The United States Senate must decide by April 28 whether to ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention. The press, the pundits, and the Clinton administration have treated the debate over the treaty as another in a series of battles between “internationalists” and “isolationists” in the new, post- Cold War era.
It isn’t. What we really have here is the continuation of one of this century’s most enduring disputes. In the first camp are the high priests of arms control theology, who have never met an international agreement they didn’t like. In the second camp are those who take a more skeptical view of relying on a piece of watermarked, signed parchment for safety in a dangerous world.
The case for ratifying the Chemical Weapons Convention is a triumph of hope over experience. It is an attempt to reform the world by collecting signatures. Some of the most dangerous nations — Iraq, Syria, Libya, and North Korea — have not ratified the convention and, for all we know, never will. Some of the nations that are signatories, like Russia, China, Iran, and Cuba, are manifestly unreliable and are already looking for ways to circumvent the convention’s provisions.
The convention’s most prominent American defenders admit that the agreement is probably not verifiable. And it isn’t. Chemical weapons can be produced in small but deadly amounts in tiny makeshift laboratories. The nerve gas used by terrorists to poison subway riders in Japan in 1995, for instance, was produced in a 14 ft.-by-8 ft. room. No one in the American intelligence community believes we would be able to monitor compliance with an international chemical weapons regime with any reasonable degree of confidence.
The Washington Post opines that these failings in the convention — the very fact “that the coverage of this treaty falls short and that enforcement is uncertain” — are actually arguments for ratifying it. Presumably, signature of a flawed treaty will make all of us work harder to perfect it.
Great.
At the end of the day, the strongest argument proponents of ratification can offer is that, whatever a treaty’s manifest flaws, it is better to have one than not to have one. How could it be bad to have a treaty outlawing production of chemical weapons, no matter how full of holes it may be?
Well, actually, such a treaty could be worse than no treaty at all. We have pretty good evidence from the bloody history of this century that treaties like the Chemical Weapons Convention — treaties that are more hortatory than mandatory, that express good intentions more than they require any actions to back up those intentions — can do more harm than good. They are part of a psychological process of evasion and avoidance of tough choices. The truth is, the best way of controlling chemical weapons proliferation could be for the United States to bomb a Libyan chemical weapons factory.
But that is the kind of difficult decision for an American president that the Chemical Weapons Convention does nothing to facilitate. Indeed, the existence of a chemical weapons treaty would make it less likely that a president would order such strong unilateral action, since he would be bound to turn over evidence of a violation to the international lawyers and diplomats and wait for their investigation and concurrence. And as Richard Perle has recently noted, even after Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons in flagrant violation of an existing prohibition against their use, the international bureaucrats responsible for monitoring these matters could not bring themselves to denounce Iraq by name. In the end, it would be easier for a president to order an airstrike than to get scores of nations to agree on naming one of their own an outlaw.
The Chemical Weapons Convention is what Peter Rodman calls “junk arms control,” and not the least of its many drawbacks is that it gives effective arms control a bad name. Effective treaties codify decisions nations have already made: to end a war on certain terms, for instance, or to define fishing rights. Because they reflect the will of the parties, moreover, the parties themselves don’t raise obstacles to verification.
But treaties whose purpose is to rope in rogue nations that have not consented, or whose consent is widely understood to be cynical and disingenuous, are something else again. They are based on a worldview that is at best foolishly optimistic and at worst patronizing and deluded.
One of the important things separating Reaganite internationalism from the more starry-eyed Wilsonian version is the understanding that treaties must reflect reality, not hope. The Chemical Weapons Convention turns the clock back to the kind of Wilsonian thinking characteristic of the Carter administration. It is unfortunate that among its strongest backers are some prominent Republicans who have served in key foreign-policy positions. It is true that the origins of the Chemical Weapons Convention date back to the Reagan years, and the convention was carried to fruition by the Bush administration. But let’s be candid. In the Reagan years, the treaty was mostly a sop to liberals in Congress, an attempt to pick up some points for an arms control measure at a time when Reagan was trying to win on more important issues like the defense buildup and the Strategic Defense Initiative. And President Bush pushed the treaty in no small part because he had disliked having to cast a tiebreaking vote in the Senate as vice president in favor of building chemical weapons. Republicans today are under no obligation to carry out the mistakes of their predecessors.
In one respect, the debate over the Chemical Weapons Convention calls to mind the struggle for the party’s soul waged in the 1970s between Kissingerian detente-niks on one side and the insurgent forces led by Ronald Reagan on the other. Back then, conservative Republicans like Senate majority leader Trent Lott knew without hesitation where they stood. They should stand where they stood before, foursquare with the ideas that helped win the Cold War, and against the Chemical Weapons Convention.
