Will Senate Pass ‘No-Brainer,’ Insist on Right to Advise and Consent on Major A.B.M. Treaty Changes?

(Washington, D.C.): From time to time,
students who perform abysmally on a test
are given a chance to try again. That is
one explanation for the drill the Clinton
Administration is putting the Senate
through at the moment.

A less charitable view would be that
the Clintonistas — having established in
the course of the recent debate on the
Chemical Weapons Convention that a large
number of Senators are willing to make a
leap of faith in the name of arms control
— can now safely ask them to take an
even more astounding step: Agree to deny
their institution its constitutional
prerogative to consider a far-reaching
amendment to the obsolete Anti-Ballistic
Missile (ABM) Treaty.

Either way, the Nation can once again
give thanks for Senator Jesse Helms’
chairmanship of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee. Without his
leadership, that committee would probably
not have acted to protect Senators’ right
to be more than a doormat for dubious
Clinton arms control initiatives. With
his leadership, however, Foreign
Relations Committee Democrats joined
Republicans in voting unanimously to tie
approval of changes in the Conventional
Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty to a
presidential commitment that the Senate
would be afforded the opportunity to
consider changes Mr. Clinton is seeking
to the much more controversial ABM Treaty.

A Mischievous
Multilateralization MOU

Specifically, the President proposes
to “multilateralize” the 1972
accord, designating Russia, Belarus,
Ukraine and Kazakhstan as successors to
the Soviet Union — whose demise could (and
should) have spelled the end of this
misbegotten bilateral agreement.
Evidently unsure whether the Senate would
actually approve such an amendment, the
Clinton Administration has argued that it
need not find out since the Memorandum of
Understanding embodying this amendment
does not “substantively modify”
the ABM Treaty.

In this manner, Clinton and Company
hope to finesse not only standard
constitutional practice. They also are
seeking to end-run a specific
statutory requirement for Senate approval
of any substantive modifications of the
ABM Treaty pursuant to Section 232 of the
Fiscal Year 1995 National Defense
Authorization Act.

As Baker Spring of the Heritage
Foundation noted in an excellent analysis
published last March, though, “the
successorship agreement does far more
than simply replace one state with
several new states. In fact, it
alters the very terms of the ABM Treaty.”
This is achieved in several portentous
ways:

• The agreement would create
  two classes of parties where only
  one existed before.
  First class — of whom only the
  United States and Russia would be
  members — would be entitled to
  have a single site for deploying
  strategic missile defenses and
  associated test facilities. The
  rest would be second-class
  parties, who would have no such
  rights.
• The successorship agreement would
  significantly revise the
  geographic boundaries covered by
  the ABM Treaty. Even
  with the addition of Belarus,
  Kazakhstan and Ukraine, the
  accord will no longer apply to
  what formerly was known as the
  “national territory of the
  Soviet Union.” Since geography
  was a singularly important aspect
  of this accord — recall
  that the reason the Kremlin’s
  Krasnoyarsk radar was a clear-cut
  violation of the Treaty was
  because it was not located on the
  periphery of the USSR and
  oriented outwards — changing the
  boundaries is indubitably a
  substantive modification of the
  treaty. This is especially true
  since Moscow could use its
  influence with the three other
  successor states, or with former
  Soviet republics that are
  non-successors, to deploy
  covertly internetted defensive
  capabilities that Russia itself
  would be unable to have under the
  ABM Treaty.
• Finally, by transforming a
  bilateral agreement into a
  multilateral one, the
  Clinton Administration would
  effectively be giving three
  additional nations a veto over
  changes to the ABM Treaty.
  Such vetoes would be especially
  likely to be cast to stymie
  future treaty modifications that
  might make it easier for the
  United States to deploy competent
  anti-missile defenses (the urgent
  need for which was underscored by
  the latest revelations that
  Russian nuclear
  command-and-control system may be
  increasingly unable to prevent
  accidental missile launches). href=”97-D64.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾
  In fact, a few years ago, an
  unidentified senior Clinton
  official told the high priests of
  the ABM Treaty theology at the
  Arms Control Association that
  this sort of stranglehold was precisely
  the purpose of the successorship
  agreement.

In recognition of these
considerations, the House-Senate
conference report accompanying the Fiscal
Year 1997 National Defense Authorization
Act minced no words about the nature of
the Clinton multilateralization scheme: “…The
accord on ABM Treaty succession…would
constitute a substantive change to the
ABM Treaty” and, therefore, require
Senate advice and consent.

When combined with the limitations
contemplated in yet another set of
amendments to the ABM Treaty — so-called
“demarcation” amendments that
appear likely to garrotte promising theater
missile defenses by imposing constraints
on their speed and other performance
characteristics — the effect of
these substantive changes would be to
ensure that the 1972 accord not only has
outlived its usefulness. It will become
demonstrably inconsistent with, and
detrimental to, U.S. national security
interests.

The Bottom Line

Even if some members of the Senate are
inclined to be no more concerned about
the United States’ inability to defend
itself against ballistic missile attack
than they are about the unchecked danger
of chemical warfare, they must not permit
themselves to be played for chumps. It is
a “no-brainer” that the Clinton
Administration’s successorship agreement
entails substantive modifications to the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Naturally, every Senator should have
the right to vote to approve such
modifications if he or she sees fit to do
so. That right — along with the right to
reject those changes — will only be
safeguarded, however, if the Senate
agrees with its Foreign Relations
Committee, requiring the ABM Treaty
successorship accord to be addressed
constitutionally and submitted for the
Senate’s formal advice and consent.

– 30 –

1. See Bill
Gertz’s article in today’s Washington
Times entitled “Mishaps put
Russian missiles in ‘combat mode’.”