Let W. Be Reagan: How President Bush Should Handle Missile Defense Summitry

(Washington, D.C.): During his visit to Europe this week, President Bush is expected to face rough sledding on several issues from his hosts and other interlocutors. The principal topic of conversation, however, may prove to be insistent Russian and European objections to Mr. Bush’s commitment to missile defense.

On the eve of a meeting in Slovenia between George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, the Center for Security Policy’s President, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., recalled an earlier summit in which a similar combination of domestic and foreign pressures was brought to bear against President Ronald Reagan’s own commitment to defending his people, their forces and allies against ballistic missile attack. The following essay, published yesterday in the Investor’s Business Daily, urges Mr. Bush to remain as Mr. Reagan did before him — steadfast in their shared determination to provide the anti-missile protection we require and deserve.

This recommendation is reinforced by the support that even a poll jointly commissioned by the left-wing Pew Charitable Trust’s Pew Research Center for The People and the Press and the Council on Foreign Relations has revealed based on a survey conducted from 15-28 May. It found that by a 51-38% margin, the American people favor “Mr. Bush’s proposed missile defense system.”

Interestingly, the survey found that “no significant change in support for the system when the concept was retested after respondents were exposed to arguments for and against missile defense.” These results are all the more extraordinary insofar as the Pew Center says that:

The survey shows a greater level of public awareness of arguments opposing missile defense than those favoring it. Fully 60% have heard that the program might be too costly, and nearly half are aware of concerns that building a missile defense system could trigger a new arms race and damage relations with Russia and China.

Fewer have heard the arguments, made by missile defense proponents….Despite the gap in awareness, however, majorities see these as important reasons to support the program; in contrast no argument against the proposal draws majority support.

The Pew/CFR poll also discovered the broad-based nature of the popular support that has long existed for missile defense, even observing that, “On balance, Democrats lean toward favoring the system with liberal Democrats evenly divided over it.” All the more reason why Mr. Bush should stay the course.

Once upon a time, a President of the United States promised to protect his people, their forces overseas and friends against the threat of ballistic missile attack.

After a while, he went to Europe to meet with the leader of the Kremlin, a man who was determined to prevent America from having such defenses. The President was told that if he would only give up his commitment and agree to leave America vulnerable, Moscow would take dramatic actions to reduce the danger of nuclear war.

Allied governments urged the President to go along, warning him that his failure to do so would undermine their confidence in his leadership and perhaps weaken their ties to his country. If the President needed any further inducement to abandon his plan, Democrats in Congress strove to deny him the funds required to ready an effective missile defense. They believed that U.S. security would be better served by continuing to observe a treaty signed with Moscow in 1972 that prohibited the U.S. from developing, testing and deploying competent anti-missile systems, than it would be by having a territorial defense against missile attack.

In the face of all these pressures, even some of the President’s own advisers believed he should cut a deal with the Kremlin, notwithstanding that doing so would mean perpetuating America’s vulnerability. They told him he could secure his place in history, perhaps even win a Nobel Peace Prize, if only he would abandon his commitment to missile defense.

The President resisted all these pressures and inducements. He told the man from the Kremlin that he had an obligation to do whatever he could to provide protection against the deadly and growing menace of missile attack. By so doing, he earned a place in history of inestimably greater importance than any ephemeral arms control deal or Nobel prize.

This is not, of course, a fairy tale. It is a description of the circumstances that led up to the 1986 summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev — a summit that most at the time described as a failure because of Reagan’s refusal to abandon his Strategic Defense Initiative, even in the face of the Soviet leader’s promises to eliminate all Moscow’s nuclear weapons. In hindsight, it is clear that Reagan’s determination to pursue SDI in the face of stiff opposition contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union.

Now George Bush faces the same struggle as he heads this week to a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Like Gorbachev, Putin is using everything from blandishments to threats to media-directed appeals to thwart Mr. Bush’s Reaganesque vision of a U.S. capable of protecting its people, forces and friends overseas against accidental or intentional missile strikes.

To an even greater degree than their conservative counterparts fifteen years ago, the left-wing leaders of virtually every government in Europe (with the notable exception of Italy’s new Berlusconi administration) are adamantly opposed to U.S. anti-missile deployments — amazingly, even those that would provide protection to their own countries!

Meanwhile, Democrats in the U.S. Congress, especially in the new Senate leadership, are pronouncing President Bush’s determination to deploy missile defenses a nonstarter. And some around President Bush seem to believe that the “new strategic framework” he has called for really should look a lot like the old “Grand Bargain” sought by the Clinton-Gore administration: a deal that would package deep reductions in U.S. and Russian strategic arms with an allowance for the U.S. to deploy a missile defense of such limited capability as to be largely ineffectual.

It can only be hoped that President Bush will find in this challenging moment the courage of his convictions, like those that guided Ronald Reagan in an earlier time. However, even if the 43rd President of the United States should yield to the temptations the 40th President so steadfastly resisted, it is unlikely this nation will remain undefended against missile attack. Missile defense is almost certain to come eventually.

Instead, if President Bush agrees to some deal with Vladimir Putin that allows the latter to exercise what would amount to a continuing veto power over U.S. missile defenses, he will simply assure that the deployment of American anti- missile systems occurs after we need them — probably after some place we care about, perhaps in this country, perhaps overseas, has been destroyed by a missile attack.

This would be a most undesirable legacy, a grave disservice to the nation and one that would permanently dishonor this presidency. We will know shortly of what Mr. Bush is made. Let us all hope it is the stuff of Ronald Reagan.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. was responsible for missile defense policy in President Reagan’s Pentagon. He is currently the President of the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C.