Damn The Treaties: Full Speed Ahead

WASHINGTON -- There is something about a treaty -- especially an arms treaty -- that the Bush administration doesn't like.

Now that the Cold War has been over for almost 12 years, President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and his other hawkish advisers want to shelve past arms limitation pacts as useless relics of ancient history.

Last weekend's successful test of a rocket-launched interceptor against a dummy warhead over the Pacific provided a thrill for those who want to junk the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with Russia and to move full-speed ahead with development of a national missile defense system, which that treaty forbids.

Most of Bush's top advisers don't want to seek an amendment to the pact to accommodate these new developments. Instead, they want to scrap the entire 30-year-old treaty, even when they have nothing better to replace it with yet.

There is an attitude in this administration that we can go it alone in the world. We are, after all, king of the road and the skies. The rationale behind this bulldozer approach is that we have "transparency" -- that is, our policies and government are open to public inspection -- and therefore we can be trusted. But when it comes to national security and secret weaponry, we are not entirely an open book, nor should we be.

Administration officials may deny it, but unilateralism seems to be the goal. That adds up to isolationism and is based on arrogance and over-confidence.

To pursue wider testing of the national missile defense system, the United States would have to give six months' notice to the Russians that it is withdrawing from the ABM pact. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld indicates that the administration is ready to do that unless there can be some other accommodation with the Russians that will allow the United States to build a missile shield. This is something Bush fully intends to do unless Democrats in the Senate stop him.

The 1972 treaty, negotiated by President Richard M. Nixon and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev, has worked. It helped keep world peace throughout the years when the superpowers were at a standoff.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that if the United States pulls out of the ABM treaty, Russia will consider all other arms-control agreements with the United States to be void. China also has threatened to beef up its nuclear arsenal if the United States goes ahead with an anti-missile shield.

There is a voice of reason in the top reaches of the Bush administration -- that of Secretary of State Colin Powell. The problem is that Powell doesn't seem to have the clout to convince Bush that his drive for a national missile defense program will be fueling another arms race without a new agreement with Moscow.

Powell recently told The Washington Post that the United States needs "an understanding, an agreement, a treaty -- something with the Russians that allows us to move forward with our missile defense programs."

Rice disagrees on the need for new agreements with the Russians. She notes that the "old implacable" hostility with Russia is gone and that it would be impossible to hide anything in our transparent society. The United States and Russia, she added, have developed a new normal relationship where treaties would not have to be negotiated on "every warhead and every element of our relationship."

"We believe it's time to move beyond that framework," she explained. "We are open as to the forum that this finally takes, but I can tell you that we really do believe that it's time to leave behind this really rather abnormal way of doing business."

I asked her, "You are saying it's not necessary" to formalize an understanding?

She replied: "I'm saying it's not necessary, that's correct."

That's not all.

Bush has no intention of reviving the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which the Senate defeated in 1999. The treaty, negotiated in 1995, would ban all nuclear test explosions and thereby prevent the development of new nuclear weapons.

Bush's opposition to the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty is well known. He also has rejected the International Criminal Court negotiated by United Nations member nations in 1998 that would have jurisdiction over the prosecution of persons accused of war crimes.

Rice's antipathy toward arms-control treaties is apparent. Although she served as a Soviet specialist on the National Security Council in the Reagan White House and helped to draft these treaties, she now labels them as "obsolete." She left before President Ronald Reagan's first term ended and went on to serve as provost at Stanford University.

She's too eager to junk the treaty framework that has helped keep peace between the world's two greatest nuclear powers. And she's against any new agreement on the basis that none is needed. It makes more sense to stick with the agreements that have stood the test of time until we and the Russians mutually agree on a new set of rules.