Lugar: Romney is Wrong on New START

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

Stories we're following today, Friday, July 9, 2010:

Romney Misinformed on New START Treaty - Senator Richard Lugar [link]

• Governor Mitt Romney’s hyperbolic attack on the New START Treaty in the July 6 edition of The Washington Post repeats discredited objections and appears unaware of arms control history and context.
• In advancing these arguments, he rejects the Treaty’s unequivocal endorsement by the Defense Department led by Secretary Robert Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He also distances himself from prominent Republican national security leaders, including Jim Schlesinger, Henry Kissinger, James Baker, and Brent Scowcroft, who have backed the Treaty after thoughtful analysis.
• Governor Romney offers additional treaty misreadings and myths that have been refuted explicitly in Congressional hearings.
• Governor Romney also cites Russia’s stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons as a reason to oppose New START.
• Rejecting the Treaty would guarantee that no agreement on tactical nukes would occur. It also would mean giving up our human verification presence in Russia that has contributed greatly to strategic stability under the expired START I Treaty. Having inspectors on the ground in Russia has meant that we have not had to wonder about the make-up of Russian strategic forces.
• New START would strengthen our non-proliferation diplomacy worldwide, limit potential arms competition, and help us focus our defense resources effectively. It offers concrete national security benefits that will make the American people safer, and it should be ratified.

Kyl’s START Op-ed Demonstrates Weakness of Treaty Critics - Max Bergmann in the Wonk Room [link]

• Kyl’s op-ed is incredibly tame by comparison and in fact demonstrates that the substantive case against the treaty is incredibly weak — as Kyl himself barely even touches on any of the standard conservative criticisms and spends the majority of the op-ed talking about issues that have little to nothing to do with the treaty at hand.
• Notably, Kyl doesn’t advocate rejecting the START treaty, instead he actually calls the treaty “benign.” This is a pretty strong implicit rebuke to Mitt Romney and the Heritage foundation.
• Kyl’s tactic is to obstruct and delay… This is also the same tactic Republicans in the Senate have used on almost every issue. Accusations that the treaty is being rushed through are totally false.
• Kyl now seems to no longer believe that there is any urgency to ratify the treaty, the fact is that ratifying START is incredibly urgent.
• Yet now Kyl, seems content to trust the Russians for a whole additional year. In the meantime, our military is losing insight into the Russian nuclear forces and is clamoring for the treaty to be ratified.

NonSTARTer - Barron YoungSmith in The New Republic [link]

• When Mitt Romney decided to oppose the New START treaty in Tuesday's Washington Post—calling it "Obama's worst foreign-policy mistake"—it was an important turning point.
• It means, first and foremost, that the responsible Republican foreign policy establishment is not coming back. Mandarins like George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, and James Baker, who have all testified or written on behalf of the START treaty—calling it an integral, uncontroversial way of repairing the bipartisan arms-control legacy that sustained American foreign policy all the way up until the George W. Bush administration—are going to be dead soon (or they've drifted into the service of Democrats).
• The people who will take their place will be from a generation of superhawks, like John Bolton, Liz Cheney, and Robert Joseph, who are virulently opposed to the practice of negotiated arms control.
• Romney gives off the impression that he's a responsible individual willing to take government seriously.
• Unfortunately, with this op-ed, we may have to accept that that's not actually the case: He's aiming to scuttle a treaty that is backed by the entire defense establishment of the United States—the heads of all the services, the intelligence agencies, Gates, Clinton, and almost all the former secretaries of defense and state—whose ratification has been called "obligatory" by the most hawkish hawks of yesteryear.

Romney v. Obama Cont'd. Can the Center Hold? - Michael Crowley in TIME [link]

• As I noted before, for a foreign policy neophyte Romney is rather boldly defying the views of several Republican wise men, including among others George W. Bush's last national security advisor (and Dick Cheney protege) Steve Hadley, as well as Bush's last (and Obama's current) defense secretary, Robert Gates.
• Now comes Richard Lugar, the Indiana Republican senator who is the ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and another one of his party's most respected foreign policy voices.
• What you're seeing, it seems to me, is a struggle between the GOP's old-guard national security center and an resurgent, post-Iraq hawkish right wing--one that also includes Sarah Palin. The ambitious national politicians are driving the party's agenda to places the seasoned experts don't think it should go.
  

View from the Dark Side 

Debate STARTed On Russian Treaty - Jim Talent in the National Review Online [link]

• Yesterday, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), reacted with a column that, after attacking Romney personally, merely ignored or dismissed (rather than disproved) Romney's objections.
• Kerry states that the preamble to the treaty is not binding by itself and denies that the treaty "impedes our ability to build missile defense against attacks from rogue countries." He does not say that START would leave America free to construct a missile-defense system that could be used against Russian nuclear missiles.
• To the extent that START limits missile defense against Russia, it must and will narrow the options we have to defend against Iran, and, for that matter, North Korea.
• As the case now stands, the Senate should vote against ratification.