Clinton’s Wheeling-and-Dealing at Helsinki Jeopardizes National Security and National Interests

(Washington, D.C.): You have to hand
it to the Clinton team. Who else would be
able to conduct a two-day summit meeting
with the Russian leadership in which the
United States made momentous concessions
on virtually every front — and still
have the conventional wisdom be that it
was President Yeltsin whose clock got
cleaned?

Partly this remarkable achievement is
a credit to the Clinton Administration’s
cynical manipulation of the press. The
summit’s concluding session and the
accompanying blizzard of joint statements
and fact sheets were timed to occur on
Friday afternoon. Clinton and Company
have raised this practice to an art form,
allowing them to dispense bad news at the
one point in the week when the
Administration can be virtually
guaranteed two days to put its
unchallenged spin on events. By Monday
morning, sufficient disinformation is in
the system to minimize the danger that
the facts will ever catch up.

Mostly, though, the effectiveness of
Mr. Clinton’s sleight-of-hand is due to
the paucity of serious analysis — or
even attention — given these days to his
conduct of American security policy. In
the absence of such scrutiny, the
initiatives agreed at the Helsinki summit
promise to cost the United States dearly
in terms of its long-term security
interests, its ability to influence
international events and its taxpayers’
resources.

The Tab Coming Due

For example, the United States has
agreed to pay through the nose for
Russian “acquiescence” to the
inevitable enlargement of NATO href=”97-D44.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾:
The Alliance will be
“transformed” into primarily a
political and peacekeeping organization.
New members will be what amounts to
second-class citizens operating under
different guidelines than the existing
sixteen. (They will, for instance, be
effectively precluded from having NATO
troops or nuclear weapons stationed on
their soil.)

Russia will be given by NATO members a
special relationship likely to translate
into a de facto veto over
Alliance actions. And American taxpayers
will be on the hook for billions in new,
undisciplined, non-transparent economic
subsidies for Russia.

U.S. Arms Control
Concessions

Higher still, perhaps, is the price
associated with the summiteers’ handiwork
on arms control.
The Helsinki meeting was hardly the first
in which an embattled American president
sought to refurbish his reputation at
home by reaching agreements calculated to
impress the untutored with his
statesmanship and his “commitment to
peace.” The recklessness evident in
the accords reached on strategic
offensive arms and missile defenses is
arguably in a class by itself,
however.

START: President
Clinton decided to give the Russians four
additional years to complete the
dismantling of the multiple-warheaded and
heavy intercontinental-range ballistic
missiles, weapons whose elimination by
2003 was supposed to be principal
achievement of the START II Treaty. Not
to worry, though. The Administration
would have us believe that these missiles
are not targeted at our cities — a
statement it persists in making (the
Helsinki fact sheet is the 131^st
time by some estimates) in the absence of
any proof.

To be sure, the Helsinki framework
agreement also promises to
“deactivate” these systems by
removing their warheads or “taking
other jointly agreed steps by December
21, 2003.” The problem is that, if
past practice is any guide, U.S. warheads
will be irreversibly removed, but the
Russians will insist that their forces
undergo some much less verifiable,
effective and permanent
“deactivation step.”

President Clinton has also made a
number of other portentous concessions
without congressional consultation — or,
apparently, much forethought. For
example, he has committed the United
States to levels of strategic arms (2,000
to 2,500 deployed warheads) that are so
low as to make it problematic to maintain
an effective nuclear Triad essential to
robust deterrence. He has agreed to the
destruction of nuclear warheads, not just
delivery systems, even though — thanks
to his denuclearization policies href=”97-D44.html#N_2_”>⁽²⁾
— the United States will have nothing
like the Russians’ capability to
manufacture new ones should the need
arise. And he has agreed to negotiate
unspecified “measures” on
nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise
missiles, a long-standing Soviet/Russian
demand resisted by every previous U.S.
administration and fraught with peril for
the U.S. Navy’s operational flexibility
and security.

