YESTERDAY WAS a red letter day for President Barack Obama, a day of domestic and foreign policy victories all the more sweet for the battering he took in last month’s midterm elections.
In the morning, the president signed into law the repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. In the afternoon, the US Senate ratified the New Start treaty that Obama concluded with Russian president Dmitri Medvedev last April. At the beginning of this month, neither achievement looked possible.
“Yes, we did! Yes, we did! Yes, we did!” a euphoric audience chanted at the signing ceremony. “Thank you! Yes, we did,” Mr Obama replied. “You know, I am just overwhelmed. This is a very good day . . . I couldn’t be prouder.” The president explained the meaning of the repeal: “No longer will tens of thousands of (gay) Americans in uniform be asked to live a lie, or look over their shoulder, in order to serve the country they love.” Though Republican senators continued harangues against the arms control treaty through the morning, it had become virtually certain on Tuesday afternoon that New Start would pass, after the cloture motion which brought the agreement to a vote yesterday.
In the event, the Senate voted 71 to 26 to approve the treaty, exceeding the required two-thirds majority. At the close of the 111th Congress, which was marked by bitter partisan division, the treaty received a surprising 13 Republican votes.
Mr Obama was to take a victory lap late yesterday, in the form of a White House press conference.
With the passage of New Start, President Obama has succeeded where his Democratic predecessors failed.
Jimmy Carter never obtained approval for the Salt II Treaty because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Bill Clinton concluded a treaty banning underground nuclear testing, but the Senate rejected it, 51 to 48.
Until yesterday, Republican senators voted only for treaties negotiated by Republican presidents.
Mr Obama campaigned hard for the ratification, keeping up a barrage of telephone calls and letters to reluctant Republicans. He dispatched his vice president and secretary of state to the Capitol to keep up the pressure for the procedural vote on Tuesday. And he sought endorsements from military commanders, east European leaders and ageing Republicans, including the first president George Bush and the former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Schultz.
The treaty requires Russia and the US to reduce their strategic warheads to a maximum 1,550, from 2,200 allowed previously, and 700 launchers, from 1,600 previously, over the next seven years. It allows the two countries to resume inspections of each other’s nuclear facilities, a process that stopped with the expiry of the original Start treaty in December 2009.
The advantages of the treaty are as much political as strategic. The Obama administration argued that it will be helpful in the “re-set” of relations with Moscow. The US needs Russia to keep up pressure on Iran, and as a supply route for the war in Afghanistan. It was awkward for the two countries who hold 95 per cent of the world’s nuclear arsenals to demand an end to nuclear programmes in Iran and North Korea while they did nothing to diminish their own stockpiles.
Mr Obama will now try to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, obtain international agreement on banning the production of fissile materials, and negotiate an agreement with Russia on tactical nuclear weapons.
All promise to be exceedingly difficult.
Diehard Republicans who opposed the treaty claimed it does not provide for adequate verification, endangers the US missile defence programme, does not address Russian superiority in tactical nuclear weapons and was not debated sufficiently.
Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama yesterday accused Mr Obama of wanting to diminish US power and leadership in the world with his naive talk of a world free of nuclear weapons.
But Mr Obama was able to change some stubborn Republican minds, in part by upping expenditure on a programme to modernise nuclear weapons from $80 billion to $85 billion.
Only last week, senator Lamar Alexander from Tennessee, the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, opposed New Start.
He switched sides on Tuesday, saying: “I am convinced that America is safer and more secure with the New Start treaty than without it . . . It leaves our country with enough nuclear warheads to blow any attacker to kingdom come.”