McCain Explodes Conservatives' Nuclear Myths

In his address on nuclear weapons at the University of Denver Tuesday, Senator John McCain signaled a retreat from the in-your-face unilateralism of the Bush-Cheney years. He is prepared to do what his fellow partisans for the past eight years have adamantly rejected: negotiate significant reductions in nuclear weapons levels with Russia, sign and abide by legally binding treaties, and invest in a stronger, independent International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). On doomsday weaponry, at least, we see traditional "realists" in the Republican national-security elite gaining the upper hand over the hard-liners plotting a "new American century."

By hinging his nuclear policy so much on a new warhead reduction treaty with Moscow to replace the strategic arms limits set to expire next year, Senator McCain suggests his party's security establishment is beginning to realize that, after a decade of treating it as a global irrelevance, Russia matters after all.  The lens he brings is not yet strong enough to fully correct the severe myopia of recent years' conservative vision, with regard both to Russia and to nuclear weapons, but the Arizonan is showing that he is not blind to the blunders of the Bush regime.

It is now all too clear that, from the early days of the Clinton presidency, Washington had been indecently premature in its obituaries for Russia's role on the world stage.  True, the Clinton administration took pains to be polite about Russia's post-communist crisis, avoiding blatant triumphalism and applying the respectful salve of high-level consultations.  But it held the whip hand and did not hesitate to use it on NATO expansion and Kosovo. 

With the return of conservative hard-liners to power in 2001, the gloves came off.  Washington renounced the Nixon-era anti-ballistic missile treaty, invaded Iraq, planted military outposts in formerly Soviet Central Asia, and relentlessly presses NATO expansion into former Soviet republics.  To its surprise, a resurgent Russian state has been pushing back.  Even conservatives quick to scorn a pauper have become grudgingly attentive to Russia's petro-fueled re-empowerment.

Mr. McCain's embrace of an arms reduction treaty with legally binding verification provisions is perhaps the clearest sign that he has gotten over the current administration's allergy to treaty obligations, and he understands that successful pursuit of a larger nonproliferation strategy hinges on nuclear weapons states reducing, at the very least, their outlandish arsenals of mass destruction--a reality of which the Bush-Cheney regime has been in stubborn denial.  Senator McCain even affirms the "dream" of a nuclear-free world, which no Republican president or nominee has done since Ronald Reagan, though he seems unaware that elimination of nuclear weapons is not simply a dream, but a treaty commitment of the nuclear-armed countries under the nuclear nonproliferation treaty.

The trick will lie in persuading Russians that they should accept an American call to reduce their nuclear arsenals.  Certainly if the initiative is in isolation from the rest of a now troubled Russo-American relationship, it may seem distinctly unappealing.  Reductions in nuclear warheads while Washington presses forward with deploying (as Mr. McCain insisted Tuesday he would do)  costly antimissile weaponry provocatively close to Russia's borders--in Moscow's one-time satellites, no less--may seem a non-starter to Russians wary of American attack. 

Perhaps in the weeks ahead Senator McCain will sketch out a larger vision of Russo-American relations, but at the moment his impulsive call to expel Russia from the Group of Eight major powers may hinder his hopes on the nuclear front.  Similarly, his embrace of a pliant "League of Democracies" to bless U.S.-led military interventions, circumventing the United Nations Security Council where Russia is a permanent member, is likely to fuel suspicions in Moscow of a continuation of Bush-era frigid relations.  And, as Hans Blix reminded listeners at a recent forum hosted by The Century Foundation and Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, in response to the current administration's efforts to raise the profile of nuclear weapons in U.S. military strategy, the Russians have now reversed Moscow's long-time pledge not to be the first to launch nuclear weapons in a conflict situation. 

Still, in his speech this week Senator McCain specifically promised to cancel the "bunker-buster" nuclear weapon that President Bush has relentlessly sought to develop, calling it--as many Democrats have--"a weapon that does not make strategic or political sense."  He offers a package of  measures to strengthen the IAEA that would have a real chance of international adoption, at least if coupled with a serious U.S. commitment to a pact for elimination of all nuclear arsenals (a rather higher threshold than a "dream"). 

The first step would be U.S. ratification of the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty that President Clinton signed in 1996.  In the death grip of hard-line conservatives, the Senate voted down the treaty in 1998--with Senator McCain among those then wielding the daggers.  He now cryptically suggests "taking another look...to see what can be done to overcome the shortcomings that prevented it from entering into force."   

Those shortcomings were ideological rather than technical, and fundamentally consisted of fiercely partisan votes orchestrated by conservative diehards.  Perhaps, as a more pragmatic Republican nominee, John McCain's new look at the treaty will allow for a Republican reversal that his competitors will be too charitable to brand a flip-flop.

Comments

[DG]

These are insightful observations, and I wish I could share the optimism. But as I re-read McCain's speech, I find it a typical piece of election rhetoric that actually avoids any binding commitments for the future. Yes, he wants to negotiate new arms reductions, but only "consistent with our security requirements and global commitments" which is as vague as it can be. Yes, he talks about investing in IAEA, but is very clear that it should be doing only what his administration will tell it to do. Yes, he promises to cancel Bush's pet weapon project but leaves room open for a McCain pet weapon - "only...that is absolutely essential for the viability of our deterrent, that results in making possible further decreases in the size of our nuclear arsenal, and furthers our global nuclear security goals" - all three conditions can be interpreted as he sees fit.

Yes, the speech is a nod towards Russia as a country that matters most as far as the nukes are concerned. But it is so at odds with his confrontational record on US-Russian relations - more hawkish than that of the current administration - that it begs the question whether he is hastily trying to reinvent himself for the election season (partly in response to the Democratic candidates who have resurrected the theme of nuclear disarmament, and to make himself more acceptable to internationalist/transnational opinion-makers). And imagining that a would-be McCain administration actually gets to do any of the things he promised, as you say, the trick will lie in persuading Russians that they should be talking with him, of all things, on arms control - while their more pressing interests and concerns are largely being ignored. And particularly when US hardliners, with McCain often ahead of the pack, have been providing so much support to militaristic anti-Russian nationalists in countries along Russia's European borders who enjoy grabbing the headlines in Western press and the attention of their sponsors by constantly trying to provoke or to humiliate Russia.