Republican irresponsibility on START

By Adam Serwer

The Republican attempt to derail ratification of the new START arms control treaty with Russia is a reminder of how far the GOP is willing to go merely to deal the president a political defeat.

Ratification of the new START treaty shouldn't be controversial. It maintains a basic trend in the reduction of the U.S. and Russia's nuclear arsenals that started in the 1980s, when the first START treaty was proposed by President Reagan, signed by his successor, George H.W. Bush, and ratified by the Senate by overwhelming margins. The current military leadership and a number of Republican foreign policy experts, including Former Secretaries of State James Baker, George Schultz, Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell have urged ratification, and three Senate Republicans actually voted the treaty out of committee. That's left the arguments against ratification to the GOP's foreign policy fringe, whose objections -- that the treaty leaves the U.S. with "only" thousands of nuclear weapons, undermines U.S. efforts at missile defense, and limits the use of conventional warheads -- are as Fred Kaplan points out, basically nonsense. That hasn't stopped conservatives from engaging in a dishonest propaganda campaign against the treaty, hoping to deal the president a humiliating political defeat.

The Constitution requires 67 votes in the Senate for ratification. Nonwithstanding the administration's willingness to drag the process out for months to assuage Arizona Republican Sen. Jon Kyl's concerns about the process moving too quickly, and even promising Republicans the pork they were asking for in exchange, Kyl is still indicating he'll block passage, Josh Rogin reports:

"When Majority Leader Harry Reid asked me if I thought the treaty could be considered in the lame duck session, I replied I did not think so given the combination of other work Congress must do and the complex and unresolved issues related to START and modernization," Kyl said in a statement. "I appreciate the recent effort by the Administration to address some of the issues that we have raised and I look forward to continuing to work with Senator Kerry, DOD, and DOE officials."

Of course if the treaty isn't ratified in the lame-duck session, it's basically dead. As with health-care reform, Republicans are pretending to want more time for negotiations when what they really want is to stop anything from being passed at all.

Before Obama's speech in Prague last year reiterating "America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons," there was Reagan calling for a "reduction and eventual elimination" of such arms back in the 1980s. Ever since Obama said he wanted to work towards the goal of a world without nuclear weapons, that banal sentiment, once expressed by Reagan himself, has become controversial. Republican opposition to the new START reflects nothing more than their tendency to reflexively object to anything Obama identifies as a priority.



The new START treaty isn't a massive shift towards Obama's vision of a world without nuclear weapons. As Max Bergmann explains, it mostly retains and modernizes an existing framework under which both countries agree to reduce their arsenals and American inspectors are given access to Russian nuclear facilities. Failing to ratify the treaty, however, could have serious consequences, from disrupting the current non-proliferation regime at a time when the U.S. is trying to pressure Iran to abandon its nuclear program to soiling our relations with Russia when the U.S. is engaged in a nearly decade long war in their backyard. Most importantly, it would eliminate the method by which the U.S. monitors Russian nuclear capabilities.

It's not like Kyl doesn't understand the implications here. Last year, when he was criticizing the administration for dragging their feet on renewing START, he fretted on the Senate floor that "[f]or the first time in 15 years, an extensive set of verification, notification, elimination and other confidence-building measures will expire." Now that the administration has a plan for extending those measures, he's about to let them expire.

Republican leaders have been willing to entertain the notion, common among their base, that the president himself is an existential threat to the country, leaving little room for cooperation. Voting on START means making a choice between indulging the reflexive hatred of their base or acting in the U.S.'s basic national security interests.

The decision shouldn't be hard.

Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The American Prospect, where he writes his own blog.