[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 85 (Tuesday, June 19, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6387-S6393]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
PRESIDENT BUSH'S EUROPEAN TRIP
Mr. KYL. Mr. President, President Bush has just returned from his
trip to Europe, and the newspapers are full of glowing accounts. Some
of the headlines include the following: ``Europe sees Bush's Trip
Exceeding Expectations.'' That from the New York Times on June 18. The
International Herald Tribune: ``President Climbs in European Esteem.''
Similarly, other headlines and stories noted the fact that the
President was successful in communicating his views on a wide variety
of subjects, including most especially our view of national security
issues and specifically the question of missile defense.
I want to spend a few minutes talking about the President's
successful trip, his vision for the future in a new post-cold-war era,
and the acceptance of those views by most of our allies and even, to
some extent, by those whom he characterizes as friends, countries that
could, indeed, someday perhaps be allies, countries such as Russia,
following especially his visit with President Putin during the course
of this trip.
I think the pundits had a good time as the President was preparing
for his
[[Page S6388]]
trip, speculating about whether this President, who had not extensively
traveled abroad and did not have a great deal of international
experience, would be able to impress these savvy international leaders.
What they found--and it was interesting--on the Sunday morning talk
shows they were all doing a little bit of a retreat, which pleased me
because I had seen the same kind of questioning of the President when
he was beginning his run for the Presidency as Governor of Texas.
There were those who said: He is a very congenial fellow, but does he
really have what it takes? I think we all saw, and even my Democratic
colleagues who supported Vice President Gore at the time concluded,
that this is a man who not only has great charm but also significant
substance and a view of the world which is in keeping with the times as
we commence our journey into this 21st century.
He proved that during the campaign. He proved it in domestic affairs,
achieving a milestone of success with the tax cuts we passed and he
signed into law a little over a week ago, and then this foreign trip,
which was the first major trip, the trip to Europe, to visit with our
NATO allies and other leaders in the region. We heard the same kind of
questions: Was the President prepared to meet these leaders?
There is a problem here, Mr. President, as you know, and that is that
most of the countries of Western Europe--the majority, I should say--
are governed by left-of-center political leaders. They are, obviously,
not of the same political viewpoint as President Bush, but our alliance
with our NATO allies has gone through a series of changes where we have
had generally conservative leadership, more left-of-center leadership,
and then a combination of the two.
We have always been able to accommodate our differences politically
because of the common goal of providing a defense for the members of
the NATO alliance and in working together in national security matters
that go beyond just the question of the NATO alliance, especially
during the cold war as we were dealing with the then-Soviet Union and
subsequent to that time dealing with other challenges, including the
Balkans and, of course, in dealing with the evolution of the changes
that have been occurring in the country of Russia itself.
That was the state of play when the President made this journey. Yet
what we found was, notwithstanding the political differences of these
leaders, there still is more that binds us than divides us. President
Bush is one of those innate leaders who has the capacity to bring
people together because of the force of his personality, which is one
of reaching out, of showing that he is willing to listen, that he is
willing to accommodate, but also making it very clear he has some very
firm principles upon which U.S. policy is going to be based.
At the conclusion of my remarks, I am going to ask unanimous consent
to print in the Record two very fine pieces by one of the finest
columnists and political writers of our time, Charles Krauthammer. One
of them appeared in the Weekly Standard in the June 4 issue. It is
entitled ``The Bush Doctrine, ABM, Kyoto, and the New American
Unilateralism.'' The other is an op-ed the Washington Post carried on
June 18 in which he makes a similar point that the type of
unilateralism President Bush took to Europe and is intent on pursuing
with respect to United States interests throughout the world is not a
unilateralism that says the United States is going to do what we want
to do no matter what anybody else thinks and basically ignores their
points of view at all, but, rather, as Charles Krauthammer carefully
points out, this new Bush doctrine is a subtle change from the past in
this regard.
It says we are going to identify what we believe is in the best
interests of the United States of America and in the interests of the
rest of the family of nations of the world.
We are going to pursue a course that achieves the goals that sustain
those interests, and we are not going to be deterred by naysayers, by
countries that, frankly, do not have the same goals in mind or by any
kind of international view that everything has to be done by
international accord or it cannot be done at all. We are not going to
have our national security interests vetoed by any other country of the
world. So we will pursue our national interests, and we are not going
to allow other countries of the world that do not share those goals to
dictate the results.
However, that does not mean we are simply going to try to impose our
will on others or that we are going to go our own way and to heck with
the rest of the world. Not at all. As Mr. Krauthammer points out,
President Bush has very carefully conducted an overarching strategy,
and then the tactics of achieving that strategy include a very heavy
dose of consultation, especially with our allies and particularly with
our NATO allies. It also involves consultation with other friends of
the United States, countries such as Russia and India, and other
countries such as China, with which we have had some difficulties in
recent times.
But the point of these consultations is not to tell other leaders
what we are going to do come heck or high water but, rather, to say:
Look, this is what we believe is in our best interests and your best
interests. Let's work together to try to find a way to achieve these
goals. There is some room for discussion. We have not finalized
everything we plan to do, so there is an opportunity for everybody to
help shape the future of the world as we begin this next century. But
there are certain goals and objectives we are going to attempt to
achieve. If you want to be with us we would like to have you come along
and help us find the right way to do that. In that spirit, he visited
with these European leaders.
We all know the President is very convincing. I realize the situation
there is a little different. In politics, it is not the typical kind of
diplomacy coming out of the State Department or other areas of
diplomatic expertise, in our country and in others, where subtlety and
the spoken word are so very important. President Bush is a man who
means and says what he means very plainly. There is a certain advantage
to that when you are dealing with foreign leaders who do not know you
so well. It quickly becomes apparent to them that what you are telling
them is exactly what you believe, exactly what the United States
intends to do, and that there is no guile, there is no hidden agenda.
