A few months ago, pretty much the entire national security establishment -- Republicans, Democrats, whomever -- agreed that the new U.S.-Russia nuclear-weapons treaty was a Good Thing. Now the likelihood of so-called New START passing is dim and fading. And when a measure as consensus-driven as that goes down, it's hard to imagine any national-security issue in the next Congress won't be politicized to death.
New START would cap the U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles at 1550 warheads -- still way more than enough to destroy the planet several times over. It's estimated that Russia has about 4,600 warheads in its operational arsenal, and the Defense Department disclosed in May that the U.S. has 5,113. The military is united in supporting New START. General Kevin Chilton, the commander of the U.S.'s own nuclear stockpile, testified in June that "our nation will be safer and more secure with this treaty than without it." (.PDF)
But while pillars of the GOP old guard like Henry Kissinger and George Schultz back the treaty, elected Republicans saw an opportunity to bloody Obama's nose. First the argument was that New START would inhibit missile defense, so the military leadership assured senators it won't. Then the GOP's point man on New START, Jon Kyl, wanted money to modernize the nuclear stockpile. So Obama pledged$80 billion for upgrading the weapons and nuclear facilities housing them over the next ten years, and then sweetened the pot with another $4.1 billion. But yesterday, Kyl still said the outgoing Senate shouldn't vote on New START during the lame-duck congressional session, all but dooming New START's chances in the next, more-Republican Senate.
Talking to reporters in the Senate this morning, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton pledged to keep twisting arms during the next few weeks to get a favorable vote, reciting the long history of arms control treaties passing with wide bipartisan consensus. What she didn't say was that those days look like relics of a bygone era -- and that a very uneasy national-security consensus that's held since 2007 looks likely to follow it out to pasture.
Neither liberals nor conservatives like to admit it, but there's been a lot more continuity than departure between the Obama administration and the post-2007 Bush administration over national security. Democrats failed to stop the Iraq surge and end the war, but President George W. Bush ended up presiding over a deal with the Iraqi government to pull troops out in 2011 -- something the Obama administration eagerly embraced. Obama hired the entire surge team -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Admiral Mike Mullen, General David Petraeus, Lieutenant General Doug Lute at the White House -- to help craft his Afghanistan strategy. Count it off: Obama retained Bush's military commissions; voted to enshrine Bush's warrantless surveillance program into law; escalated the Afghanistan war; accelerated CIA drone strikes in Pakistan and now Yemen...
Watch that consensus crumble. Gates' effort to cut overhead in the Pentagon budget is predicated on the money spigot drying up; incoming House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon wants to give the Pentagon even more cash. McKeon suggested in a Monday speech that the new crew of House Republicans wants to keep troops in Iraq beyond 2011, when getting them out is going to be one of Obama's major reelection credentials.
And it's not just going to be Republicans. The Democratic electoral decimation in the House overwhelmingly took out conservative Democrats. That means, as McKeon predicted, a much harder time for the administration to prosecute the Afghanistan war with support inside its own caucus -- especially if it pushes its (incomplete) deadline for (partial) troop withdrawals back to 2014. And how can a more-liberal Democratic caucus accept Obama expanding a shadow war in Yemen?
Some of the people who've held the uneasy consensus together are on their way out the door. Gates, a Republican, will retire next year. Chances are Mullen will, too. The outgoing Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Ike Skelton, who earned McKeon's praise on Monday, lost his seat on November 2.
One of the last bipartisan-minded national-security barons in Congress is Indiana Republican Richard Lugar, the dean of arms control in the Senate. He joined Clinton today in demanding a vote on New START -- and was far blunter than the secretary. "We're at a point where we're unlikely to have either the treaty or modernization unless we get real," Lugar said. If Congress doesn't get real now, over a treaty with the support of the entire military establishment, get ready for two years' worth of unreality.
*Update, 3:56 p.m.: * This post initially included an estimated total of nukes slated for destruction in the Russian arsenal. Thanks to commenter Trollout for pointing out my error.
Credit: Wikimedia
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