Obama Evokes Reagan in Push for New Start Treaty

It's no surprise that President Obama pumped up the new START in his Saturday address:

Did you listen? It's interesting, since the president's main argument is that the new START is essential to verify the Russian arsenal. The president evokes Reagan's famous dictum, "trust, but verify." But if anyone's breaking Reagan's rule, it's Obama himself. The Russians don't follow the same strategic norms as we do, something I discussed earlier, "Trust Russia on START?" In fact, according to Keith Payne and Tom Scheber:

... compared to those of its predecessor, the 1991 START, New START’s verification measures are extremely weak. Among many problems, it abandons the mobile-missile verification regime of START I, including the provision for continuous monitoring at final-assembly plants for Russian mobile missiles. It virtually guarantees that we will not get useful performance data from Russian ballistic-missile flight tests, leaving us with limited insight into the performance characteristics of new Russian weapons — including such basic items as range and warhead payload. It shifts much of the burden of verification to aged National Technical Means satellites and other sensors, and allows Russia’s deployed mobile missiles to be concealed. Several Republican members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee rightly concluded that “verification in this treaty is very weak.” Sen. Kit Bond (R., Mo.) observed, “This is one that turns President Reagan’s theory of trust but verify on its head. We will trust them even though we can’t verify it.”

And that's not all. Obama is attempting to build an arms control legacy on the scale of Reagan's, and of course he's been playing politics with existing treaties in an effort to hammer through his own vision. As Heritage reported this week:

It is ironic that the Administration is citing the need for verification as justification for treaty ratification—after all, the present verification problem was created by the Administration. The White House did not take the advantage of a five-year extension possible under START I and instead insisted on negotiating a separate agreement. At that time, the Administration justified its approach by saying that it was more important to get the treaty right rather than get the treaty soon. The Senate considered the original START for nearly a year. The Moscow Treaty, which was far less complex than New START, was before the Senate for nearly nine months. The Obama Administration took more than 12 months to negotiate New START but has sought approval from the Senate in less than five. The rush to ratification undermines the important role of “advice and consent” that the Senate must exercise on any treaty of this magnitude.

The Administration’s claim for the urgent need to pass New START and initiate its verification provisions blatantly contradicts the Administration’s own public statements about the absence of any Russian military threat to the United States or U.S. allies. New START would increase U.S. reductions relative to Russia, and “concessions to Russian demands make it difficult to support Senate approval of the new treaty,” according to Ambassador James Woolsey.

Treaties such as New START, a major nuclear arms agreement, require more scrutiny than others. The Senate needs access to the negotiating record that includes all draft versions of New START, memoranda, notes, and communications between U.S. and Russian negotiators. This record is critical to clear up questions on key provisions in the treaty and specifically, how the Russians interpret them. The Senate is constitutionally mandated to give due diligence in its consideration of New START. This responsibility is not consistent with the rushed process the White House is seeking.

And, so, what the rush? Obama claims that it's been 11 months, 18 congressional hearings, and the administration's responded to over 1000 questions. Yeah. So what? Rushing the new START is Obama's method to ram home a flawed pact. And apparently he's calling out some age-old arms control veterans -- realists, such as Henry A. Kissinger, James A. Baker III and Brent Scowcroft --- to lend gravitas to a White House as inept as it is insipient.