I think it has an effect of disarming some leaders who might be
looking for hidden agendas or games that sometimes people in the
political world like to play. President Bush is not like that. He has
been very straightforward. He has been very clear about his vision. He
has not wavered from that, which is, of course, tempting to do when
visiting with other world leaders who do not totally share your world
view.
The net result of that diplomacy and the new American vision of
national security for the family of nations of the world has been an
acceptance by many of the European leaders, expressed very overtly. As
the headlines noted, a view among even those who do not necessarily
totally share the President's view is that there is room to work with
this President on these common goals.
Our NATO allies, countries such as Spain and Italy, the Czech
Republic, Vaclav Havel, made some very eloquent statements in support
of the President. The Polish Government, even some statements from
leaders of the British Government, Hungary, and other countries in
Europe, have in one way or another expressly supported the President's
plans for missile defense to protect the United States, our troops
deployed abroad, and our allies. Vaclav Havel said:
The new world we are entering cannot be based on mutually
assured destruction. An increasingly important role should be
played by defense systems.
There are many similar quotations in these various news stories that
were filed by the reporters covering the President's trip.
While there were many European leaders who overtly expressed support
for what the President was trying to do, as I said, there were others
who were not specific in their endorsement but who made it very clear
they believed President Bush was somebody with whom they could sit
down, talk these things over with, and reach some kind of mutual
conclusion.
I was especially pleased this morning to find President Putin being
quoted over and over again, in the lead story
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in the Washington Post saying he believed there was room for the United
States and Russia to talk about these issues.
He was talking about something that has been very fundamental, from
the Russian point of view, to the relationship between Russia and the
United States, the ABM Treaty. There is a suggestion it is no longer
absolutely necessary that that treaty remain in existence as the
cornerstone of the strategic relationship between Russia and the United
States, as he has characterized it. President Bush has said it no
longer is the cornerstone. That was a treaty developed during the
height of the cold war when the Soviet Union and the United States
totally mistrusted each other. Whether or not it helped keep the peace
during that time is totally irrelevant to the circumstances of today,
where the threat of mutually assured destruction simply cannot be the
basis for the relationship, the strategic relationship between the
Russian people and the American people.
It has even been put into the context of a moral statement. Dr. Henry
Kissinger was one of the architects of the ABM Treaty. He was there at
the creation. He has testified to Congress, and he has told many of us,
that it is time to scrap this treaty. He knew why it was put into place
in 1972. He knew the function it might perform at that time. But he now
fully appreciates that it no longer serves that function and, more
importantly, leaves us nude, unprotected, vulnerable to attack by
countries that were not parties to that treaty and never would be. Here
is what he said during testimony in 1999:
The circumstances that existed when the treaty was agreed
to were notably different from the situation today. The
threat to the United States from missile proliferation is
growing and is, today, coming from a number of hostile Third
World countries. The United States has to recognize that the
ABM Treaty constrains the nation's missile defense programs
to an intolerable degree in the day and age when ballistic
missiles are attractive to so many countries because there
are currently no defenses against them. This treaty may have
worked in a two-power nuclear world, although even that is
questionable. But in a multinuclear world it is reckless.
He was even more blunt during a press conference with then-Governor
Bush on May 23, 2000, when he said:
Deliberate vulnerability when the technologies are
available to avoid it cannot be a strategic objective,
cannot be a political objective, and cannot be a moral
objective of any American President.
He is correct. For any President of the United States or Congress to
deliberately leave the United States vulnerable to attack when we
understand that there is a growing threat of that attack, and to leave
in place any kind of legal regimes that would inhibit us from
developing the means of protecting ourselves, is intolerable; it is
morally indefensible, especially, as Dr. Kissinger says, when the
technology is there to provide a defense.
One of the questions raised by some of our European friends was, Is
the technology really there?
By the way, I am somewhat amused by the twin arguments of opponents.
``This thing will be so effective that it will start another arms
race.'' That is argument No. 1. Argument No. 2: ``It will never be
effective.'' It is going to be effective or it is not going to be
effective. I think it will be effective. I also do not think it will
start another arms race.
But what about the state of technology?
The Bush administration has decided that, because of the immediacy of
the threat identified in the Rumsfeld Commission report 3 years ago, we
need to get on with this now; that we cannot test forever to try to
develop the perfect system. There will never be a perfect system, at
least for the amount of money we are willing to spend, and right now we
do not need a perfect system. The threat is from an accidental launch
or rogue nation, and those are not the most robust threats to have to
defeat.
So I think what Secretary Rumsfeld and the President have in mind
doing is fielding, as soon as possible, whatever technology we have,
understanding that it is not necessarily the best and it may not work
in all circumstances.
Now, is that an indictment of what they intend to do? I do not think
so. It is an honest acknowledgement of the fact that there is no such
thing as a perfect shield, and that we are in the beginning stages of
actually fielding this equipment.
We have done a lot of research, to be sure. But, frankly, for
political reasons, a lot of that research has been wasted because the
systems that could take advantage of that research have been stopped
from development and eventual deployment. So we have had a lot of
starts and stops, but we have never gone the next step, which is to
actually put it out in the field and see how it works.
What Secretary Rumsfeld has said is go back to the gulf war. That was
an emergency. We knew the Iraqis had Scud missiles. In fact, they were
beginning to shoot them toward Israel. We did not have a missile
defense. But Secretary of Defense Cheney at that time said: Don't we
have anything that we might employ here? And the answer from the
Pentagon was: Yes, we have the Patriot. It is an anti-aircraft system,
but it is very good at that, and it might be able to shoot down some
Scud missiles.