The ABM Treaty: Mr.
Clinton has, moreover, reaffirmed his
fealty to an obsolete Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty that prevents the United
States from effectively protecting its
people against missile attack, whether
from China, North Korea, Libya or
anyplace else. Insisting that this treaty
is the “cornerstone of strategic
stability,” Mr. Clinton promised to
expand the ABM Treaty so as to impose new
limits on the most promising American
systems not currently covered by that
accord — fast-flying defenses against
shorter-range (or “theater”)
missiles.

President Clinton also agreed to ban
altogether space-based theater missile
defenses. This ban extends even to the
“development” of such defenses
— a far more restrictive arrangement
even than that governing strategic
anti-missile systems to be based in
space. The President pledged not to
develop, test or deploy futuristic
“components” (like lasers) that
could substitute for space-based
interceptor missiles.

Cold Comfort: ‘No Plans’

In making such commitments, the
Clinton team avers that they are
consistent with current U.S.
“plans.” Since the
Administration has demonstrated a
palpable reluctance to provide missile
defense programs with the sort of
priority and funding required for
near-term deployment, however, these
modest plans would appear to be a bad
guide for agreeing to permanent
limitations. In any event, why would the
United States want to impose arbitrary
constraints on the future performance of
defensive systems?

Worse yet, it is a safe bet that the
Russians will try to use the broadly
worded prohibition on “components
based on other physical principles”
to block at least one promising TMD
program that is in the
“plans” — the Air Force’s
high-priority airborne anti-missile laser
program. It will be an
ignominious irony if, in its blind
pursuit of “clarification” of
the ABM Treaty’s limitations, the Clinton
Administration winds up creating new
ambiguities that impinge still further
upon critical American defense options.

Defying Congress

It is important to note that, whereas
the U.S. side formally declared that it
would submit the date change on START II
to the Senate for its advice and consent,
no such commitment was made with
respect to agreed, and far more
momentous, changes concerning the scope
and signatories to the ABM Treaty.
This is presumably because the White
House believes the latter amendments
would not pass muster on Capitol Hill —
a prospect underscored by not one, but
two, letters sent to the President by the
House Republican leadership last week
vehemently opposing expansion of the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Notably, a
letter from Representatives Newt
Gingrich, Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, John
Boehner and Christopher Cox, dated 20
March 1997, declared: “…If these
proposals are in fact advanced in
Helsinki, they will recklessly prejudice
the safety of our forces and the national
security of the United States.”

The Bottom Line

If Senators are unhappy with the
Clintonistas’ highhandedness with respect
to arms control, they may have an early
opportunity to express it. One other
Helsinki agenda item was to announce the
two Presidents’ determination to
“expedite ratification” of the
Chemical Weapons Convention. This is
expected to result in even greater
pressure on the Senate to rubber-stamp
this fatally flawed treaty, perhaps by as
early as mid-April.

The Chemical Weapons Convention should
be rejected on its merits — or, more
precisely, its lack of merit. href=”97-D44.html#N_3_”>⁽³⁾
In the wake of the Helsinki summit,
however, the Senate’s refusal to agree to
this unverifiable, unenforceable and
ineffectual treaty would also have
another, very desirable effect: It
would demonstrate unmistakably that the
Clinton Administration cannot expect
blithely to agree to international deals
that compromise national security and
interests and get away with it.

– 30 –

1. In fact, it is
predictable that Russia will demand still
further concessions in the months ahead
in connection with the NATO-Russia
charter and in other contexts.

2. See in this
regard, the Center’s Decision
Brief entitled Where
Is Pena On O’Leary’s Legacy Of
Denuclearizing The U.S., Passivity On The
Growing Nuclear Threat In Cuba? ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_16″>No. 97-D 16, 29
January 1997).

3. See, in this
regard, the Center’s Truth or
Consequences series
of Decision Briefs
dealing with the myriad problems
afflicting the Chemical Weapons
Convention.