The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty may be at the mercy of distrustful Republicans, writes MARY BETH SHERIDANin Washington
WITH ONLY days left in the lame-duck Congress, President Barack Obama is pushing hard to accomplish something never before done by a Democratic president: successfully get a nuclear-arms-reduction treaty through the ratification process.
White House senior adviser David Axelrod said on CBS News’s Face the Nation on Sunday that “the support is there” to pass the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New Start) if it came to the floor.
The White House said on Friday that Obama is willing to postpone his vacation until the US-Russia pact is ratified. It has become clear, though, that Obama is facing a fight over the same issue that derailed Bill Clinton’s quest for a similar accord – missile defence, a cherished Republican goal dating back to Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
When Republican senators now say they need a fuller debate on the treaty, this is an important part of what they want to discuss.
“Missile defence remains a major point of disagreement between the United States and Russia, and this treaty only makes the situation worse,” Republican senator John Thune, wrote recently on National Review Online.
Some Republicans say they want to tweak the Senate resolution of ratification with the goal of then supporting it. Others argue the treaty itself needs amendments that could kill it.
Supporters say the outcry over missile defence is unfounded and suspect it is a tactic to score political points.
They note that there is almost nothing on missile defence in the treaty, which runs to more than 300 pages with annexes, and Obama has continued many of George W Bush’s missile-defence policies.
“One of the great ironies is, he made sure there was no way to attack the treaty as being tough on missile defence,” Greg Thielmann, a senior fellow at the Arms Control Association, said of Obama. “And yet that’s exactly one of the main rationales used by treaty critics.”
To Republicans, though, the issue goes beyond the few words on missile defence in the treaty. It reflects their lack of trust in Obama and the Russians and their scars from years of fights with Democrats over the issue.
The Obama administration’s policy “is not that radically different from what most Republicans say they want on missile defence,” Stephen Rademaker, a Bush administration arms-control official, said.
However that simple conclusion “overlooks the long and tortured history of missile defence,” he said. “The positions the Obama administration is taking today are not the traditional positions of most Democrats.”
US defence officials started considering missile defence as far back as the 1950s, but it was Reagan’s ambitious Strategic Defence Initiative, announced in 1983, that turned the issue into political dynamite.
Reagan’s initiative, nicknamed “Star Wars”, was assailed by Democrats as expensive, unworkable and a danger to global stability.
The system envisioned fending off Russia’s massive arsenal with space-based lasers and other weapons.
Subsequent presidents scaled back such plans, focusing instead on a missile system that would defend against more rudimentary nuclear weapons that could be fired by countries such as Iran or North Korea.
George W Bush began building such a missile-defence system in Alaska and California.
Obama has continued developing it, albeit with fewer defensive rockets than Bush envisioned. He also has pursued – and achieved – one of Bush’s other goals, agreement on a Nato missile-defence system.
Republicans, though, still haven’t shaken their mistrust stemming from some of Obama’s early steps.
“It’s hard for an administration to say they’re committed to a robust missile-defence system when . . . in their first budget submission, they cut the Missile Defence Agency by $1.4 billion,” said one Republican congressional staffer, who was not authorised to comment on the record.
Key Republicans, including senator John McCain, said in recent weeks that they could not vote for New Start unless there were more safeguards for US missile defence.
Recently, however, McCain has indicated the issue could be resolved by changes to the resolution to ratify the treaty, which appears amenable to Democrats.
For a few Republicans, though, that might not be enough. Twenty-seven years after the introduction of Reagan’s unrealised Star Wars plan, a more ambitious defence shield still has some congressional support.
“Reagan’s vision, as we all know, was to render all nuclear missiles obsolete by developing the capability to shoot them down,” Republican senator Jim DeMint, a Tea Party favourite, said in a committee debate in September.
“It’s the only practical way to ever hope for a nuclear-free world.” – (Washington Post service)