Kerry "Hopeful" for New START Vote in December

Today's top nuclear policy stories, with excerpts in bullet form.

Stories we're following today, Thursday, November 11, 2010.

Kerry Says December Looks Good for New START - Josh Rogin for "The Cable" [link]

• Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry (D-MA) said Wednesday that he still believes the New START nuclear reductions treaty with Russia can be ratified during the lame duck session of Congress, despite calls from several Republican senators for more time to consider the agreement.
• Kerry was calling from Israel, the last leg of his overseas trip that included stops in Sudan, Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon. He said he spoke Wednesday to the committee's ranking Republican Richard Lugar (R-IN), Vice President Joseph Biden, and that he put in a call to Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-AZ), the key GOP leader on New START.
• "I'm very hopeful. My expectation is that we're going to try to move to the START treaty and get the START treaty done, because it's a matter of national security," Kerry said on a conference call. "I would think [December] is likely, just given the overall schedule and the Thanksgiving break."
• [Lindsey] Graham (R-SC) seemed to indicate he was for the treaty. "I certainly am leaning towards, I definitely want a treaty because if you can reduce the number of launch vehicles and the number of warheads and still have a nuclear deterrent, that's a good move because it reduces your cost," he said.

Why Senate Republicans Should Pass the New START Treaty - Robert Kagan for The Washington Post [link]

• New START, whatever its flaws, is not a threat to U.S. security. The three previous arms-control treaties, all negotiated by Republican presidents, cut deployed nuclear weapons from near 12,000 to around 2,000. New START reduces the totals to 1,550. Passing it will neither produce a nuclear-free utopia nor disarm the United States.
• But blocking the treaty will produce three unfortunate results: It will strengthen Vladimir Putin, let the Obama administration off the hook when Russia misbehaves and set up Republicans as the fall guy if and when U.S.-Russian relations go south.
• Few men are more cynical players than Vladimir Putin. One can well imagine Putin exploiting the failure of New START internally and externally. He will use it to stir more anti-Western nationalism, further weakening an already weak Medvedev and anyone else who stands for a more pro-Western approach. He will use it as an excuse to end further cooperation on Iran. He will certainly use it to win concessions from Europeans who already pander to him, charging that the Americans have destroyed the transatlantic rapprochement with Russia and that more concessions to Moscow will be necessary to repair the damage. There's no getting around it: Failure to pass START will help empower Putin.
• All this is a big price to pay to derail such a minor treaty. Do Republicans really want to devote weeks of floor debate to this nothingburger next year? With so many pressing domestic issues, and truly significant foreign and defense issues - Iran, Afghanistan, China, the defense budget - a big set-piece debate over this little treaty would be a waste of the new Senate's time. Nor should Republicans worry that passing the treaty in a lame-duck session will help Obama politically. No one in the United States cares, or will remember come January.

START over? - Sentinel Source [link]

• As partisan squabbles and insults dominate post-election activity in Washington, word comes that the Obama administration is poised to make what could be a final effort to salvage the strategic arms reduction treaty with Russia. The plan is to persuade the Senate to ratify the treaty during the coming few weeks, before the new Senate takes over.
• It is astonishing, given all the talk about the need to reduce government spending and enhance national security, that more congressional and media attention has not been paid to this document.
• The treaty is designed to replace an earlier START treaty that was negotiated during the Reagan administration, signed during the first Bush administration and put into effect during the Clinton administration. Since it expired last December, the United States has had no on-site ability to evaluate Russia’s nuclear arsenal and bases.
• But today all Washington decisions are framed by partisanship. Earlier this year, some Republicans were demanding, as the price of even considering ratification, that the Obama administration put up $10 billion to upgrade the nation’s nuclear weapons complexes; that would be in addition to $10 billion the Obama administration already proposed. That development came as the Defense Department was beginning a much needed economy drive. As we noted in this space, the deficit hawks seemed to be losing their claws.
• So treaty supporters of all stripes have but a few weeks to persuade a sufficient number of independent-minded Republicans in the Senate not to hold national security hostage to a partisan charade.

AP-GfK Poll: Public Mixed on GOP Agenda, Backs Broad Tax Cuts but Not Health Overhaul Repeal - Alan Fram for The Los Angeles Times [link]

• People back Republican tax cut plans but not the GOP campaign to repeal President Barack Obama's health care overhaul, according to a poll suggesting that the Republicans' big Election Day win was not a mandate for the party's legislative wish list.
• Two-thirds want the Senate to ratify Obama's nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia, including most Democrats, about 6 in 10 Republicans and independents — and even about half of conservative tea party supporters. Some Republican senators oppose the treaty. The Obama administration hopes to win Senate approval in the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress and will need GOP support to garner the 67 votes required.

Dishonest, Devious, and Dangerous - Fred Kaplan for "Slate" [link]

• Last July, when Mitt Romney attacked the New START treaty in a Washington Post op-ed, I wrote that in 35 years of following debates on nuclear arms control I'd never seen anything quite as "thoroughly ignorant" about the subject.  On the op-ed page of [yesterday's] New York Times, John Bolton and John Yoo take after the treaty with a slightly different set of arguments, and I've never seen anything quite as slippery and dishonest.
• Take the head-spinning syllogism of the first paragraph. The midterm elections, they claim, indicate that voters want the government to abide by the Constitution; the New START treaty jeopardizes our security and thus violates the Constitution's first principles; therefore, the U.S. Senate "should heed the will of the voters" and reject or drastically amend the treaty.
• Two things are suspect about this logic. First, the midterm election campaigns were notable for their utter silence on any issue of foreign policy; to claim a mandate against nuclear arms reduction is risible. Second, nowhere in the piece (and more about this later) do Bolton and Yoo support their claim that New START endangers U.S. security.
• But there is nothing harmful in this treaty. Nobody inside the Senate has any problems with the treaty itself. The Republican whip, Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, who has emerged as the crucial player (the GOP caucus will follow his lead on ratification, one way or the other), is using the treaty as a bargaining chip to prod Obama to spend more money on missile defense and "nuclear modernization" (i.e., maintaining the arsenal, including the replacement of aging ICBMs if necessary). Obama may have to go along with this to get the votes—though the question is whether Kyl will vote to ratify if he gets what he's asking for or whether he's just playing budget games. Neither the White House nor the Senate's Democratic leaders know the answer.
• To most Republican opponents, the treaty itself is irrelevant—though the Senate's failure to ratify it would do more real damage to U.S. security than even the most twisted reading of the treaty's language ever could.