Beware a Clinton Arms Deal

By Charles Krauthammer

The Washington Post, 21 April 2000

While the country is fighting over a 6-year-old boy in Florida, the big geopolitical news is
buried
on Page 20. President Clinton has quietly added Russia to a planned European trip. On June 4, he
will go to Moscow to meet with Vladimir Putin. This is no mere “how do you do.” Frantic
negotiations are going on for an immense arms control agreement–the so-called Grand
Compromise–in time for Clinton to leave a legacy.

Why is this big news? Because the deal Clinton is angling for would both decimate our
offensive
nuclear deterrent and cripple any future president’s ability to build an effective missile defense. It
promises to be the worst arms control agreement in American history.

The story is this. The Russians, going back to Gorbachev’s days, don’t want us to build a
missile
defense. They don’t have the technology to build one. We do. Why do we care what Russia
thinks? Russia’s hold on us is the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, which essentially
prohibits building defensive weapons. But the ABM treaty was signed in 1972 with the now
defunct Soviet Union. Quite arguably, it is legally dead. Inarguably, it is logically absurd.

It was intended to prevent an arms race in a radically bipolar world. The world is not bipolar
today. And there is no arms race. Yet the treaty prevents the United States from building
adequate defenses against the likes of Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

For 20 years, Democrats resisted the idea of building a missile defense. They ridiculed it as
Reagan’s folly. But the left’s almost theological resistance to defending America from missile
attack has begun to weaken. Why, even the New York Times now admits that the ABM treaty
“was premised on a clash between the two superpowers. The likely emergence of smaller,
less-predictable nuclear-armed nations over the next few years creates a different equation.”

But what to build? Clinton is considering a single plan: a battery of fixed, land-based ABMs
in
Alaska.

It is the worst possible choice. Fixed missiles are expensive, because the whole infrastructure
has
to be built from scratch, and limited, because from Alaska there are parts of the United States
they could not defend.

A far more effective and versatile way to go is by sea, placing ABMs on Aegis cruisers. We
already have the cruisers. No need for huge infrastructure expenses. The ships are movable and
thus less subject to preemptive attack. Best of all, they can be sent to defend any vulnerable part
of America or, for that matter, the world (e.g., Taiwan, Israel, South Korea, Japan).

Why Alaska? Alaska is the choice of people still deeply skeptical about missile defenses, still
grudging about validating Reagan’s idea. The administration figures that Alaska is just enough to
get the Democrats off the hook on the issue of defending America–and that the Russians will see
an Alaska defense as so weak that they might agree to allow it by mildly amending the ABM
treaty.

In return for those mild amendments, Clinton is preparing to forfeit to Putin the store. He
would:

(1) Sign a START III treaty that would radically cut our nuclear weapons force–to the point
where we lose much of the redundancy that today makes it invulnerable. Why? To get
corresponding Russian cuts? The Russians aren’t building new missiles anyway. They don’t have
the money. With or without these treaties, they are not going to squander their scarce military
resources on overkill.

(2) Strengthen the obsolete ABM treaty to prevent precisely the kind of layered defense we
need,
such as the Aegis option, and, in the future, space-based defenses to shoot down missiles as they
leave the launch pad. As Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) explained in The Post, Clinton’s plan is to
“get the limited system locked down in a deal with Putin” in order to prevent Republicans from
pushing forward with a broader, full-scale national missile defense.

Such is the Grand Compromise. We get the costly, limited Alaska plan. We cut our nuclear
deterrent to the bone. And we get restrictions on building defenses that will make it impossible in
the future to adequately defend America or its allies.

Why, then, are we doing it? Because Clinton gets a lavish signing ceremony in Moscow and
a
run at a Nobel. “The Clinton administration does not want to be the first in several decades not to
have signed a significant arms control agreement with Moscow,” says former diplomat and
Clinton administration official Thomas Graham Jr.

In other words, arms control for the sake of arms control. It has come to that.