Max Bergmann has remarkable confidence in the power of Republican “wise men” to bring the GOP into line for START ratification:

Should the GOP oppose or obstruct START explicitly, almost every editorial board in the country will rip them and there will be countless stories about the far-right shift of the Republican party. Foreign policy heavies like James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, George Schultz, among others, will likely rebuke the leadership and perhaps even leave the party [bold mine-DL]. Therefore if McConnell is willing to oppose START it provides clear evidence that their partisan obstructionism and their significant lurch to the right over the last two years was not just some temporary tactical approach.

Bergmann seems to think that the Senate Republican leadership wouldn’t welcome most or all of these developments. It would be very useful to Senate Republicans to be denounced for their alleged “far right” turn, since it would allow them to oppose a treaty they already dislike for various reasons and portray the issue to their core constituencies as a matter of protecting national security against a feckless elite. The difference from previous rejectionist stands over the last two years is that Senate Republicans actually have it within their power to kill the treaty. That would make them responsible for its failure, but there is no reason to think they would have a problem accepting responsibility for that. According to Heritage’s deceptive talking points, START subverts national security, and all any Republican Senator has to do when challenged on his treaty vote is to recite the misinformation Heritage has given his staffers. Yes, they would be repeating falsehoods, but their core supporters would eat it up. Why would they not want to receive the praise National Review and other conservative outlets will heap on them for their “courage”?

Perversely, widespread criticism from the editorial pages would allow the ultimate establishmentarian McConnell to pose as some sort of independent-minded critic of the Washington consensus. The protestations of prominent realists would be music to their ears, since most national security conservatives hold Baker, Scowcroft et al. in low esteem for one reason or another. For many Republican hawks, defeating START and driving the remaining old guard of realists out of the GOP would be an ideal outcome. Unfortunately, most of the GOP’s political incentives are on the side of rejecting the treaty.

Think about it. If the treaty is voted on in the lame-duck session, Republicans could offer near-unanimous opposition on the grounds that the treaty is “too important” to be “rammed through” in the lame-duck session. This is what some of them are saying now, and it is why it is not clear whether there will even be a vote. If the treaty doesn’t get voted on before next year, the entire process has to start over and a Foreign Relations Committee with a different composition will rehash the issue for weeks or months. The committee vote will be more evenly split than it was last time, and the hill will be that much steeper to climb when it comes to the floor vote. After the new Congress begins, ratification will require fourteen Republican votes. When you have Rand Paul indicating that he will probably vote no, there are not fourteen Republican yeas to be found.

Annoyingly, defeating or significantly delaying ratification works to the GOP’s advantage, since the failure to ratify the treaty ultimately reflects poorly on Obama, and the defeat of START will deprive Obama of one of the main genuine foreign policy achievements of his first two years in office. If McConnell’s top goal is to ensure that Obama is a one-term President, as he claims that it is, why would he and his colleagues support the treaty and give Obama a clear win? It’s not as if the future Republican nominee will mind, since virtually every major contender for the 2012 nomination has denounced Obama’s overall foreign policy and some, such as Romney, have spent a fair amount of time attacking START specifically.

It could be that opposition to the treaty will simply be an expression of a deeper distrust of Obama, which makes ratification that much less likely. As Ambassador Richard Burt said recently (via Democracy Arsenal):

But there is a deeper and more difficult problem here… As people describe it to me, Kyl is part of a number of Republican members of the Senate that are more worried about Obama. And this almost kind of reminds you of some of the rhetoric you’ve heard over the last two years. And the argument is this:

Yes the treaty has some problems, but they’re not big problems, and under normal circumstances we could support it. But you know this guy Obama has talked about eliminating all nuclear weapons. And I don’t know if we could support a treaty when Barack Obama is president. ‘Cuz we don’t know where he is going in the long term on nuclear arms control.

And that’s a tough one it seems to me. Because what you’re really saying there is you’re not so much interested in the details of the treaty— what it constrains, it doesn’t constrain. You don’t trust the commander in chief. And that is sort of the argument you’re beginning to hear. And what I’m worried about is if that argument gets traction, particularly if the treaty isn’t ratified in a lame duck session, I think some of the new Republicans who are coming into the Senate could buy into that argument—that it’s not the treaty. It’s the president.

Obviously, I assume that the treaty is already almost certainly dead. I would be very happy to be wrong about that, but it doesn’t look good.