HOW DO REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL candidates whip the crowds into a frenzy? They tear apart Clinton and Gore, demand tax cuts for hard-working Americans, and reminisce about the Gipper. Now add to this ballistic missile defense. As unlikely as it sounds, the issue — boosting America’s defense against ballistic missiles by declaring the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union obsolete — has become the latest crowd pleaser. “It’s a sign of how far we’ve fallen,” Dan Quayle likes to say, “that more fidelity is shown to a piece of paper signed with a state that no longer exists than to our own Constitution.” It’s one of his biggest applause lines.
Missile defense may not seem like a natural issue Republicans would use to win the White House, or to supplement their congressional majorities. Other than the Republican faithful, few people really understand it, and it’s so obscure that leading pollsters seldom ask about it. The issue has, nonetheless, quietly emerged as a Republican talking point. Nearly all the GOP presidential candidates have incorporated it into their speeches, party chairman Jim Nicholson has made a personal crusade out of the issue, and the congressional Republican leadership has indicated missile-defense bills will be among the first pieces of legislation considered by the House and Senate.
The GOP onslaught has had a predictable effect. On January 20, defense secretary William Cohen announced the Clinton administration would seek a $ 6.6 billion increase in funding for missile defense. Cohen also echoed a GOP theme when he said the administration not only would be willing to modify the ABM treaty, which limits U.S. missile-defense capabilities, but it would be willing to withdraw from the treaty if Russia couldn’t be persuaded to agree to the modifications.
As a policy matter, Cohen’s announcement signaled a landmark victory for Republicans: They’ve been warning of the missile threat from rogue nations like North Korea for years, but the administration has always claimed the threat wasn’t imminent enough to justify a spending increase on missile defense. Indeed, in September the administration vigorously opposed a missile-defense bill sponsored by senators Thad Cochran and Daniel Inouye, charging U.S. intelligence could provide necessary warning of missile threats. Now, the issue is no longer whether to develop a missile defense or whether to modify the ABM treaty. Instead, it’s how.
The first agenda item will be the congressional missile-defense bills, which require the deployment of a national missile defense once the technology is ready. The House bill, sponsored by Republican Curt Weldon and Democrat John Spratt, won’t have any trouble passing. The Senate version, sponsored again by Cochran and Inouye, was one vote short of overcoming a filibuster last year, but is expected to pass this year. Given the new Clinton administration position, a veto seems unlikely. But Cohen, asked in a private meeting recently whether the administration will support the congressional efforts, evaded the question.
The more contentious and more meaningful issue is the ABM treaty. As written, the treaty gives Moscow the right to approve any U.S. moves to build a national missile defense. Jesse Helms, writing recently in the Wall Street Journal, summed up what’s wrong with this picture: “The Clinton administration wants to negotiate permission from Russia over whether the U.S. can protect itself from ballistic missile attack by North Korea.”
Senate Republicans are united in agreeing the ABM treaty will have to be modified if a national missile-defense system is to be deployed. Indeed, some Republicans, such as Helms and Jon Kyl, argue the treaty is a dead letter since it was agreed to with the now extinct Soviet Union. As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Helms thinks he can drive a stake through the heart of the treaty by defeating a set of amendments that would make the treaty apply to Russia and other post-Soviet states. The Clinton administration’s response has been to refuse to submit the amendments to the Senate for ratification, though Helms is still planning hearings this spring to bolster opposition to ratification. And last week, the committee issued a mischievous press release noting that while Clinton agreed in May 1997 to submit the amendments to the Senate for ratification, he had held them “hostage” for 622 days.
Regardless of how these disputes get resolved, what’s clear is that missile defense looks to be part of the political debate between now and the 2000 presidential election. In fact, while Republicans are cautiously optimistic about Cohen’s announcement, the administration has already provoked skepticism about its real intentions. The day after Cohen’s press briefing, the White House had Bob Bell, a senior arms-control aide on the National Security Council staff, conduct his own press briefing on missile defense. He emphasized, in a way Cohen did not, that the missile defense system being considered was “limited,” that a deployment decision wouldn’t be taken until the year 2000 “or later,” and that the ABM treaty remained “a cornerstone of strategic stability.” This prompted Curt Weldon to say he sees “more politics than substance” in the administration’s proposal.
There’s another reason for skepticism. In his January 20 briefing, Cohen explained the administration’s change of heart by citing two factors: a report issued last July by Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defense in the Ford administration, spelling out the multiple missile threats facing the United States, and an August 31 launch of a missile by North Korea, which demonstrated capabilities that had until then been unknown. Yet even after the missile was launched, and the report was issued, the administration continued to vigorously oppose the modest Cochran-Inouye missile-defense bill. With the security climate no different today than it was in September, Republicans believe the real reason Cohen made his announcement is that the administration simply didn’t like the appearance of opposing a national missile defense when North Korea has shown that its missiles can reach Alaska or Hawaii.
Motivation aside, the Clinton administration’s very acknowledgment that a missile threat to the United States exists, and that more money is needed to develop a national missile defense, counts as a Republican policy victory. But it was also a clever way to muddy the differences between Democrats and Republicans on defense issues, undermining the efforts of Republican candidates like Dan Quayle to portray Al Gore as a dove. Perhaps focusing the debate on the ABM treaty, which the administration seems determined to perpetuate, can help Republicans call the administration’s seriousness about defending the country into question. If not, Quayle and the rest of the GOP field could have a tough time using the missile-defense issue as they hope to in 2000.
Matthew Rees is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