So they tinkered with it. They took the Patriot batteries that we
had--I think some of them were even test batteries--and put them into
the field. And those Patriots did a remarkably good job. I think that
the end result was somewhere in the neighborhood of about one-third of
the Scud missiles were brought down by the Patriot.
That is important when you recognize--and you will recall, Mr.
President--that the single biggest loss of life of U.S. servicemen in
the gulf war occurred when 28 American soldiers were killed by one Scud
missile.
It is a very lethal weapon if you don't have a defense against it. So
what Secretary Rumsfeld and President Bush have decided to do is to
take what we have--such as the Patriot missile of the gulf war time--
get it into the field and begin working with it, all the while
continuing to test more and more advanced systems. In this way, we will
actually have a rudimentary defense to begin with, and we can continue
to build on that as the technology evolves.
I will give you an analogy. We build ships in classes. We will start
the Los Angeles class of attack submarines, for example. The first of
the Los Angeles class submarines that came out of the dock was a good
submarine, but it was not nearly as good as the last Los Angeles class
submarine that came out many years later. Throughout the time that
basic class of submarines was built, changes were being made and
embodied in that submarine, so that the last one that came off the
dock, in many respects, was not much like the very first one; it was
much, much improved and, frankly, was the basis for the evolution to
the next generation of attack submarines.
And so it is with missile defenses. I believe what the Secretary and
the President have in mind is fielding a combination of air and space
and land systems, combined with the satellite and radar that is
necessary to detect a launch, and continue to follow a rogue missile,
and then provide information at the very end of its flight for
intercept and shootdown.
That combination might include the airborne laser, something with
great promise. It might include standard missiles aboard the so-called
Aegis cruisers, cruisers with very good radar, and a missile which
today is, obviously, not capable against the most robust of
intercontinental ballistic missiles but at least has some capability if
especially you are able to sail the cruisers close enough to the
launching point of the missile.
As those missiles are made bigger, and another stage is added to
them, and a more sophisticated seeker is put on top of that missile, it
will become more and more robust, to the point that at some point it
will have the capability of stopping just about any missile that might
be launched against us. We also have the potential for land-based
systems.
The point is this: The President has in mind moving forward, getting
off the dime. Almost no one, any longer, denies the threat. Even
President Putin has pointed that out.
So the question is: Do you test forever, until you are absolutely
certain, or do you move forward?
I saw my little nephew over the weekend. He is just now trying to
crawl and walk; and he is falling down
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more than he is walking, but he is trying. And the next time I see him,
I suspect he is going to be walking. You don't quit just because you
fell down the first time. And we don't stop just because we had a
couple tests that were not totally successful.
The point is, we will continue to test; we will continue to develop;
we will deploy what we have as we get it ready to deploy, and we will
continue to evolve those systems until we are satisfied that we have a
system that can work.
To those critics who say we don't have the technology or we won't
have it, I say, give us a chance. Let's try. Let's see. Don't say, you
can't do it, and we never start and we never try. The consequences are
simply too great. As Dr. Kissinger said, it would be literally reckless
and immoral for us not to try when the technology is there.
Another question in this respect that the allies asked is, What would
the reaction from Russia be? It is a fair question. Russia has some
concerns. But Russia should not have concerns. Does anybody believe
that the United States intends to attack Russia? Even the Russians have
to acknowledge that is no longer the relationship between our two
countries. And we don't believe they intend to attack us. Why would
they?
So these large inventories of nuclear weapons that both sides have,
frankly, are going to come down. We are not going to maintain that
level of warhead, and we do not think the Russians are either. In fact,
they have made it clear they cannot afford to do so. Frankly, we would
rather not have to spend the money on all those weapons so both sides
can draw down their nuclear weapons.
For anybody to suggest that our building the rudimentary defense is
going to cause the Russians to begin spending billions more to build
new weapons, when they cannot afford to keep the ones they have, is, I
think, ludicrous. It is not going to happen. It is a misplaced fear.
I acknowledge the concern that these people express, but I ask them
to think about the facts. Even Russian leaders have acknowledged they
would not be able to maintain more than about 1,500 warheads--down from
about 6,000 or more that they have today.
So I do not think it makes sense to argue that we should not prepare
to defend ourselves just because the Russians might be fearful somehow
and, therefore, might decide to spend billions more that they do not
have in developing new weapons. Nor do I think that argument applies to
anyone else.
What we are talking about is building a defense that rogue nations
will understand, making it unprofitable for them to develop and deploy
the technology of missile defenses.
Are there other threats out there from these countries such as the
so-called suitcase bomb? Yes, we are spending a lot to try to deal with
that, too. The cruise missile is another challenge that we have to
meet. But the mere fact that we have other kinds of challenges as well
does not mean that we ignore the one that is first and foremost on the
minds of these rogue leaders. Why else would they be spending the
billions of dollars they are spending to develop or buy the technology
for these missiles and the weapons of mass destruction that they put on
top of the missiles? Why?
This kind of weapon offers them a blackmail potential. In the wrong
hands, with this kind of weapon a country can essentially say to the
rest of the world--at the time they intend to attack someone else, or
want to get something from the rest of the world--look, you know we can
launch this missile against you. We have done it in the past. We will
do it again. So you better give us what we want, or you better stay out
of our way, or you better do whatever we want you to do. It is that
blackmail component that worries so many of our leaders the most.
