3. A leader people perceive as strong can get large ratification majorities for treaties. Just as it took staunch anticommunist president Richard Nixon to go to China, Presidents Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr. won large majorities for arms pacts because the public trusted them. President Obama is less well trusted, and the modest margin of passage for New START reflects this reality.
These factors have to do with gaining support for and ratifying treaties; they apply before the fact. The more important lesson of arms-control agreements, stated at the beginning of the chapter as the Second Lesson of nuclear-age history and repeated here, has to do with how the treaties work in the months and years after they are signed: Arms agreements work well only if the parties correctly perceive commonality of strategic interest. The Soviet Union ruthlessly exploited loopholes in SALT I, while ardent arms-control supporters held America to narrow interpretations of what the treaty permitted. The INF and START I treaties worked well, because Mikhail Gorbachev indeed was a different Soviet leader: he ended the Soviet quest for global dominance, freed his country’s captive nations, and turned the country inward for reform efforts. The 2002 SORT Treaty came when Russian leader Vladimir Putin was acting as an ally of the United States, and worked well. But Putin ended linkage of arms treaties to country conduct later in the decade. Most notably, he invaded Georgia—America’s ally and Russia’s former satellite republic—in 2008.
The years 1967–1992 were the apogee of arms control. Arms-control primacy in Western countries elevated it to an exalted place, supreme above all other competing security priorities, as the path to escape nuclear nightmares. Formalist objections to particular provisions in SALT I were put aside, in pursuit of ending “the arms race”; not until several years later did it become clear that America’s freeze of its arsenal did not encourage the Soviets to freeze its arsenal. Jimmy Carter’s own defense secretary, Harold Brown, conceded that the Soviets built even while we were cutting.
Ironically, New START reflected the Obama administration’s Cold War mindset: a treaty between superpowers. Yet Russia is no longer a true superpower, although it is still able to cause lots of trouble around the world. It makes no sense to place current-day Russia’s concerns at a level higher than those of all other nations. In terms of arms control and deterrence, Barack Obama has traveled in time back to 1967, to the days of mutual assured destruction, placing superpower arms concord above deploying full-scale missile defense as insurance against future “clandestine cache” strategic surprise. To put that in perspective, imagine that President Johnson in 1967 had based American policy on how things looked in 1922. That was the year the Washington Naval Treaty put limits on ships and their armaments. Leaders of the great democracies thought these limits would prevent a second world war. Tyrants in Germany and Japan ended that fantasy.
The Cold War turned out better, but arms accords did not bring about the collapse of the evil empire, nor can it be proven that they alone prevented a nuclear war. All that can be known are two truths: The accords, whether wise or not, did not realize the worst fears of their critics. Equally, it can be said, they did not realize the high hopes of their ardent supporters. They were politically salient, bringing a measure of political peace in Western countries, but ultimately of marginal impact on strategic affairs save for missile defense. Missile defense research lagged and was skewed by arms-control priorities. We are thus more vulnerable to small-power strikes than likely we would be had our research and development on missile defense proceeded without impediments arising out of the prevailing U.S. interpretation of Cold War arms agreements.
President Obama’s “open mic” exchange with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev at the March 2012 Nuclear Summit exemplified his preoccupation with arms control over missile defense, an attitude that animated the now-defunct ABM Treaty.[16] The president noted that missile defense is a “particular” concern, thus indicating an intention to move towards Moscow’s position after the U.S. 2012 election. Indeed, the White House has sought to share sensitive missile defense data with Moscow, a move strongly opposed by many members of Congress.
Arms control is an essential tool, not a talisman. Agreements with adversaries are possible, but only when interests in fact coincide, as they do with efforts to avoid accidental war, and with several later arms treaties. It is dangerous for America to assume that an enemy’s strategic interests are the same as its own—as Jimmy Carter learned when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and George W. Bush learned when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia. Commonality of strategic goals was, in those cases, simply absent. With Russia, President Reagan put it best by often citing a Russian proverb: “Trust, but verify.”
Soviet leaders were hardly immune to mirror-imaging fallacies—that is, the assumption that one’s opponent behaves like oneself. Riding in Los Angeles during his 1959 visit to America, Khrushchev spotted a sign held up by a woman protesting the Hungarian revolt, brutally suppressed by the Soviets in 1956. The sign read: “Death to Khrushchev, the Butcher of Hungary.” Khrushchev angrily turned to American UN Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge: “Well, if Eisenhower wanted to have me insulted, why did he invite me to come to the United States?” Lodge was incredulous at this question, but Khrushchev persisted: “In the Soviet Union, she wouldn’t be there unless I had given the order.” This was no idle boast. Dean Rusk, secretary of state during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, recounted how during a demonstration in front of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, a staffer asked a Russian soldier how long it would last. The Russian glanced at his watch and replied: “Sixteen minutes.”
It would take the end of the Cold War to relieve much public anxiety about nuclear arms races that had in fact long since ended. What is remarkable to anyone who lived through the height of the Cold War was how little a splash the New START strategic arms treaty of 2010 made in the public imagination. There were, by then, even scarier prospects than that of superpower nuclear war.
The question pending after the ratification of New START is not one of war between Russia and America. Russia never did want a direct shooting war with America, and throughout the Cold War fought hot wars by proxy only. Dangers elsewhere—proliferation in North Korea, Iran’s nuclear quest, a potential Islamist takeover in nuclear-armed Pakistan—are unaffected by New START. History simply fails to support the hope expressed by President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that we are furthering nuclear arms control elsewhere by setting an example with our own reductions. With America’s huge arsenal dramatically shrunk and its needed modernization stalled, other powers large (Russia, China) and small (Pakistan, North Korea, Iran) cheerfully ignore us.
5.
IRAN AND THE MIDEAST: SLIDING TOWARDS NUCLEAR WAR
Our dear Imam [Khomeini] ordered that the occupying regime in Al-Qods [Jerusalem] be wiped off the face of the earth. This was a very wise statement. The issue of Palestine is not one on which we could make a piecemeal compromise…. This would mean our defeat. [Anyone who recognizes Israel] has put his signature under the defeat of the Islamic world.
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OBAMA: “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this can be solved but it’s important for [incoming president Vladimir Putin] to give me space.”
MEDVEDEV: “Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you.”
OBAMA: “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.”
MEDVEDEV: “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”