In a surprisingly brief statement issued from his ranch in Texas, US President George W. Bush has just finalized his decision to cancel one of the principal elements of a global security system that has been in place since 1972. The decision, one of the most crucial taken by an American president in 30 years, is important enough to merit attention from US allies, not only in Europe but also in Asia and the Arab world.
The decision is to walk out of the Anti-Ballistics Missile (ABM) Treaty that the US signed with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. The treaty was based on a doctrine, originally developed by the US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the mid-1960s. Under it, the US and the Soviet Union agreed to produce and deploy enough nuclear warheads to destroy one another in case of a thermonuclear conflict. The doctrine was known as “Mutually Assured Destruction”. MAD is based on the assumption that a country that knows it would be completely destroyed even if manages to destroy its adversary would have no interest in triggering a thermonuclear war. The 1972 treaty stipulated that the signatories would not be able to develop anti-missile weapons systems. This was to make sure that fear of destruction will remain as a major deterrent.
For the past six months, the new US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been touring European and some Asian capitals to assure allies that the anti-missile system, “Missile Defense Initiative” (MDI), a kind of space “umbrella”, will also cover them.
Two questions need to be asked.
The first is: Who will this “umbrella” be raised against? Washington says this is not against Russia that is now regarded as a “friend and partner”. US leaders have also tried to reassure China. But the fact remains that if the US succeeds in creating such an “umbrella”, the entire nuclear missile arsenals of both Russia and China could become ineffective against American targets. Russian and Chinese nuclear warheads carried by aircraft, ships or submarines are already vulnerable to defensive action and counteraction by American air force and navy. The only area where the US is utterly defenseless is that of an attack by ballistic missiles with nuclear, chemical or bacteriological warheads.
The Russians and the Chinese claim that if they lose their only means of threatening the US, there is no reason why Washington would not bully them in political and economic domains without fear of provoking a nuclear conflict.
The Americans find this logic strange, to say the least. They say a similar argument could be made against the US having any navy or air force to prevent attacks from the sea or air. All that the MDI does is to ensure US defense in an existing potential theatre of war. The proposed system cannot attack anybody; all it can is destroy missiles fired against the US before they reach their targets.
The French oppose the MDI for another reason. They say such a system would turn the US from a “superpower” into a “hyper-power” which no longer needs to fear anyone or anything. Suddenly a new category of military power will be created in which the US will be far above all the existing nuclear powers such as France, Britain, Russia and China.
Washington has tried to allay such fears by proposing that Russia and the Western European countries join the scheme. But this is easier said than done. Russia does not have the kind of money needed for such high-cost defense mechanisms. The Russian government cannot pay its employees regularly, let alone find billions of dollars to embark on an arms race against a super-rich US. Many of the wealthy European nations also find it hard to mobilize the financial resources needed. But even if the money were found, the result would be the dependence of Russia and the European Union nations on American military technology and supplies.
The Americans, of course, say that Russia and the Europeans can develop their own MDI systems independently. But that, too, is easier said than done. Even if they started today, Russia and the EU would be more than 20 years behind the US in this particular field of research.
The Chinese have even worse suspicions. They believe that the proposed American “umbrella” is designed to trigger a new arms race that could wreck China’s still fragile economy. Clinton had described China as “a strategic ally”. Bush, however, sees China more like a potential rival if not actual adversary for the US. China’s defense budget is just about nine percent of the American defense budget. And yet Chinese defense expenditure amounts to almost 20 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. The US, however, spends less than 3 percent of its GDP on defense. The US would need to raise military spending almost seven times to reach the present Chinese rate. China, however, could wreck its economy if it tried even to double its defense expenditure to 40 percent of the GDP.
Washington says the MDI “umbrella” is aimed against “rogue states”, and names North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Cuba. That claim is hardly convincing. It assumes that the countries named will experience no internal political change for the next 10 to 15 years, the period needed for the “umbrella” to be made and deployed. Most experts, however, believe that almost all those countries will see major policy and leadership changes much sooner than expected.
In any case even if the “rogue states” were to stay unchanged and pose a missile threat, their principal targets would be US regional allies such as Japan, South Korea and the Arab states of the Gulf and the Middle East. None of them has the capacity to produce and stockpile enough intercontinental missiles to hit the US itself. Thus the American umbrella should be primarily developed for US allies.
The second question is: Will US allies seek such an umbrella? If they do now they may expose themselves to attacks before the umbrella is made and opened. Also, it is not clear who will pay for such a costly system were it to be deployed in the Far East or the Gulf.
Bush’s 16-word statement from his Texas ranch is certainly not enough. Washington has a great deal more of explaining to do if it wishes to address the concerns raised by its decision to cancel the ABM and end a 32-year system based on a balance of terror.
