JUST SAY NO TO A BAD TREATY

The United States Senate must decide
by April 28 whether to ratify the
Chemical Weapons Convention. The press,
the pundits, and the Clinton
administration have treated the debate
over the treaty as another in a series of
battles between
“internationalists” and
“isolationists” in the new,
post- Cold War era.

It isn’t. What we really have here is
the continuation of one of this century’s
most enduring disputes. In the first camp
are the high priests of arms control
theology, who have never met an
international agreement they didn’t like.
In the second camp are those who take a
more skeptical view of relying on a piece
of watermarked, signed parchment for
safety in a dangerous world.

The case for ratifying the Chemical
Weapons Convention is a triumph of hope
over experience. It is an attempt to
reform the world by collecting
signatures. Some of the most dangerous
nations — Iraq, Syria, Libya, and North
Korea — have not ratified the convention
and, for all we know, never will. Some of
the nations that are signatories, like
Russia, China, Iran, and Cuba, are
manifestly unreliable and are already
looking for ways to circumvent the
convention’s provisions.

The convention’s most prominent
American defenders admit that the
agreement is probably not verifiable. And
it isn’t. Chemical weapons can be
produced in small but deadly amounts in
tiny makeshift laboratories. The nerve
gas used by terrorists to poison subway
riders in Japan in 1995, for instance,
was produced in a 14 ft.-by-8 ft. room.
No one in the American intelligence
community believes we would be able to
monitor compliance with an international
chemical weapons regime with any
reasonable degree of confidence.

The Washington Post opines
that these failings in the convention —
the very fact “that the coverage of
this treaty falls short and that
enforcement is uncertain” — are
actually arguments for ratifying it.
Presumably, signature of a flawed treaty
will make all of us work harder to
perfect it.

Great.

At the end of the day, the strongest
argument proponents of ratification can
offer is that, whatever a treaty’s
manifest flaws, it is better to have one
than not to have one. How could it be bad
to have a treaty outlawing production of
chemical weapons, no matter how full of
holes it may be?

Well, actually, such a treaty could
be worse than no treaty at all. We have
pretty good evidence from the bloody
history of this century that treaties
like the Chemical Weapons Convention —
treaties that are more hortatory than
mandatory, that express good intentions
more than they require any actions to
back up those intentions — can do more
harm than good. They are part of a
psychological process of evasion and
avoidance of tough choices. The truth is,
the best way of controlling chemical
weapons proliferation could be for the
United States to bomb a Libyan chemical
weapons factory.

But that is the kind of difficult
decision for an American president that
the Chemical Weapons Convention does
nothing to facilitate. Indeed, the
existence of a chemical weapons treaty
would make it less likely that a
president would order such strong
unilateral action, since he would be
bound to turn over evidence of a
violation to the international lawyers
and diplomats and wait for their
investigation and concurrence. And as
Richard Perle has recently noted, even
after Saddam Hussein used chemical
weapons in flagrant violation of an existing
prohibition against their use, the
international bureaucrats responsible for
monitoring these matters could not bring
themselves to denounce Iraq by name. In
the end, it would be easier for a
president to order an airstrike than to
get scores of nations to agree on naming
one of their own an outlaw.

The Chemical Weapons Convention is
what Peter Rodman calls “junk arms
control,” and not the least of its
many drawbacks is that it gives effective
arms control a bad name. Effective
treaties codify decisions nations have already
made: to end a war on certain terms, for
instance, or to define fishing rights.
Because they reflect the will of the
parties, moreover, the parties themselves
don’t raise obstacles to verification.

But treaties whose purpose is to rope
in rogue nations that have not consented,
or whose consent is widely understood to
be cynical and disingenuous, are
something else again. They are based on a
worldview that is at best foolishly
optimistic and at worst patronizing and
deluded.

One of the important things
separating Reaganite internationalism
from the more starry-eyed Wilsonian
version is the understanding that
treaties must reflect reality, not hope.
The Chemical Weapons Convention turns the
clock back to the kind of Wilsonian
thinking characteristic of the Carter
administration. It is unfortunate that
among its strongest backers are some
prominent Republicans who have served in
key foreign-policy positions. It is true
that the origins of the Chemical Weapons
Convention date back to the Reagan years,
and the convention was carried to
fruition by the Bush administration. But
let’s be candid. In the Reagan years, the
treaty was mostly a sop to liberals in
Congress, an attempt to pick up some
points for an arms control measure at a
time when Reagan was trying to win on
more important issues like the defense
buildup and the Strategic Defense
Initiative. And President Bush pushed the
treaty in no small part because he had
disliked having to cast a tiebreaking
vote in the Senate as vice president in
favor of building chemical weapons.
Republicans today are under no obligation
to carry out the mistakes of their
predecessors.

In one respect, the debate over the
Chemical Weapons Convention calls to mind
the struggle for the party’s soul waged
in the 1970s between Kissingerian
detente-niks on one side and the
insurgent forces led by Ronald Reagan on
the other. Back then, conservative
Republicans like Senate majority leader
Trent Lott knew without hesitation where
they stood. They should stand where they
stood before, foursquare with the ideas
that helped win the Cold War, and against
the Chemical Weapons Convention.