Unsurprisingly, John Bolton doesn’t like the new START. Also unsurprisingly, his arguments against the treaty are severely flawed. He believes countries like Iran and North Korea will perceive the treaty as a signal of U.S. weakness and warns of the resulting dangers:
Faced with the Obama mindset, Iran and North Korea are now more likely to fall all over themselves getting to the bargaining table. There seems to be no limit to what they would be able to extract from Obama’s negotiators, to our serious and perhaps permanent detriment.
Really? No limit? So if North Korea demanded certain preconditions for returning to the Six Party Talks, like that the U.S. must agree to a formal treaty ending the Korean War and that the U.N. must lift North Korean sanctions, the U.S. would grant North Korea’s request? Or would the U.S. refuse, as it did earlier this year? And if Iran had proposed a counteroffer to the West’s proposed nuclear deal, the U.S. would have accepted? Or would the U.S. have rejected the proposal and begun pursuing more sanctions, as it also did earlier this year?
Bolton claims that START commits the U.S. to “very low levels” of strategically deployed warheads, which will signal to U.S. allies that the U.S. nuclear umbrella is fragile:
The risk of rips and tears in our nuclear umbrella is not simply that our allies will be less safe, although they will. Beyond that, several friends, concerned for their security, could feel impelled to develop their own nuclear-weapons capabilities. The treaty thus increases the risk of proliferation, exactly the opposite of what Obama believes as a matter of faith.
However, Bolton cannot reconcile the above passage with a point he makes later in his piece:
Take, for example, the treaty clause that each heavy bomber will count as one deployed warhead, regardless of what the bomber actually carries or is capable of carrying. This provision may in fact benefit the United States by keeping our warhead levels up, thanks to our current advantage in heavy-bomber capabilities.
As The New York Times reported last month, this provision means that the new START may not cut warhead levels very much at all:
The nub is how to count warheads. While the treaty will count the actual number of warheads deployed on land- and sea-based ballistic missiles, it will count each heavy bomber as a single warhead, even though they can carry far more…
Although the United States now has about 2,100 deployed strategic warheads, about 450 would not be counted, Mr. Kristensen [an expert at the Federation of American Scientists] estimated. Similarly, 860 of Russia’s 2,600 warheads would not count. To meet the treaty limit, he said the United States would need to cut just 100 warheads and Russia just 190.
Bolton doesn’t grapple with how a treaty that barely cuts warhead levels could have such drastic signaling effects. He also argues that, for various reasons, the treaty gives Russia many advantages over the U.S. Once again, he cannot reconcile this argument with another argument he introduces toward the end of his piece. Noting that “Russia’s unilateral statement accompanying the treaty explicitly states that a qualitative or quantitative increase in U.S. missile-defense capabilities would constitute grounds for Moscow to withdraw,” Bolton asserts:
The president has proclaimed the treaty a huge victory, and it would defy reason to think he would invite Russian withdrawal in the near future. Thus, to preserve his precious treaty, he has given Russia a de facto veto over U.S. missile-defense plans. This national humiliation, because it is implicit, in some ways is worse than an express surrender in treaty language…
If the treaty is, in fact, so beneficial to Russia, one wouldn’t expect Russia to be so quick to withdraw. Therefore, in actuality, the U.S. does have a significant degree of missile defense lattitude without the fear of Russian withdrawl.
Bolton frames his piece as advice to U.S. senators, claiming senators should consider his points during the ratification debate. Senators should certianly entertain these notions but should also be careful not to fall prey to the various contradictions and logical fallacies with which Bolton’s arguments are riddled.
