at Moscow Summit

LONDON – If President Bill Clinton had all his wits about him he would challenge the toughest hard-liners on the Republican right to posit a plausible scenario for modern day Russia wanting to go to war with the West. Can anyone really make a case that if the U.S. dropped its guard- and its nuclear allies Britain and France did too – that Russia would move into western Europe and bomb America’s industrial heart-lands?

It is simply intellectually outrageous, which is why no one spells it out. Even Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and Condoleezza Rice choose to speak in more general, vague, even elliptical terms, the content of which is more insinuation and prejudice than rational argument. As for General Colin Powell, the former chief of staff of the U.S. armed forces, the black man who could have been president instead of Clinton almost for the asking, and now being paraded as a possible top foreign policy appointee in the putative cabinet of would-be president George W. Bush, he doesn’t even try. An eminently sensible man he knows better and keeps his mouth shut.

Yet as Mr Clinton prepares for his meeting on Sunday with Russian president Vladimir Putin, the White House has been letting it be known that the world should expect little from the summit in terms of arms control. The promise of a quick move to Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty 3 (START 3) that would cut nuclear weapons on both sides, as agreed by Clinton and Boris Yeltsin in Helsinki in 1997, to between 2,500 and 2,000 nuclear warheads looks remote. (At present there are around 7,000 but under START 2 they will fall to 3,000.) As for the briefly considered Russian wish that they be cut to 1,500, the Pentagon has just rubbished the idea in reports to the president and congress. Clinton has returned to the position where he seems most comfortable: the do-nothing arms controller, who decided early on in his presidency that tussling with the Pentagon and its powerful Congressional allies was not his vocation.

There is an enormous built-in inertia to the nuclear arms business on the western side. (On the Russian side less so thanks to lack of means- the Russian defense minister has said publicly that Russia could not afford to possess more than 500 warheads by 2012.) Western public opinion, in as much as it is roused at all, is more interested in the fate of civilian nuclear power stations and nuclear waste disposal than it is in nuclear armaments. Not even India’s and Pakistan’s graduation to the nuclear club seems to have shaken the torpor, though it is indisputable that if the nuclear powers had contributed their part to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and honoured their commitment to make rapid progress on arms control India would never had had the political face to start the nuclear ball rolling on the sub-continent.

Now on May 8th at the NPT review conference in New York the five established nuclear powers for the first time made an “unequivocal undertaking…. to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals”.

Yet if the process doesn’t begin in Moscow on Sunday where and when does it begin? This summit should be the defining moment of the Clinton presidency, when he summons up all his reserves of political capital and deploys his precious ability to speak to rank and file Americans. (Many people judge him even more persuasive than Ronald Reagan who, by the way, hatched an apparently forgotten understanding with Gorbachev to reduce nuclear armaments to zero.) Clinton also needs to convey to public opinion his sense of Russia’s place in the order of contemporary life (as Putin said earlier this week, echoing Gorbachev, Russia’s home is in western civilization).

Instead Clinton has found himself hoisted on the petard of anti-missile defense and, in calling for a revision of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, shown himself to be a prisoner of the old Cold war Warriors who, having “no demons” left, as General Powell used to say when in office, conjured them up. Not only have they managed to stymie the nuclear disarmament which should have come hard on the heels of the end of the Cold War, they have found new would-be nuclear enemies that require not just missile defenses in Alaska but will require a re-writing of “the cornerstone treaty” (to quote Richard Nixon) ensuring nuclear stability between the superpowers. So narrow are their perspectives it seems to worry them not one wit that they will trigger in Russia a sense of vulnerability combined with a deep suspicion of America’s real intentions that will be quite counterproductive to future attempts at arms control. It will also persuade China that it should build up its presently surprisingly small stock of long range intercontinental nuclear missiles. This in turn could trigger India to build a bigger nuclear armoury than presently intended. All this, combined with continuing American tolerance of Israel’s nuclear armoury, could, in time, persuade presently non-nuclear armed powers like Egypt, Iran or even Brazil that they too should revise their self-denying ordinances. (This is not to exaggerate. Do not put too much store in the “wise old men” of American politics. There was not one American political scientist who predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. And probably the only place you read a month before it happened that India would soon test a nuclear weapon was in this column.)

A month or two ago it was being said in some circles in Moscow that if Washington would agree to a START 3 that would mandate a 1,500 ceiling on warheads, Putin might agree to amend the ABM treaty. Washington has turned this apparent flexibility on its head by saying it will only agree to a START 3 on the old terms of a ceiling of 2,500 to 2,000 if Moscow says yes to modifying the ABM treaty. It is Washington that has moved the goalposts. (If Moscow did momentarily consider a compromise it has now shelved the idea, convinced it has more to lose from agreeing to restraints on U.S. missile defense that it does from U.S. nuclear warhead superiority. Besides, it has read the tea leaves in Washington. Clinton is not prepared to stand up to Senator Jesse Helms who says he will block any treaty negotiated by Clinton.)

Not surprisingly, Moscow does not see why it has to compromise. It has right, if not might, on its side. But it does have one card- Clinton’s historical reputation. Is he as oblivious of this as his behaviour sometimes suggests? Does he want to limp to the end of his presidency, and beyond, recalled in faint memory as the man who lacked moral conviction on the greatest issue of his day and allowed himself to become the prisoner of those who make a living by crying “wolf”? Perhaps if Putin can get that thought through to Clinton then the present American president might decide go out with something other than a whimper.