Go back to the Persian Gulf war again. If Saddam Hussein had had the
weapons that could put a missile on London or Paris or Berlin or Rome
or any other country in that area of the world, do you think we would
have had the same quality of allied contingent to face him down in that
Persian Gulf war? Do you think other countries would have been as
willing to join the United States? And if, in fact, those weapons could
have killed a lot more Americans, would the United States have been as
anxious to kick him out of Kuwait?
The argument would have been: Kuwait is of no interest to us,
especially when he can rain so much destruction down upon us. So you
need the kinds of defenses that prevent these rogue nations from
carrying out their aggressive intentions.
That is why--just getting back to the President's visit in Europe
this week--I am so heartened by not only the way he has laid this
vision out but the way he has stuck to his guns, all the while being
very open in his discussions with allied leaders, as well as the
Russians.
I must say, I was also heartened by the descriptions of the policy,
and the steadiness with which Secretary of State Colin Powell and
National Secretary Adviser Condoleezza Rice presented this case again
Sunday on the talk shows. Dr. Rice, despite, I would say, bating by the
questioner, was very calm and very firm in articulating that the United
States will do what it takes to protect the citizens of the United
States and the interests of other freedom-loving people around the
world but that we will do so in a way in which we engage these other
leaders. We will listen to what they have to say, and to the extent we
are able to do so, within the confines of what is necessary for the
United States, we will find ways to accommodate their needs as well.
One of these would be to actually provide that kind of missile
defense protection for them as well.
I applaud the President. I congratulate him for a successful trip. I
hope we will have more opportunities to discuss this important issue in
the future.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that two articles by Charles
Krauthammer be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Weekly Standard, June 4, 2001]
The Bush Doctrine
ABM, Kyoto, and the New American Unilateralism
(By Charles Krauthammer)
i. the world as it is
Between 1989 and 1991 the world changed so radically so
suddenly that even today the implications have not adequately
been grasped. The great ideological wars of the twentieth
century, which began in the '30s and lasted six decades, came
to an end overnight. And the Soviet Union died in its sleep,
and with it the last great existential threat to America, the
West, and the liberal idea.
So fantastic was the change that, at first, most analysts
and political thinkers refused to recognize the new
unipolarity. In the early '90s, conventional wisdom held that
we were in a quick transition from a bipolar to a multipolar
world: Japan was rising, Europe was uniting, China was
emerging, sleeping giants like India were stirring, and
America was in decline. It seems absurd today, but this
belief in American decline was all the rage.
Ten years later, the fog has cleared. No one is saying that
Japan will overtake the United States economically, or Europe
will overtake the United States diplomatically, or that some
new anti-American coalition of powers will rise to replace
the Communist block militarily. Today, the United States
remains the preeminent economic, military, diplomatic, and
cultural power on a scale not seen since the fall of the
Roman Empire.
Oddly enough, the uniqueness of this structure is only
dimly understood in the United States. It is the rest of the
world that sees it--undoubtedly, because it feels it--
acutely. Russia and China never fail in their summits to
denounce explicitly the ``unipolarity'' of the current world
structure and to pledge to do everything to abolish it. The
French--elegant, caustic, and as ever the intellectual leader
in things anti-American--have coined the term ``hyperpower''
to describe America's new condition.
And a new condition it is. It is not, as we in America tend
to imagine, just the super-powerdom of the Cold War writ
large. It is something never seen before in the modern world.
Yet during the first decade of unipolarity, the United States
acted much as it had during the preceding half-century.
In part, this was because many in the political and foreign
policy elite refused to recognize the new reality. But more
important, it was because those in power who did recognize it
were deeply distrustful of American power. They saw their
mission as seeking a new world harmony by constraining this
overwhelming American power within a web of international
obligations--rather than maintaining, augmenting, and
exploiting the American predominance they had inherited.
This wish to maintain, augment, and exploit that
predominance is what distinguishes the new foreign policy of
the Bush administration. If successful, it would do what
Teddy Roosevelt did exactly a century ago: adapt America's
foreign policy and military posture to its new position in
the world. At the dawn of the 20th century, that meant
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entry into the club of Great Powers. Roosevelt both urged and
assured such entry with a Big Stick foreign policy that built
the Panama Canal and sent a blue water navy around the world
to formally announce our arrival.
At the dawn of the 21st century, the task of the new
administration is to develop a military and foreign policy
appropriate to our position of overwhelming dominance. In its
first four months in office, the Bush administration has
begun the task: reversing the premises of Clinton foreign
policy and adopting policies that recognize the new
unipolarity and the unilateralism necessary to maintain it.
ii. abm: burying bipolarity
In May 2000, while still a presidential candidate, George
W. Bush gave a speech at the National Press Club pledging to
build a national missile defense for the United States. A
year later, as president, he repeated that in a speech at the
National Defense University. This set off the usual reflexive
reaction of longtime missile defense opponents. What was
missed both times, however, was that Bush was proposing far
more than a revival of the missile defense idea that had been
put on hold during the Clinton years. Bush also declared that
he would make unilateral cuts in American offensive nuclear
arms. Taken together, what he proposed was a radical new
nuclear doctrine: the end of arms control.
Henceforth, the United States would build nuclear weapons,
both offensive and defensive, to suit its needs--regardless
of what others, particularly the Russians, thought. Sure,
there would be consultation--no need to be impolite. Humble
unilateralism, the oxymoron that best describes this
approach, requires it: Be nice, be understanding. But, in the
end, be undeterred.
