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New START and “The Will of the Voters”

The Senate should heed the will of the voters and either reject the treaty or amend it so that it doesn’t weaken our national defense. ~John Bolton I know, Bolton will be Bolton, but this has to be the sorriest bit of self-serving election analysis ever written. The Senate should heed the “will of the […]

The Senate should heed the will of the voters and either reject the treaty or amend it so that it doesn’t weaken our national defense. ~John Bolton

I know, Bolton will be Bolton, but this has to be the sorriest bit of self-serving election analysis ever written. The Senate should heed the “will of the voters” by making New START more acceptable to John Bolton? Every activist and advocate is going to try to claim popular support for his position, but few of them have as little evidence that “the will of the voters” supports his position as Bolton does.

After the negotiation of the Moscow Treaty in 2002, the public was overwhelmingly in favor of the agreement:

An overwhelming majority supports the 2002 US-Russian nuclear weapons reduction agreement. A May 2002 Gallup poll found 82% approval for the “agreement between the United States and Russia to substantially reduce the number of nuclear weapons in each of these countries.” Only 11% disapproved. At the same time, Time/CNN found 85% in favor of “a treaty between Russia and the US to reduce the number of nuclear weapons of each country.” Again, a mere 11% opposed the deal. In the same poll, a near-unanimous 90% said that it was at least somewhat important (62% very important) to them that the two sides reached this agreement.

On New Start, an April 2010 Quinnipiac poll found public support for ratification at 60-33%. As we might expect, a plurality of Republicans (48%) opposed ratification at that time, but independents overwhelmingly back the treaty 63-32% and Democrats support it at an even higher rate. A CNN poll taken around the same time shows even greater support at 70-28%. Bolton is pushing for a position on New START that possibly doesn’t even command majority support among Republican voters. Obviously, voters on November 2 weren’t voting the way they did because of an arms reduction treaty, and there is no remotely credible way to claim that the election outcome was a rejection of Obama’s foreign policy. Evidently, a large majority of voters supports the treaty Bolton is disingenuously claiming they reject.

New START doesn’t need to be overwhelmingly popular, because it is worth ratifying on the merits. As it happens, it is also overwhelmingly popular according to the relevant polling. However, as we all understand, strong popular support doesn’t necessarily mean anything when it comes to foreign policy and national security matters, because such decisions are not outpourings of the will of the people. Senate Republicans will either embrace specious complaints about limits on missile defense and other distractions, or they won’t, but it will have nothing to do with the election. What the midterms have done is to increase the number of Senate Republicans in the new Congress, which makes ratification that much more difficult.

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