir Putin–became its
midwife. For the first time in American history, a missile defense is now inevitable.

As in the case of Clinton’s great domestic legacy–the abolition of welfare–the initiation of
an
American anti-ballistic missile system is not exactly what Clinton intended to do as president.
Nor is it the way he would prefer to be remembered.

Both acts were undertaken with little conviction and much political calculation. Clinton
signed
welfare reform in 1996 on the election-year advice of Dick Morris and against the deeply held
convictions of his liberal supporters (such as Peter Edelman, who then resigned from the
administration).

Clinton has now expressed support for a limited ABM system to give his anointed heir, Al
Gore,
the political cover he needs to fend off traditional election charges of Democrats being soft on
defense.

True, the Clinton idea of a few dozen missiles in Alaska to shoot down North Korean nukes
is
static, inflexible, inadequate and far too expensive–exactly the kind of system lifelong opponents
of ABM would design. Nonetheless, Clinton went to Moscow having to make a case for it. And
once you make the case for it, you have made the case for missile defense in general. And with
that, a generation-long Democratic taboo came to an end.

And the Clinton trip broke the taboo on an international scale. Here was a Democratic
president–leader of the party that for 17 years has religiously opposed any missile defense, the
very notion
of missile defense–making the case for it across Europe.

Putin opposed the Clinton proposal, of course, and they came to no agreements on nuclear
weapons. But the very failure of the summit on this issue put missile defense on every front page
in the world and raised its stature immensely, far more than its proponents could ever have done.

Putin then went one better and undermined his own anti-ABM position by offering a
counterproposal in Italy the very next day after meeting Clinton: Russia would join in building a
different kind of ABM system (it would shoot down rockets on the way up; the American system
would shoot them on the way down) that would provide “a 100 percent guarantee of the security
of every European country.”

Putin was trying to outflank the United States by portraying it as selfish, interested only in
protecting itself, while Russia would magnanimously extend a shield over all of Europe. But that
was very shortsighted. By proposing any kind of defensive system, Putin was acknowledging the
threat of ballistic missile attack and the need for a defense. He thus removed the central prop of
his government’s position that missile defenses threaten international stability.

True, the official communique issued by Clinton and Putin repeated the usual nonsense that
the
1972 ABM treaty — a treaty that its own creator, Henry Kissinger, has declared hopelessly
obsolete — constitutes “the cornerstone of strategic stability.”

And true, top Clinton advisers still believe it. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, the
guiding force behind these arms control negotiations, said just a week before the summit that
“our intention is to keep the ABM treaty very much part of the foundation of the international
arms control. We don’t want to see the ABM treaty violated. We don’t want to see it weakened.
We want to see it strengthened.”

I am sure he wants to. But the game is up. The administration cannot escape the reality it
created:
Once you have gone around the world saying that America must defend itself, you can hardly
call for strengthening the treaty that prevents us from doing exactly that.

On missile defense, Clinton in Moscow was Nixon in China. To be sure, Nixon made the
opening to China wholeheartedly. Clinton’s opening on missile defense is half-hearted, grudging
and politically expedient.

But history does not remember intent. History remembers outcome. And the outcome of the
Moscow summit is that a missile defense for the United States is now a fact. The only question is
what kind and how fast.