President Obama’s team gave up on an attempt to pass a United Nations resolution on nuclear weapons test bans that might have circumvented the constitutional treaty requirements, earning rare approval from skeptical Republicans in the process.
Obama had considered the endorsement of a U.N. resolution on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which the Senate rejected in 1999. Senate Republicans argued the draft version of the resolution would bar future nuclear tests, in defiance of the Senate. The U.N. passed the resolution, but only after deleting the language that Republicans viewed as an attempt to bind the United States from testing nuclear weapons.
“Any attempt to circumvent Congress by using a backdoor process to attempt to implement a treaty the Senate has voted to reject would have been wholly inappropriate and set a dangerous precedent, and I am pleased the engagement of the members of our committee in this issue has dissuaded additional executive branch overreach by this administration,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said Friday.
State Department officials originally intended to pair the resolute with a “political statement” stipulating that future nuclear tests “would defeat the object and purpose” of the test ban treaty. For purposes of international law, that language would have required the United States to abide by the treaty. “[T]he State Department is in effect submitting the United States to the restrictions of a treaty that has not entered into force,” Corker protested in an Aug. 12 letter. “[S]eeking to limit a future administration through a customary international law mechanism, when your administration has only four months left in office, is not appropriate.”
Thirty-three Senate Republicans threatened to retaliate by cutting funding for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) Preparatory Commission budget in a September letter to Obama. “We urge you to respect your constitutional obligations and warn that if you do not, your efforts at the United Nations on this issue are likely to set back any supposed progress on achieving a testing ban, rather than advancing it,” the letter said.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., the author of the letter, joined Corker in declaring a provisional victory after the U.N. dropped the offending “object and purpose” language.
“I am pleased the Administration appears to have walked back from its initial intention to seek a Security Council resolution purporting to create a binding obligation on the United States to comply with a treaty the U.S. Senate has not ratified,” Rubio said.
“Because of the Obama administration’s retreat from the world stage, our allies in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia are questioning the U.S. nuclear umbrella, and even contemplating the development of their own nuclear capabilities. On President Obama’s watch, the likelihood of a highly-proliferated nuclear world has increased exponentially. Preventing such a disaster will not come through more arms control agreements, but from bolstering our nuclear deterrent and strengthening our alliances,” he added.
