Unilateral Action and Leadership: Or, Goodbye ABM Treaty
JINSA applauds President Bush’s announced intention to invoke the withdrawal clause of the ABM Treaty as the fulfillment of a promise and a necessary step toward the defense of our homeland. We believe it will make ours a stronger and more secure country.
The first indication of that is the equanimity with which Russia accepted the President’s decision. Mr. Putin surely would have preferred to keep the Treaty, but having to choose between it and the President’s good will, he wisely opted for the latter.
JINSA applauds President Bush’s announced intention to invoke the withdrawal clause of the ABM Treaty as the fulfillment of a promise and a necessary step toward the defense of our homeland. We believe it will make ours a stronger and more secure country.
The first indication of that is the equanimity with which Russia accepted the President’s decision. Mr. Putin surely would have preferred to keep the Treaty, but having to choose between it and the President’s good will, he wisely opted for the latter.
Would that our friends in Europe could do the same, but the old “unilateralist” tag is rising again from the Continent. European criticism of Mr. Bush’s priorities was muted after 9-11 because it was indelicate, and because use of the word “coalitions” in preparing the subsequent war led some to believe that the President forgot that American national interests are supposed to come first. He didn’t.
The US is doing precisely what the President promised the American people would be done, and he invited others to join us. But except for those whose participation is essential to our plans (Britain, Pakistan, Uzbekistan) no one quite knows who is in and who is out of any coalition. Syria is altogether out; what has that stopped us from doing that we otherwise would have done? Has Lebanon’s objection changed our plans? From our perspective then, the war is going as we planned, and as we lead.
American leadership abounds this month. We boycotted the UN travesty in Geneva where countries convened to denounce Israel’s governance in the territories as a violation of the 4th Geneva Convention, which was designed to prevent Nazi-like depredations against civilian populations. The parallelism was unacceptable to the United States and so, as in Durban last summer, we refused to be party to it.
The US walked out of the international conference on enforcement mechanisms for the Biological Weapons Convention, forcing a “cooling off period” in the negotiation. The protocol under discussion would not have prevented countries from acquiring or developing such weapons, but by virtue of their signatures, they would have to be given the benefit of the doubt. Giving Saddam, who has already used chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and his own civilians, the benefit of any doubt was abhorrent to American negotiators (including John Bolton, formerly of JINSA’s Advisory Board). They refused to be party to a sham with potentially devastating consequences.
And now the fulfillment of the promise to build defenses for the American homeland, which, we believe will be coupled with fulfillment of the President’s promise to reduce our offensive nuclear arsenal to the lowest level consistent with American security.
Goodbye ABM Treaty; hello American leadership.