Bill Clinton, ‘New Isolationist’?
The U.S. Needs a Missile Defense That Defends its Allies, Too

(Washington, D.C.): As the worm turns! In the wake of the U.S. Senate’s crushing rejection
of
the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) last month, President Clinton and his supporters
unleashed a torrent of invective against Republicans in the Senate, and their party more
generally. The GOP, it was said, was in the hands of “new isolationists” who were reflexively
opposed to arms control and endangering the Nation’s standing around the world by appearing
indifferent to the will of the “international community.”

Now, having widely promoted this slanderous falsehood, the Administration finds itself
being
tarred with the same brush. The President’s new-found, and long-overdue, enthusiasm for
deploying a limited national missile defense is causing Mr. Clinton’s allies at home and abroad —
and most of our potential adversaries — to portray this initiative as isolationist, a mortal threat to
arms control and insensitive to the preferences of foreign governments.

These anxieties could only have been intensified by a speech the Under Secretary of Defense
for
Policy, Walter Slocombe, gave last Friday about America’s determination to defend itself against
missile attack — whether the Russians like it or not. Slocombe commendably declared that: “We
will not permit any other country to have a veto on actions that may be needed for the defense of
our nation.”

Allied Concerns

Even before this pronouncement, European leaders were expressing alarm. On Thursday,
French
President Jacques Chirac issued a quintessentially Gaullist denunciation of American foreign
policies and the isolationist tendencies that he contends are impelling them. According to the
November 7 New York Times, “French officials close to Mr. Chirac said that one of
the main
causes for concern…was the possible deployment by the United States of a limited missile
defense shield to protect against attack by ‘rogue states’ like Iraq or North Korea….’President
Chirac has told President Clinton that it could open a Pandora’s box that is in none of the allies’
interest.'”

The allies seem particularly upset that the Clinton plan for missile defense appears focused
on
the deployment of a limited anti-missile system that would protect only the United States. On
November 6, the Washington Post reported under a headline “Possible U.S. Missile
Shield
Alarms Europe,” that Germany’s Foreign Minister, Joschka Fisher of the Green Party, declared
during a visit to Washington last week that: “There is no doubt that this would lead to split
security standards within the NATO alliance. I see lots of problems developing in this respect,
which we must discuss calmly and reasonably with our American friends.”

The Post added that “Fischer said Germany’s commitment to be non-nuclear ‘was
always based
on our trust that the United States would protect our interests, that the United States, as the
leading nuclear power, would guarantee some sort of order.’ A drive by the United States to
build its own missile defense, he said, would erode that confidence by effectively putting
European cities at greater risk of nuclear missile attack than those in America.” (Wouldn’t that
be a legacy for Bill Clinton — converting the Greens into advocates of a “German bomb”!)

In point of fact, like the Senate vote to defeat the CTBT, a U.S. deployment of missile
defenses
should not be construed as a national retreat to “Fortress America.” Thoughtful Democrats and
Republicans alike understand that — in a world increasingly awash with ballistic missile threats —
effective anti-missile systems are becoming an essential ingredient to the United States’
engagement internationally, as well as its security at home.

What to Do Now

Assuming President Clinton is not, as Foreign Minister Fischer suggested last week, just
going
through the motions on missile defense “based on political calculations in the upcoming
presidential elections,” it behooves him to consider a alternative approach, one that both meets
American needs and addresses legitimate allied concerns about being left uniquely vulnerable to
ballistic missile attack.

Instead of making the initial “national” anti-missile deployment one involving the
construction
of a fixed, ground-based system in Alaska — a deployment that will not be able to provide
complete protection for all 50 states, let alone provide any anti-missile defense for U.S. forces
and allies overseas ¹ — Mr. Clinton should authorize the
Navy’s Aegis fleet air defense system to
be modified so as to make it an effective, world-wide ballistic missile-killer.

As President Clinton’s own Pentagon has begun to acknowledge publicly, by taking
advantage of
the roughly $50 billion investment already made in relevant naval infrastructure, the United
States could acquire a missile defense that is capable of defeating a larger number of incoming
missiles than the present plan, doing it faster and at a fraction of the cost. If done in
collaboration with allied navies — not only the Japanese, who have four of their own Aegis ships,
but the NATO allies, South Korea, Taiwan and Israel, as well — understandable concerns about
leaving their countries undefended could be rapidly dispelled.

The Bottom Line

Of course, such an approach will not end the opposition now being expressed by the
Russians,
Chinese, North Koreans and others who find America’s vulnerability to ballistic missile threats
convenient. (In fact, North Korea’s growing ability to exploit that vulnerability has caused the
United States to become the largest provider of foreign aid to the despotic regime in Pyongyang.)
Neither will it allay the outcry from those at home and abroad who favor American disarmament
and regard the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (which prohibited a territorial anti-missile
defense of the United States) as sacred writ, or in Mr. Clinton’s words, as the “cornerstone of
strategic stability.” ²

For the millions of Americans who believe the United States must be defended against the
scourge of missile attack, if the Clinton Administration is now serious about defending America,
if it really will not “permit any other nation to have a veto on actions that may be needed for the
defense of our nation” and if it pursues missile defenses in a way that enhances alliance cohesion
— rather than divides the U.S. from its allies — the response will be very positive. More to the
point, if our countrymen do not get such leadership from the Clinton-Gore team, they are certain
to hire someone who will follow such a sensible, internationalist course in January 2001.

¹ The principal reason for choosing such a system appears to be the
Administration’s belief that
it would involve the smallest departure from the ABM Treaty and, therefore, would be the most
readily acceptable to the Russians. To date, however, the Russians seem no more interested in
legitimating this approach to a U.S. missile defense than any other.

²The Russians are skillfully exploiting the Europeans’ anxieties over
what is perceived to be the
Clinton Administration’s “America First” approach to defending the United States so as to
exacerbate the rift between the U.S. and its allies. Every member of the European Union either
voted with Moscow or abstained in a UN committee’s vote last Friday on a resolution introduced
by Russia calling on the United States to continue to adhere to the ABM Treaty.