Critical Mass: The Republican Party Joins Burgeoning Effort to Defend America
(Washington, D.C.): In what may prove to be a truly historic development,
Republican
National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson Sunday invited “President Clinton, Vice
President Al Gore and other Democrats to join [the Republican Party] and make safeguarding
America [against ballistic missile attack] a bipartisan project.” In his op.ed. article published in
the Washington Times (see attached), Chairman
Nicholson solemnly declared: “If they will not,
the Republican Party is prepared to have this become a political issue.”
- “We are prepared to ask the American people if they agree the United States should be
defenseless against weapons of mass destruction, relying instead on outdated treaties
and the good intentions of our adversaries …. We can do something to protect our
children and ourselves — and it won’t cost a single life, American or foreign. We need
to get started.”
With this initiative, the last ingredient for a successful campaign to deploy effective
missile
defenses may be coming into place. After all, as the Center for Security Policy has previously
noted:
- “Ideally, Republicans and Democrats, executive branch officials and legislators alike,
will recognize the peril facing the United States as missile threats proliferate and the
Nation remains defenseless against them. Such an ideal political realignment would
certainly assure the deployment of anti-missile systems with the greatest military
effectiveness in the shortest possible time. Failing that sort of bipartisan consensus
on the most critical national security issue of our time, however, the Republican Party
is superbly positioned to take to the electorate the case for deploying missile defenses
as soon as technologically possible. Will it do so?”(1)
The Emerging ‘Correlation of Forces’
The following are among the other elements of such a campaign to defend America that have
emerged in recent weeks:
Item: Senators Cochran and Inouye Offer an Important Legislative
Vehicle. Bipartisan
legislation, S. 1873, has been introduced by Senators Thad Cochran (R-MS) and Daniel Inouye
(D-HI) which would, for the first time in history, make it the policy of the U.S.
government “to
deploy effective anti-missile defenses of the territory of the United States as soon as
technologically possible.” This bill offers an excellent opportunity to frame the issue
clearly by
obliging legislators to vote for or against defending America from the devastating effects of a
ballistic missile attack.
Unfortunately, as a result of a 13 May filibuster led by Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), a majority of
fifty-nine of his colleagues — every Republican Senator and four respected Democrats (Sens.
Inouye, Fritz Hollings [SC], Joseph Lieberman [CT] and Daniel Akaka [HI])– were denied the
opportunity to debate S. 1873 and, presumably, to have it approved by the Senate.
Despite this setback, the Senate leadership is expected to continue to seek cloture on S. 1873,
thereby affording an opportunity for the policy framework for deploying missile defenses to be
established at last. What is more, with the effort now promised by Republican Chairman
Nicholson, it stands to reason that at least one of the Democratic Senators whose votes made the
Levin filibuster possible will find their opposition to defending America politically untenable.
Item: Support for Deploying Missile Defenses Grows Among Key
Office-Holders. Among
those who have recently expressed their commitment to fielding effective anti-missile capabilities
are the following:
- House Speaker Newt Gingrich: In an interview for a documentary film
produced by the
Center for Security Policy, Speaker Gingrich said: “Not since the 1930s, when
Winston
Churchill demanded radar, demanded air defenses, demanded protection against the German
air force, not since then have we been in the kind of crisis in the Western democracies
where our citizens are unnecessarily at risk, could literally be killed in large numbers.
The solution is available. It is doable. And the government refuses to protect Americans.
This has to be changed, and it has to be changed now because the dictators aren’t waiting.”
- Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott: In his response to President
Clinton’s State of the
Union address earlier this year, Sen. Lott told his countrymen:
- “You know, as hard as it is to believe, right now our country has no national defense
against
missiles carrying nuclear, chemical or biological warheads. Those who hate America most in Iraq,
in Iran and elsewhere, they know that. President Clinton, I urge you to reconsider your
opposition to having a national missile defense for America. Join us in taking the steps
that
will actually deploy a national missile defense system for the United States.“
Sen. Lott made a similar point a week ago when, on the ABC Sunday news program
“This Week” he called for enactment of the Cochran-Inouye bill and prompt
deployment of missile defenses.
Other elected officials who have been outspoken proponents of missile defenses
include:
Senate Majority Whip Don Nickles, California Governor Pete Wilson, Oklahoma
Lieutenant Governor Mary Fallin, Senators Jon Kyl, Jim Inhofe, Bob Smith,
Kay Bailey
Hutchison and Reps. Bob Livingston, Floyd Spence, Curt Weldon, Duncan
Hunter and
Tillie Fowler.(3)
Item: Many of the Nation’s Foremost Opinion-Shapers are Calling for
Missile Defenses.
The past few weeks have also seen an extraordinary outpouring of support from a number of
America’s leading columnists and intellectual movers-and-shakers. This group includes:
Charles
Krauthammer, A.M. Rosenthal, Ben Wattenberg, George F. Will, William Safire, Steve
Forbes, former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and former Secretary
of State
Henry Kissinger.(4)
Item: Conservative Leaders Marshal Their Forces. A week
prior to the Nicholson op.ed.’s
publication, the Washington Times’ excellent Commentary Section gave the same,
above-the-fold
treatment to another powerful essay in favor of missile defense by two of the Nation’s most
influential conservative leaders — the Family Research Council’s Gary Bauer
and the Heritage
Foundation’s Ed Feulner. They wrote, in part: “It is hard to fathom the cynicism at the
White
House when a conscious decision is made to keep the American people vulnerable to missile
attack, while approving the transfer of technology that allows a potentially hostile power to better
target its missiles on the United States.”