Liberal critics argue that a missile defense would launch a
new arms race, with the Russians building new warheads to
ensure that they could overcome our defenses. The response of
the Bush administration is: So what? If the Russians want to
waste what little remains of their economy on such weapons,
let them. These nukes are of no use. Whether or not Russia
builds new missiles, no American defense will stop a massive
Russian first strike anyway. And if Russia decides to enlarge
its already massive second strike capacity, in a world in
which the very idea of a first strike between us and the
Russians is preposterous, then fine again.
The premises underlying the new Bush nuclear doctrine are
simple: (1) There is no Soviet Union. (2) Russia--no longer
either a superpower or an enemy, and therefore neither a
plausibly viable nor an ideological threat--does not
count. (3) Therefore, the entire structure of bilateral
arms control, both offensive and defensive, which was an
American obsession during the last quarter-century of the
Cold War, is a useless relic. Indeed, it is seriously
damaging to American security.
Henceforth, America will build the best weaponry it can to
meet its needs. And those needs are new. The coming threat is
not from Russia, but from the inevitable proliferation of
missiles into the hands of heretofore insignificant enemies.
Critics can downplay and discount one such threat or
another. North Korea, they say, is incapable of building an
intercontinental ballistic missile. (They were saying that
right up to the time when it launched a three-stage rocket
over Japan in 1998). Or they will protest that Iraq cannot
possibly build an effective nuclear capacity clandestinely.
They are wrong on the details, but, even more important, they
are wrong in principle: Missile technology is to the 21st
century what airpower was to the 20th. In 1901, there was not
an airplane in the world. Most people did not think a
heavier-than-air machine could in theory ever fly. Yet 38
years later, the world experienced the greatest war in
history, whose outcome was crucially affected by air power
and air defenses in a bewildering proliferation of new
technologies: bombers, fighters, transports, gliders,
carriers, radar.
It is inconceivable that 38 years from now, we will not be
living in a world where missile technology is equally
routine, and thus routinely in the hands of bad guys.
It is therefore inexplicable why the United States should
not use its unique technology to build the necessary defense
against the next inevitable threat.
Yet for eight years, the U.S. government did nothing on the
grounds that true safety lay in a doctrine (mutually assured
destruction) and a treaty (the antiballistic missile treaty)
that codifies it. The logic of MAD is simple: If either side
can ever launch a first. And because missile defenses cast
doubt on the efficacy of a second strike capacity, they make
the nuclear balance more unstable.
This argument against missile defense was plausible during
the Cold War. True, it hinged on the very implausible notion
of a first strike. But at the time, the United States and the
Soviet Union were mortal ideological enemies. We came
close enough in Berlin and Cuba to know that war was
plausible. But even then the idea of a first strike
remained quite fantastic because it meant initiating the
most destructive war in human history.
Today, the idea of Russia or America launching a bolt from
the blue is merely absurd. Russia does not define itself as
our existential adversary. It no longer sees its mission as
the abolition of our very way of life. We no longer are nose-
to-nose in flashpoints like Berlin. Ask yourself: Did you
ever in the darkest days of the Cold War lie awake at night
wondering whether Britain or France or Israel had enough of a
second strike capacity to deter an American first strike
against them? Of course not. Nuclear weapons are not in
themselves threats. They become so in conditions of extreme
hostility. It all depends on the intent of the political
authorities who control them. A Russian or an American first
strike? We are no longer contending over the fate of the
earth, over the future of Korea and Germany and Europe. Our
worst confrontation in the last decade was over the Pristina
airport!
What about China? The fallback for some missile defense
opponents is that China will feel the need to develop a
second strike capacity to overcome our defenses. But this too
is absurd. China does not have a second strike capacity. If
it has never had one in the absence of an American missile
defense, why should the construction of an American missile
defense create a crisis of strategic instability between us?
But the new Bush nuclear doctrine does not just bury MAD.
It buries the ABM treaty and the very idea of bilateral
nuclear coordination with another superpower. Those
agreements, on both offensive and defensive nuclear weapons,
are a relic of the bipolar world. In the absence of
bipolarity, there is no need to tailor our weapons to the
needs or threat or wishes of a rival superpower.
Yet the Clinton administration for eight years carried on
as if it did. It spent enormous amounts of energy trying to
get the START treaties refined and passed in Russia. It went
to great lengths to constrain and dumb down the testing of
high-tech weaponry (particularly on missile defense) to be
``treaty compliant.'' It spent even more energy negotiating
baroque extensions, elaborations, and amendments to the ABM
treaty. Its goal was to make the treaty more enduring, at a
time when it had already become obsolete. In fact, in one
agreement, negotiated in New York in 1997, the Clinton
administration amended the ABM treaty to include as
signatories Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus, thus making
any future changes in the treaty require five signatures
rather than only two. It is as if Britain and Germany had
spent the 1930s regulating the levels of their horse
cavalries.
That era is over.
iii. kyoto: escape from multilateralism
It was expected that a Republican administration would
abrogate the ABM treaty. It was not expected that a
Republican administration would even more decisively discard
the Kyoto treaty on greenhouse gases. Yet this step may be
even more far-reaching.
To be sure, Bush had good political and economic reasons to
discard Kyoto. The Senate had expressed its rejection of what
Clinton had negotiated 95-0. The treaty had no domestic
constituency of any significance. Its substance bordered on
the comic: It exempted China, India, and the other massively
industrializing polluters in the Third World from
CO2 restrictions. The cost for the United States
was staggering, while the environmental benefit was
negligible. The exempted 1.3 billion Chinese and billion
Indians alone would have been pumping out CO2
emissions equal to those the United States was cutting. In
reality, Kyoto was a huge transfer of resources from the
United States to the Third World, under the guise of
environmental protection.
