ADMINISTRATION WANTS TO BLOW CFE TREATY PAST SENATE: BUM’S RUSH ONLY HOPE TO SAVE OUTDATED, FLAWED ACCORD

(Washington, D.C.): The Bush
Administration — evidently panicked by
the prospect that its foreign policy
triumphs built upon Mikhail Gorbachev’s
house of cards will prove as
insubstantial as its domestic political
record — is mounting a full court press
on the Senate to rubber stamp the
Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE)
Treaty signed with much fanfare one year
ago today. The Foreign Relations
Committee is expected to play its part in
this bum’s rush by approving a toothless
resolution of ratification this morning.

The White House strategy is
transparent: The President’s men hope to
use the looming congressional recess as a
device to prevent significant debate. By
minimizing the opportunity for critical
public deliberations, they believe the
accord’s ratification can be secured
before events in the unraveling
Soviet Union render CFE even more
irrelevant or more inadequate than
it already is at present.

This urgency derives from the
Administration’s apparent recognition —
at long last — that, by the time the
Senate is due to reconvene in January
1992 (if not today), there will almost
certainly not be an entity remotely
resembling that which signed the Treaty
on behalf of the former Soviet empire.
Inevitably, the consequences will be
far-reaching in terms of the commitments,
requirements, responsibilities and costs
flowing from this accord. Put simply, the
Bush Administration recognizes that it is
now or never for the Conventional Forces
in Europe agreement.

The Center for Security Policy
believes that, given that
choice, the United States
would be better off choosing never
to ratify
the CFE Treaty. The following
are among the reasons for adopting such a
course of action:

• The Treaty has been
  overtaken by events, its
  principal purpose — a dramatic
  reduction in the size of Soviet
  forces stationed in Eastern
  Europe having been accomplished
  not by the terms of this
  agreement but by the collapse of
  Moscow’s hegemony there and the
  demise of the Warsaw Pact.
• The CFE agreement accords
  the discredited Soviet center a
  presence and rights
  within the
  independence-bound republics of
  the former Soviet Union (e.g.,
  the Ukraine) and the newly
  sovereign Baltic States whose
  perpetuation is neither in the
  interest of the latter entities
  nor of the West.
• In the weeks before the CFE
  Treaty was signed, Moscow
  center perpetrated one
  of the most massive
  circumventions of the terms of an
  arms control agreement
  on record. It moved over
  60,000 pieces of military
  equipment the West had expected
  would be destroyed to a zone not
  covered by the Treaty east of the
  Ural mountains. Under present
  circumstances, the Soviet excuse
  that such equipment would be used
  only for “internal”
  purposes is scarcely more
  appetizing than the persistent
  possibility that it might at some
  point once again be used to
  threaten Central and Western
  Europe.
• The Soviet data upon
  which the Treaty’s reduction
  requirements and schedule are
  based have been found to
  be significantly
  understated. What is
  more, higher Western estimates
  are almost certainly too low. It
  is unconscionable that the Senate
  — in the face of such manifest
  Soviet bad faith — would content
  itself with attaching the
  platitudinous statement to the
  resolution of ratification that
  if more of Moscow center’s
  weaponry is uncovered
  “additional reductions of
  equipment” should be made.
• A number of the
  verification arrangements remain
  to be resolved; worse
  yet, they will require a
  consensus among the many parties
  in order to come into effect.
  When combined with the
  inadequacies of those
  arrangements that have been
  agreed, it is clear that CFE is
  and will likely remain a
  substantially less than
  verifiable arms control document.
• In this sense (among others), the
  CFE Treaty is not — as some in
  the Administration have
  claimed — a “flexible”
  document which can be
  safely ratified despite the
  massive changes in underlying
  conditions. It is, rather, a
  ponderously unwieldy and
  incredibly legalistic document;
  its implementation is sure to be
  uneven and its amendment
  problematic.

In short, the United States
Senate would be well advised to let the
dust settle on events in the former
Soviet Union over the next two months, rather
than pretend they do not matter and
proceed to enshrine a document drafted by
a party and under circumstances that
effectively no longer exist. At the very
least, deferral to next year will allow
an opportunity to establish more clearly
just who will be responsible for
implementing the accord in place of the
Warsaw Pact.

If the successors to Gorbachev’s
central authorities prove to be more
tractable individual republics, their
willingness to engage in genuine,
transparent and even unilateral
disarmament arrangements will have the
same effect as the bilateral
disengagement agreements Moscow had to
sign with its erstwhile East European
allies, namely to make CFE ridiculously
moot. If, on the other hand, the
successor regime tums out to be a
reconstituted and more aggressive
totalitarian leadership, the West would
be well advised not to be bound by an
agreement already being violated and
circumvented by the Soviet side and sure
to become more so.

Suspending action on CFE for the time
being would also afford the United States
an opportunity to undertake a more
fundamental rethinking of the role and
utility of traditional arms control
approaches. This rethinking should lead
to adoption of a policy of systemic
arms control — one that
utilizes Western economic and financial
leverage to put the Soviet
military-industrial complex and the
system that created it out of
business. This would appear
to be a far more effective means of
permanently reducing the potential threat
posed by such entities, rather than
continued pursuit of agreements like CFE
with Moscow center which have the effect
— at best of legitimating and preserving
a somewhat modulated threat.