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Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

rshowalter - 11:28pm Sep 18, 2001 EST (#9419 of 9422)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

"Diplomats noted that Mr. Bush sent a high-level envoy, John R. Bolton, to Moscow on Monday to push forward on American missile defense plans, even though a decision by Mr. Bush to withdraw unilaterally from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 would raise questions of a return to a "go it alone" ethos in international affairs.

"President Bush's father last week seemed to be the first to declare dead the sort of unilateralism that prevailed in the administration's early months. He told a Boston audience, "Just as Pearl Harbor awakened this country from the notion that we could somehow avoid the call to duty and defend freedom in Europe and Asia in World War II, so, too, should this most recent surprise attack erase the concept in some quarters that America can somehow go it alone in the fight against terrorism or in anything else for that matter."

"No one has suggested, least of all the former president, that his statement represented criticism of his son or the current administration. But it seemed an unmistakable effort by the father to assert that the son was breaking with the recent past.

"If policy is changing, nobody seems quite sure where it is heading. Just what Mr. Bush, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Vice President Dick Cheney meant when they indicated that harboring terrorists would be a casus belli in the fight against terrorism remained unclear.

"In Moscow, an influential parliamentarian, Aleksei G. Arbatov, said although the consensus there was "total moral support" for the United States and the struggle against terrorism, there also existed a strong humanitarian concern "not to resort to massive strikes, to nonselective actions which are unjustified from the moral point of view, to avenge the death of thousands of innocent people with the deaths of tens of thousands of other innocent people."

"Karl Kaiser, a foreign policy expert in Germany, said the "experience of the first months of the administration caused a great deal of concern in Europe about unilateralism."

""However," Mr. Kaiser said, "something rather extraordinary has happened, and the reaction of the administration thus far, contrary to some fears that existed, was so different, so cautious and stressing the need to act with others." As a result, Mr. Kaiser suggested that at least for now "the image of the cowboy shooting from the hip is gone."

rshowalter - 11:30pm Sep 18, 2001 EST (#9420 of 9422)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

The diplomats are being graceful and diplomatic. Even so, it occurs to me that American pretensions of unilateral power, to be weilded without cost, are under pressure.

I recall a circumstance from days long ago. In 1969, when I was a Senior at Cornell, there were political difficulties.

There was a time when negotiations on territorial and conceptual matters were tense.

An able student radical had crossed swords with the Proctor of the University on various occasions.

This student, who may have had noble motives, but liked the girls in the anti-war movement as well, showed up in the path of this University officer, a Proctor named George, if I remember aright, with a large pin conspicuously on his sweater. The pin read:

" I am not yet convinced that the Proctor is a horse's ass."

Proctor George lost his gravitas and laid violent hands on this student.

Within no more than ten minutes, more Cornell students than not (thousands, anyway) were wearing new pins. The pins bore a simple message.

" I'm convinced."

Somehow, this story occurs to me now.

. . . .

Diplomats can be diplomatic. But very tough, as well.

rshowalter - 11:39pm Sep 18, 2001 EST (#9421 of 9422)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

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