All very good reasons. Nonetheless, the alacrity and almost
casualness with which Bush withdrew from Kyoto sent a message
that the United States would no longer acquiesce in
multilateral nonsense just because it had pages of
signatories and bore the sheen of international comity.
Nonsense was nonsense, and would be treated as such.
That alarmed the usual suspects. They were further alarmed
when word leaked that the administration rejected the
protocol negotiated by the Clinton administration for
enforcing the biological weapons treaty of 1972. The reason
here is even more obvious. The protocol does nothing of the
sort. Biological weapons are inherently unverifiable. You can
make biological weapons in a laboratory, in a bunker, in a
closet. In a police state, these are unfindable. And police
states are what we worry about. The countries effectively
restricted would be open societies with a free press--
precisely the countries that we do not worry about. Even
worse, the protocol would have a perverse effect. It would
allow extensive inspection of American anti-biological-
warfare facilities--where we develop vaccines, protective
gear, and the like--and thus give information to potential
enemies on how to make their biological agents more
effective against us.
Given the storm over Kyoto, the administration is looking
for a delicate way to get out of this one. There is nothing
wrong with delicacy. But the thrust of the administration--to
free itself from the thrall of international treaty-signing
that has characterized U.S. foreign policy for nearly a
decade--is refreshing.
One can only marvel at the enthusiasm with which the
Clinton administration pursued not just Kyoto and the
biological protocol but multilateral treaties on everything
from chemical weapons to nuclear testing. Treaty-signing was
portrayed as a way to build a new structure of legality and
regularity in the world, to establish new moral norms that
would in and of themselves restrain bad behavior. But the
very idea of a Saddam Hussein being morally constrained by,
say, a treaty on chemical weapons is simply silly.
[[Page S6392]]
This reality could not have escaped the liberal
internationalists who spent the '90s pursuing such toothless
agreements. Why then did they do it? The deeper reason is
that these treaties offered an opportunity for those who
distrusted American power (and have ever since the Vietnam
era) to constrain it--and constrain it in ways that give the
appearance of altruism and good international citizenship.
Moreover, it was clear that the constraints on American
power imposed by U.S.-Soviet bipolarity and the agreements it
spawned would soon and inevitably come to an end. Even the
ABM treaty, the last of these relics, would have to expire of
its own obsolescent dead weight. In the absence of
bipolarity, what was there to hold America back--from, say,
building ``Star Wars'' weaponry or raping the global
environment or otherwise indulging in the arrogance of power?
Hence the mania during the last decade for the multilateral
treaties that would impose a new structure of constraint on
American freedom of action.
Kyoto and the biological weapons protocol are the models
for the new structure of ``strategic stability'' that would
succeed the ABM treaty and its relatives. By summarily
rejecting Kyoto, the Bush administration radically redefines
the direction of American foreign policy: rejecting the
multilateral straitjacket, disenthralling the United
States from the notion there is real safety or benefit
from internationally endorsed parchment barriers, and
asserting a new American unilateralism.
IV. The Purposes of Unilateralism
This is a posture that fits the unipolarity of the 21st
century world. Its aim is to restore American freedom of
action. But as yet it is defined only negatively. The
question remains: freedom of action to do what?
First and foremost, to maintain our preeminence. Not just
because we enjoy our own power (``It's good to be the
king''--Mel Brooks), but because it is more likely to keep
the peace. It is hard to understand the enthusiasm of so many
for a diminished America and a world reverted to
multipolarity. Multipolar international structures are
inherently less stable, as the catastrophic collapse of the
delicate alliance system of 1914 definitively demonstrated.
Multipolarity, yes, when there is no alternative. But not
when there is. Not when we have the unique imbalance of power
that we enjoy today--and that has given the international
system a stability and essential tranquility it had not known
for at least a century.
The international environment is far more likely to enjoy
peace under a single hegemon. Moreover, we are not just any
hegemon. We run a uniquely benign imperium. This is not mere
self-congratulation; it is a fact manifest in the way others
welcome our power. It is the reason, for example, the Pacific
Rim countries are loath to see our military presence
diminished.
Unlike other hegemons and would-be hegemons, we do not
entertain a grand vision of a new world. No Thousand Year
Reich. No New Soviet Man. By position and nature, we are
essentially a status quo power. We have no particular desire
to remake human nature, to conquer for the extraction of
natural resources, or to rule for the simple pleasure of
dominion. We could not wait to get out of Haiti, and we would
get out of Kosovo and Bosnia today if we could. Our principal
aim is to maintain the stability and relative tranquility of
the current international system by enforcing, maintaining,
and extending the current peace. Our goals include:
(1) To enforce the peace by acting, uniquely, as the
balancer of last resort everywhere. Britain was the
balancer of power in Europe for over two centuries, always
joining the weaker coalition against the stronger to
create equilibrium. Our unique reach around the world
allows us to be--indeed dictates that we be--the ultimate
balancer in every region. We balanced Iraq by supporting
its weaker neighbors in the Gulf War. We balance China by
supporting the ring of smaller states at her periphery
(from South Korea to Taiwan, even to Vietnam). One can
argue whether we should have gone there, but our role in
the Balkans was essentially to create a micro-balance: to
support the weaker Bosnia Muslims against their more
dominant ethnic neighbors, and subsequently to support the
(at the time) weaker Kosovo Albanians against the dominant
Serbs.
(2) To maintain the peace by acting as the world's foremost
anti-proliferator. Weapons of mass destruction and missiles
to deliver them are the greatest threat of the 21st century.
Non-proliferation is not enough. Passive steps to deny rogue
states the technology for deadly missiles and weapons of mass
destruction is, of course, necessary. But it is insufficient.
