Which Bush will it be on missile defense?

The emerging conventional wisdom about George W. Bush is that he can
be determinedly principled with respect to certain "big" issues and
ruthlessly pragmatic when it comes to compromising about smaller ones. This
explains, we are told, why he stood his ground on tax cuts but, for example,
decided to bail out on military training at Vieques.

The question now urgently arising is: Will Mr. Bush's oft-stated
pledge to deploy missile defenses prove to be one of the big issues, to
which he will remain steadfastly committed? Or does he see it as one of
those policy areas where he can safely agree to compromises that would
effectively eviscerate his commitment to defend the American people, their
forces overseas and allies "at the earliest possible time"?

This is hardly an academic question. If Mr. Bush sees missile
defense as the moral equivalent of tax relief, he needs to start making at
once no less concerted an effort for the former than he did for the latter.

After all, the battlelines are now being clearly drawn. This was
particularly evident when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was
confronted during a hearing on June 21 before the Senate Armed Services
Committee with the sort of disciplined Democratic opposition to missile
defense last seen in 1998. In the run-up to that year's congressional
elections, the then-minority caucus succeeded on three different occasions
in sustaining exactly the forty votes needed to filibuster legislation
making it U.S. policy to deploy an effective, limited national missile
defense as soon as technologically possible. (The next year, essentially
the same bill passed both houses of Congress with overwhelming majorities
and was signed into law by Bill Clinton.)

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The committee's new chairman, Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, closed
last Thursday's proceedings by pointedly warning Mr. Rumsfeld that "you may
find some of your priorities ... for little things like missile defense,
changed" in favor of greater spending in areas like quality of life, morale,
pay and benefits and retention.

For his part, Russian President Vladimir Putin, the man Mr. Bush
concluded he could "trust" after their 90-minute meeting in Slovenia, is
doing what he can to inflame opposition here and abroad to U.S. missile
defense deployments. After their summit, he has repeated earlier warnings
that Moscow would respond to such an initiative by retaining nuclear
missiles that would otherwise be retired and/or by putting multiple warheads
aboard new missiles that were supposed to carry just one. Such threats of
an arms race, no matter how implausible (due to Russia's economic situation)
or incredible (given the lack of any compelling strategic rationale for such
behavior in the post-Cold War world), are having the predictable effect of
emboldening the critics.

So, too, are indications that President Bush is really seeking a
deal with Putin. The latest indicator to that effect is a report published
by Peggy Noonan in Monday's Wall Street Journal based on an interview with
President Bush last week. This generally very astute observer of the mondo
politico observes that, "One might infer – and perhaps should infer – from the President's comments that he will not attempt to tear the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty up, but instead will move for an amendment that would allow further missile testing." Could Ms. Noonan have completely misread Mr. Bush? Or is she correctly discerning the migration of missile defense from a big issue to a compromisable small one?

The only problem with that idea is that, if President Bush
compromises on missile defense – whether by acquiescing to Senate
Democrats' budget games, by quailing in the face of threats from Russia (or,
for that matter, from China or North Korea) or by trying to negotiate
amendments to the ABM Treaty with the likes of Vladimir Putin – he can
forget about actually deploying protection against ballistic missile attack.
It won't happen on his watch, unless someplace we care about is destroyed by
one.

Here's the rub: The ABM Treaty expressly required each of the two
parties – the United States and the Soviet Union (a country that, by the
way, ceased to exist a decade ago) – "not to deploy ABM systems for a
defense of the territory of its country and not to provide a base for such a
defense." To ensure that such a "base" was not established, the treaty also
obliged each party "not to develop, test, or deploy ABM systems or
components which are sea-based, air- based, space-based, or mobile
land-based."

Senators, Russians and allied leaders who insist that the U.S. must
not depart from the ABM Treaty understand full well the practical effect of
this arrangement. As long as the United States forswears sea-, air- and
space-based missile defenses in particular, it will be unable to develop, to
say nothing of deploy, effective anti-missile systems. And it is impossible
to "amend" a treaty whose sole purpose is to preclude national missile
defenses so as to allow such defenses to be tested efficiently and deployed
quickly – particularly if our Russian negotiating partners remain adamantly
opposed to our doing so.

In short, President Bush must establish at once where he stands on
defending America, its forward deployed forces and allies. If Mr. Bush has
not just been paying lip service to the need for missile defenses, and
remains determined to deploy them, he has no choice but to get started.
Only by displaying the kind of resolve he showed on tax cuts – refusing to
take "No" for an answer, mobilizing his base and the country at large and
not allowing himself to be stymied or slow-rolled – will he be able to begin
to provide the needed protection, first from the sea.

If Mr. Bush does not take that course of action, however, all other
things being equal – big issue or no – he is going soon to find himself
utterly hamstrung by those who oppose him politically and strategically.
What will be compromised as a result, however, will not be merely his
credibility, but the security of his nation and its people.