The Rumsfeld Effect’: Leadership on Missile Defense

(Washington, D.C.): A few years back, the conventional wisdom had it that the Soviet Union was an immutable fact of life, that U.S. security could only be obtained through negotiated arms control agreements with the Kremlin and that the alternative to acceding to the lowest-common-denominator consensus among America’s allies was isolationism. Today, many of those who held such views assert with equal adamance that the United States is legally prohibited from building missile defenses without Russia’s permission and that neither Moscow — nor, for that matter, Beijing and allied capitals — will ever agree to such a deployment.

Just as the first set of assertions have been shown to be false, the current conventional wisdom is becoming ever more palpably wrong. In the attached, excellent column published in today’s Washington Post, Robert Kagan observes the already discernable impact of President-elect Bush’s appointment of Donald Rumsfeld to run the Pentagon once again:

Call it the “Rumsfeld effect.” Bush’s pick for secretary of defense — described in European headlines as a “hawkish missile advocate” — has gone a long way toward convincing the Europeans that Bush, unlike Clinton, is serious about going forward with an ambitious missile shield. Missile defense hard-liners and astute American diplomats have long argued that creating an aura of inevitability is the key to winning European and eventually Russian acquiescence in a program they now think they hate. As Rumsfeld puts it, “once the Russians understand that the United States is serious about this and intends to deploy…they will find a way…to accept that reality.”

Cases in Point

By way of evidence of the “Rumsfeld effect,” Mr. Kagan points to an important speech on the future and durability of the “U.S.-European strategic relationship” given on 12 January by William Hague MP, the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party. Mr. Hague said, in part:

The new U.S. administration is firm about…the early deployment of a missile shield. I welcome the appointment of Donald Rumsfeld, who has done more than anyone to heighten public awareness of missile proliferation, as Secretary of Defense. It is a signal of the importance that the President-elect attaches to early deployment. I think the United States should be supported in pushing forward this project and in pursuing the necessary research.

Further evidence of the tectonic shifts the new American leadership is causing on the missile defense front can be found in the left-wing British newspaper, The Independent, which made the following, for-it-extraordinary statement in an editorial published on Monday: “Fortunately for us, the Americans could only protect themselves by protecting us….The Americans may receive little gratitude for national missile defense, but yet again, they will be making a large and disinterested financial sacrifice in the cause of world peace.” (Emphasis added.)

If even the British left is swinging at anchor before the new Administration actually takes office, it is predictable that — if the Bush-Cheney team speaks with one voice along Secretary Rumsfeld’s lines and moves out smartly to begin deployment of the first components of missile defenses at the earliest possible time — Russia and China will have little choice but to accommodate themselves to the fact of American determination, as well.

It behooves the new President, therefore, to eliminate any possibility of confusion on this score. One place to start is by ensuring that the Rumsfeld effect is maximized by confirming that responsibility for missile defense rests where it belongs, with the Pentagon. This would mean that it is not, in fact, “an assignment of the Secretary of State” — a formulation Mr. Bush hopefully did not mean to use in a New York Times interview published last Sunday. This is all the more important insofar as his Secretary of State-designate, General Colin Powell sent signals during his Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing yesterday that could embolden opponents of missile defenses to believe that redoubled criticism in places like China and Europe could have the effect of delaying, if not scrubbing, U.S. deployments of NMD.¹

The Bottom Line

President Bush’s inaugural address provides an opportune — and appropriate — chance to affirm the course the new Administration will follow, both in terms of policy and programs (notably, an accelerated deployment of anti-missile systems at sea aboard the Navy’s existing Aegis ships) to provide effective missile defenses to the American people as soon as technologically possible, as the law of the land requires. Draft speech language toward this end has been suggested by the Center’s President, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., in a memo to President Bush that appeared in National Review Online this week (see the attached).

¹ For example, in his confirmation hearing yesterday, Gen. Powell emphasized the need to “persuade our Chinese interlocutors that this [NMD] system is not intended, nor does it have the capacity…to destroy their deterrent force.” To our allies who are opposed to the NMD, Powell recommended to the Senate that “we have to do a better job of explaining to them and communicating to them how it will all fit together.”