Ultimately the stuff gets through.
What to do when it does? It may become necessary in the
future actually to preempt rogue states' weapons of mass
destruction, as Israel did in 1981 by destroying the Osirak
nuclear reactor in Iraq. Premption is, of course, very
difficult. Which is why we must begin thinking of moving to a
higher platform. Space is the ultimate high ground. For 30
years, we have been reluctant even to think about placing
weapons in space, but it is inevitable that space will become
militarized. The only question is: Who will get there first
and how will they use it?
The demilitarization of space is a fine idea and utterly
utopian. Space will be an avenue for projection of national
power as were the oceans 500 years ago. The Great Powers that
emerged in the modern world were those that, above all,
mastered control of the high seas. The only reason space has
not yet been militarized is that none but a handful of
countries are yet able to do so. And none is remotely as
technologically and industrially and economically prepared to
do so as is the United States.
This is not as radical an idea as one might think. When
President Kennedy committed the United States to a breakneck
program of manned space flight, he understood full well the
symbiosis between civilian and military space power. It is
inevitable that within a generation the United States will
have an Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Space Force.
Space is already used militarily for spying, sensing, and
targeting. It could be uniquely useful, among other
things, for finding and destroying rogue-state missile
forces.
(3) To extend the peace by spreading democracy and free
institutions. This is an unassailable goal and probably the
most enduring method of promoting peace. The liberation of
the Warsaw Pact states, for example, relieved us of the
enormous burden of physically manning the ramparts of Western
Europe with huge land armies. The zone of democracy is almost
invariably a zone of peace.
There is a significant disagreement, however, as to how far
to go and how much blood and treasure to expend in pursuit of
this goal. The ``globalist'' school favors vigorous
intervention and use of force to promote the spread of our
values where they are threatened or where they need
protection to burgeon. Globalists supported the U.S.
intervention in the Balkans not just on humanitarian grounds,
but on the grounds that ultimately we might widen the zone of
democracy in Europe and thus eliminate a festering source of
armed conflict, terror, and instability.
The ``realist'' school is more skeptical that these goals
can be achieved at the point of a bayonet. True, democracy
can be imposed by force, as both Germany and Japan can
attest. But those occurred in the highly unusual circumstance
of total military occupation following a war for
unconditional surrender. Unless we are willing to wage such
wars and follow up with the kind of trusteeship we enjoyed
over Germany and Japan, we will find that our interventions
on behalf of democracy will leave little mark, as we learned
with some chagrin in Haiti and Bosnia.
Nonetheless, although they disagree on the stringency of
criteria for unleashing American power, both schools share
the premise that overwhelming American power is good not just
for the United States but for the world. The Bush
administration is the first administration of the post-Cold
War era to share that premise and act accordingly. It
welcomes the U.S. role of, well, hyperpower. In its first few
months, its policies have reflected a comfort with the
unipolarity of the world today, a desire to maintain and
enhance it, and a willingness to act unilaterally to do so.
It is a vision of America's role very different from that
elaborated in the first post-Cold War decade--and far more
radical than has generally been noted. The French, though,
should be onto it very soon.
____
[From the Weekly Standard, June 4, 2001]
Big Rotten Apple
New York City after Giuliani
(By James Higgins)
Liberalism, or paleoliberalism to some, is what New Yorkers
are told will return to City Hall when term limits force
mayor Rudolph Giuliani to depart in 2002. Four Democrats are
vying to succeed him.
But the potential return of unreconstructed liberalism is
not the most menacing aspect of this fall's election. The
greater threat is the potential return of unreconstructed
crime. Not the kind in the streets, but the kind in the
suites--the suites of city government and the Democratic
party.
Everyone old enough to have watched TV in the 1980s and
early 1990s knows that New York City before Giuliani was
where foreign tourists came to pay the world's highest hotel
taxes while waiting to be robbed and shot. But the depth and
breadth of corruption in the city's Democratic establishment
during the pre-Giuliani years may be difficult for non-New
Yorkers to grasp. The problem was not just a few rotten
apples at the top. Under a series of Democratic mayors--
Abraham Beame, Edward Koch, and David Dinkins--the whole tree
was rotten. It was corruption that the New York City
Democrats stood for even more than liberalism, and it was
corruption at least as much as liberalism that brought
Giuliani to office. It was as if, having jailed much of the
leadership of New York's ``Five Families'' of crime while he
was U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York,
Giuliani had to become mayor to flush out this Sixth Family.
To appreciate the significance of the upcoming election,
it's essential to know this background. The chief reason the
rot was not always visible to outsiders is the canniness of
Dems in the Big Apple. Unlike their counterpart New Jersey
crew, the New York City Democratic leadership has refrained
from putting into the highest offices sticky-fingered
characters like U.S. senators Harrison Williams and Robert
Torricelli. The New York Democrats could have been working
from the template of the mobsters who once
[[Page S6393]]
controlled Las Vegas: They've always chosen clean front
men. There was never a hint of personal corruption on the
part of Beame, Koch, or Dinkins. Their administrations
were another story. Consider:
Under Ed Koch, the entire city department charged with
inspecting restaurants had to be closed because there was
almost no one left to do the job after investigators arrested
the inspectors who were taking bribes. Not long afterwards,
the department that inspected taxicabs had to be closed for
exactly the same reason.
Over an extended period of the '80s and early '90s, the
felony rate among Democratic borough leaders in New York City
approached 50 percent. Criminal defense lawyers tell me that
if senior managers of a private business used their jobs to
commit crimes at this rate, the entire enterprise would be
inviting a RICO indictment.
