WASHINGTON -- What's the greatest threat to international security today? According to many officials around NATO, it's not rogue states with nuclear or chemical weapons but the policies of the Republican Party and its hostility to arms-control treaties.
This is an extraordinary turnabout. After all, the GOP has traditionally been seen as a bastion of support for NATO and a leader in arms control. It was a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who gave us SALT I and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, who negotiated the INF and START I treaties; and a Republican president, George Bush, who advanced START II and the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Today's GOP leadership takes pride in different achievements. It points with pride to the fact that the government's independent Arms Control and Disarmament Agency has been shut down; that the nuclear test-ban treaty was rejected by the Republican-controlled Senate; that the global Chemical Weapons Convention was approved but only after killer-amendments were tacked on; and that it now appears that the ABM treaty is about to be dismantled.
In place of its traditional support for arms-control agreements, the GOP now favors near total reliance on the armed forces to insure the nation's security. What this military-only policy fails to consider is that the U.S. is often rightly hesitant to use military force and that war does not always achieve the desired results.
Americans do not like their soldiers to be killed. Neither does the Pentagon, which was most reluctant to commit ground forces in the Balkans. And its reliance on air power over Kosovo led to grossly exaggerated battle damage assessments of Serb forces destroyed.
It is ironic that arms control is rejected if verification is thought to be less than 100 percent effective, but no such criteria is imposed on military operations. Indeed, Republicans apparently see any form of arms control agreement as a threat in and of itself.
Ronald Reagan used to say "negotiate from strength." Nowadays, faced with no credible military foe, U.S. allies have a hard time understanding why it is apparently more difficult for the Clinton administration and a Republican-controlled Congress to negotiate an arms-control agreement with a ramshackle Russia than it was for the Reagan administration to deal with the Soviet Union.
Nor are the allies convinced that a few tiny countries pose a serious threat to the U.S. And those who exaggerate these threats unwittingly act as boosters for regimes like those in North Korea. The hostility to arms control squanders the chance to make the world more secure. It plays into the hands of rogue states and in effect puts the U.S. in favor of armaments anarchy.
At the start of the Gulf War, the United States had no trouble rounding up an international posse to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and impose stringent sanctions on Iraq. Following the war, the United Nations' inspection regime was an astonishing success, uncovering high-tech equipment that had been supplied by the West and demonstrating how a verification and destruction regime could eliminate weapons that military action had neither detected nor destroyed.
Today, that global consensus has been thrown away and U.S.' rejection of a wide range of arms-control initiatives have left its allies alienated and confused.
Arms talks with Russia have stalled. Although former president Bush had no trouble signing START I before Russia had ratified START II, this Congress has insisted that the Russian parliament ratify the START II agreement before further arms-reduction talks can proceed. Never have so few Republicans given so much power over U.S. foreign policy to a few members of the Russian Duma.
And in a further indication that its policies are being controlled by nuclear anarchists, the U.S. appears ready to walk away from the ABM in favor of a unproven missile defense system. The Republican-led policy seems to be for the U.S. to keep its nuclear weapons while adding to its defenses. Of course other nations, such as China, will perceive this as a threat, setting the world off on a news arms race. In the end, it may be possible to shoot down a bullet with a smarter bullet -- but it will always be cheaper to build more bullets.
As George Robertson, the NATO Secretary General, recently remarked, "Arms control is something that's in everyone's interest and something that we really have to press ahead with." The question facing the U.S. isn't whether it needs to accept being defenseless but whether its safety is ultimately enhanced by building more weapons or by joining in international arms reductions.
Dan Plesch is the director of the British American Security Information Council, an independent research organization that analyzes government policies on military and nuclear issues.