This call for defending America comes on the heels of Mr. Bauer’s declaration at the Heritage
Foundation’s Resource Bank last April that he is determined “in the months ahead…to do
everything I can to arouse the pro-family and pro-life movement around America to see
[the issue of defending America against missile attack] as a pro-family and pro-life
issue.“
The Bauer-Feulner editorial is, moreover, but the latest important contribution by the
Heritage
Foundation to the missile defense campaign. Another notable Heritage product is the 15
June
Legal Memorandum prepared for the Foundation by the law firm of Hunton and
Williams
concerning the status of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty — the accord whose prohibition on
U.S. territorial anti-missile defenses is the principal reason for the Nation’s present vulnerability.
This memorandum concludes:
- “When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the ABM Treaty became impossible to
perform in accordance with its original provisions. Because of the unique terms and
conditions of the ABM Treaty, and the underlying assumptions of the parties,
none of the states (including the Russian Federation) that emerged from the
Soviet Union, either alone or with others, could carry out the U.S.S.R.’s
obligations under the ABM Treaty. Consequently, the obligations of the United
States under the Treaty were discharged at the time the Soviet Union
disappeared.
“Although a number of the former Soviet republics have indicated that they are
prepared to undertake the U.S.S.R.’s role in the ABM Treaty regime, this
willingness alone is insufficient to bind the United States. Transforming the ABM Treaty from a bilateral accord, applicable to the entire Soviet territory, into a multilateral convention, applicable only to a portion of the former Soviet territory, and redrafting in the process a number of key substantive Treaty provisions fundamemtally alters the bargain originally struck by the United States and the Soviet Union in 1972. The President cannont of his own authority, accomplish these results.
“Accordingly, the United States can again be bound to the ABM Treaty only if two-thirds of the Senate agrees to the revisions required by the transformation of the ABM Treaty and the president then chooses to ratify them.”
Item: There is a Near-Term, Effective and Affordable Option to
Begin Defending
America. Another invaluable Heritage product was the analysis performed by its
blue-ribbon
Missile Defense Study Team (“Team B”) entitled Defending America: Ending
America’s
Vulnerability to Ballistic Missiles.(6) This
team of prominent scientists, retired high-ranking
military officers and senior former policy-makers concluded that the United States could
begin
to enjoy protection against missile attack most quickly, effectively and inexpensively by
modifying the Navy’s existing AEGIS fleet air defense system to give it the capability to
shoot
down ballistic missiles, as well as aircraft and cruise missiles.
It is very gratifying that this approach, which has long enjoyed the strong support of the
Center
for Security Policy,(7) is being explicitly endorsed by many
of the prominent figures now leading
the effort to defend the United States, as well as its forces and allies overseas, against emerging
missile threats — including, notably, Senators Jon Kyl and Jim Inhofe, Reps. Bob Livingston,
Duncan Hunter and Curt Weldon, Steve Forbes, William Safire and Jim Nicholson.
The Bottom Line
It is time to move beyond rhetoric about the need for missile defenses to action leading to
their
prompt deployment. The Center for Security commends all those who have made their support
for the latter a matter of record and urges them to move forward on all fronts to
translate their
vision into reality.
– 30 –
1. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
Rising Tide: Who Will Catch the Wave of the
Growing Demand for the Prompt Deployment of U.S. Missile Defenses? (
June 1998).
2. See Shame, Shame: By One Vote, Minority of
Senators Perpetuate America’s Vulnerability
to Missile Attack (No. 98-D 84, 14 May 1998).
3. See, for example, Onward Christian Soldiers — And
All Other Americans: Gary Bauer Joins
the Fight to Defend America (No. 98-D 74, 29 April
1998) and Hill Leadership Endorses
Prompt Deployment of Missile Defenses: Will Tel Aviv ‘Burn’ While Clinton
Fiddles? (No.
98-D 18, 30 January 1998).
4. See The Tide Rises Further: Bill Safire Calls for
Missile Defense (No. 98-D 105, 11 June
1998).
5. This study can be accessed on the Heritage Internet site at:
ritage/nationalsecurity/legalbrief/legalbrief.html. (Please note that
if you “click” on this site, you will leave the Center for Security Policy’s site.)
6. This important study can be accessed on the Heritage Foundation’s
World Wide Web site at
the following address:
g/heritage/nationalsecurity/teamb. (Please note that
if you “click” on this site, you will leave the Center for Security Policy’s site.)
7. See, for example, Senate Should Vote to Defend
America ‘As Soon As Technologically
Possible’ (No. 98-D 79, 6 May 1998) and
Unhappy Birthday: 15th Anniversary of Reagan SDI
Speech Sees U.S. Still Undefended, Warnings of ‘Haste’ in Fielding Defenses (
23 March 1998).
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