The Beame, Koch, and Dinkins administrations approved a
contract with school custodians that was close to being
criminal on its face: The custodians were required only to
maintain schools to ``minimum standards,'' and the contract
precluded any effective enforcement mechanism. The lucky
custodians then personally got to keep whatever money in
their budgets they didn't spend doing their jobs. This type
of contract came to an end only after a 1992 60 Minutes
segment showed the custodians spending less time at the
filthy schools they were ostensibly maintaining than
attending to the yachts they acquired--and did maintain--at
taxpayer expense.
As pre-Giuliani taxi and limousine commissioner Herb Ryan
described the system after he was caught taking bribes,
``Everybody else has their own thing. I just wanted to get my
own thing.'' The literal translation of ``Our Thing'' is, of
course, La Cosa Nostra.
This is just a small sample of what the Sixth Family
Democrats and their appointees did--indeed, just a small
sample of what they were caught doing. That predicate
criminal activity is a major part of what in 1989 lured
political rising star and crime-fighter Rudy Giuliani to run
for mayor, a job that for more than a century had been a
political dead end.
____
[From the Washington Post, June 18, 2001]
. . . From a No-Wobble Bush
(By Charles Krauthammer)
``Remember George, this is no time to go wobbly.'' So said
Margaret Thatcher to the first President Bush just days after
Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait. Bush did not go wobbly. He
invaded.
A decade later, the second George Bush came into office and
immediately began a radical reorientation of U.S. foreign
policy. Now, however the conventional wisdom is that in the
face of criticism from domestic opponents and foreign allies,
Bush is backing down.
Has W. gone wobbly? In his first days, he offered a new
American nuclear policy that scraps the 1972 anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty, builds defenses against ballistic missile
attack and unilaterally cuts U.S. offensive nuclear forces
without wrangling with the Russians over arms control, the
way of the past 30 years. He then summarily rejected the
Kyoto protocol on climate control, which would have forced
the United States to undertake a ruinous 30 percent cut in
CO2 emissions while permitting China, India and most of
humanity to pollute at will.
Bush's assertion of American freedom of action outraged
those--U.S. Democrats, Europeans, Russians--who prefer to see
the world's only superpower bound and restrained by treaty
constraints, whether bipolar (ABM) or multipolar (Kyoto), in
the name of good international citizenship.
The word now, however, is that Bush has gone soft. He sends
Secretary of State Colin Powell to Europe to try to get
agreement on missile defenses. He tries, reports the New York
Times in high scoop mode, to cook an ABM deal with the
Russians--shades of the old days. He then concedes there is
global warming and promises action. ``When President Bush
announces . . . that he will seek millions of dollars for new
research into the causes of global warming,'' reported the
Times just one week ago, ``. . . it will mark yet another
example of how global and domestic politics have forced him
to back away from the hairline pronouncements of his first
five months in the White House.''
The Bush administration, explained Newsweek, began by
``playing the bully.'' But then ``the Bushies began to see
that they could not simply impose their agenda on a balky and
complex world.''
The alleged cave has been greeted with smug satisfaction
from those on the left who see Bush returning, after a brief
flirtation with the mad-dog ideological right, to the basic
soundness of post-Cold War foreign policy as established by
the Clinton administration.
Dream on.
Has Bush gone wobbly? Not at all.
Ask yourself: If you really wanted to reassert American
unilateralism, to get rid of the cobwebs of the bipolar era
and the myriad Clinton-era treaty strings trying Gulliver
down, what would you do? No need for in-your-face arrogance.
No need to humiliate. No need to proclaim that you will
ignore nattering allies and nervous enemies.
Journalists can talk like that because the trust is
clarifying. Governments cannot talk like that because the
truth is scary. The trick to unilateralism--doing what you
think is right, regardless of what others think--is to
pretend you are not acting unilaterally at all. Thus if you
really want to junk the ABM Treaty, and the Europeans and
Russians and Chinese start screaming bloody murder, the trick
is to send Colin Powell to smooth and sooth and schmooze
every foreign leader in sight, have Condoleezza Rica talk
about how much we value allied input, have President Bush in
Europe stress how missile defense will help the security of
everybody. And then go ahead and junk the ABM Treaty
regardless. Make nice, then carry on.
Or, say you want to kill the Kyoto protocol (which the
Senate rejected 95-0 and which not a single EU country has
ratified) and the Eueopeans hypocritically complain. The
trick is to have the president go to Europe to stress, both
sincerely and correctly, that the United States wants to be
in the forefront of using science and technology to attack
the problem--but make absolutely clear that you'll accept no
mandatory cuts and tolerate no treaty that penalizes the
United States and lets China, India and the Third World off
the hook.
Be nice, but be undeterred. The best unlateralism is
velvet-glove unilateralism.
At the end of the day, for all the rhetorical bows to
Russia, European and liberal sensibilities, look at how Bush
returns from Europe: Kyoto is dead. The ABM Treaty is
history, Missile defense is on. NATO expansion is relaunched.
And just to italicize the new turn in American foreign
policy, the number of those annual, vaporous U.S.-EU summits
has been cut from two to one.
Might the administration yet bend to the critics and
abandon the new unilateralism? Perhaps. But the crowing of
the Washington foreign policy establishment that this has
already occurred is wishful thinking.
Will he wobble? Everything is possible. But anyone who has
watched Defense Secretary Rumsfield, read Deputy Secretary
Wolfowitz known Vice President Cheney or listened to
President Bush would be wise to place his bet at the ``no
wobble'' window.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, the time
until 10:45 a.m. shall be under the control of the Senator from Kansas,
Mr. Brownback.
Mr. BROWNBACK. Thank you, Mr. President.
____________________