U.S. President Barack Obama's administration and its allies on the left would have us believe that the Senate's failure to ratify a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia before the end of the year will significantly damage the security of the United States. "There is no higher national security priority for the lame-duck session of Congress. The stakes for American national security are clear, and they are high," Obama intoned last week.
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Meanwhile, some on the right are arguing that ratification of New START would put the United States at a disadvantage in its strategic relationship with Russia, lead to a surge in nuclear proliferation, and empower rogue regimes such as Iran and North Korea.
Neither side is correct. New START is a rather meaningless arms-control agreement notable more for what it fails to do than what it achieves.
Obama hoped to accomplish much more in his negotiations with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. When he laid out his goal of a world without nuclear weapons in Prague in April 2009, he described New START as a concrete step toward achieving his vision. "To reduce our warheads and stockpiles, we will negotiate a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Russians this year," he said. "And this will set the stage for further cuts, and we will seek to include all nuclear-weapons states in this endeavor."
By the time the treaty was signed a year after that speech, it had largely been stripped of these lofty goals. After months of tortuous negotiations, it became evident that Russia had no interest in drastically reducing its nuclear stockpile, which currently stands at roughly 1,700 warheads. In fact, Russia is already technically in compliance with the treaty's new limits on deployed delivery systems -- 700 -- even before New START has been ratified.
As Obama struggles to get his first step toward a nuclear-weapons-free world past the Senate, the further cuts he promised in Prague also look increasingly unlikely. The Russians have made clear that they will only discuss cuts to their tactical nuclear forces -- estimated at as many as 2,000 operational weapons, many of which sit across the border from America's NATO allies -- if the United States withdraws its much smaller number of tactical weapons from Europe, which is certain to be a nonstarter for Washington and its allies in Central Europe.
Much of the criticism from the president's Republican critics about New START has been well intentioned but exaggerated. The fact of the matter is that New START could have been much worse. If anything is worth criticizing, it is the president's singular focus on a fanciful vision of nuclear disarmament. This has come at the expense of serious action on efforts to prevent and halt proliferation, distracting him from real challenges such as North Korea, which just revealed a new uranium-enrichment facility, and Iran, which despite problems with its centrifuges at Natanz, continues to make steady progress toward a nuclear-weapons capability.
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