Institutions should do what they are good at. And the expansion of NATO is one of the few true post-Cold-War foreign-policy success stories. By including some of NATO’s old enemies inside its security umbrella, we ensured, at a minimal cost, the political, economic and ideological “Westernization” of an enormous swath of the continent.

We could continue that process. The stakes are lower – 2010 is not 1990, and the countries outside NATO are poorer and more turbulent than even those that have recently joined. Nevertheless, the very existence of a credible Western military alliance remains – yes, really – an encouragement to others on Europe’s borders. This is a uniquely propitious moment. Right now there is a pro-Western government in Moldova; Ukraine’s geopolitics are up in the air; elections are due to take place in Belarus in December. We in the West might have gone sour on ourselves, but Europeans on our borders still find us magnetically attractive. But we will only remain so if we try. ~Anne Applebaum

Of course, if an institution has long since outlived its purpose, its continued expansion is not a sign of health or proof of success: it is a stubborn refusal to accept its irrelevance. Applebaum is arguing more or less for expansion of the Alliance for expansion’s sake. For that matter, if NATO still has a purpose, it is not to promote “Westernization.” If it has any purpose, it must be as a military alliance that exists to contain Russian power, and there will be no other way for Russia to view NATO if it continues to expand into the former USSR. All of this is harmful to the stability and security of Europe, and especially for the security of those states that border Russia. Western critics of Russian foreign policy often cite the Kremlin’s view that NATO is the major threat to Russia as proof that the Russian government is paranoid, but what is the Russian government to think when defenders of NATO keep agitating for expansion to the east and insist on framing expansion as a process of “Westernization” that is explicitly defined as coming at the expense of Russian influence?

As Dmitri Trenin pointed out in a recent Foreign Policy article on the “reset” and New START, one of the crucial factors in the success of the “reset” has been the administration’s refusal to press the issue of additional NATO expansion:

For Moscow, Obama’s most important — and welcome — decision to date has been to end his predecessor’s efforts to roll back Russian influence in the former Soviet Union. NATO enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia has been put on hold [bold mine-DL]. Arming Georgia has largely stopped. And Obama has scrapped Bush’s Russia-centric missile-defense plans, with their radar and interceptor installations in the Czech Republic and Poland, in favor of a system designed to thwart potential threats from Iran. It was the unilateral and unconditional removal of these three irritants by Obama that gave the new U.S. president credibility in Moscow’s eyes. As long as these issues are not revisited, the new cooperative relationship between Russia and the United States has every chance of continuing, albeit with new, more stringent limits.

Put another way, U.S.-Russian relations are not automatically doomed to deteriorate and worsen if the New START goes down in flames, but they will certainly worsen if Washington reverts to Clinton- and Bush-era provocations in these other areas. If the treaty fails, U.S.-Russian relations will suffer, but if the administration heeded Applebaum’s advice those relations would return to the poor state they were in two years ago. Applebaum’s recommendation of renewed NATO expansion is especially foolish right now. This is not a “uniquely propitious moment” to revisit NATO expansion. On the contrary, this is an exceptionally bad time to bring it up. Coming on the heels of the “reset” and Moscow’s willingness to accommodate Washington on several issues, a new push for NATO expansion would be interpreted as a betrayal of Russian trust and a return to the habits of the Clinton and Bush administrations.

Meanwhile, it’s not much of an argument in favor of renewed NATO expansion that “the countries outside NATO are poorer and more turbulent than even those that have recently joined.” Applebaum might as well say that the likely candidates for new membership are all woefully unqualified and not very valuable as allies. Every one of the countries Applebaum mentions would be a glaring liability to NATO in one way or another. The idea of trying to bring Moldova into NATO is silly enough, given the ongoing Russian presence east of the Dniestr, but talk of bringing Belarus and Ukraine in is preposterous. Ukraine has already committed not to join any alliance, and even if Lukashenko were no longer in power Belarus would be a completely undesirable candidate on account of its poverty, corruption, and energy dependence on Russia.

Proponents of NATO expansion like to say that former Soviet republics should be free to make their own foreign policies and make whatever alliances they believe are appropriate, but what if it is actually the desire of most of the people in all of these countries not to become a pawn in a great power struggle? Are we prepared to accept that these nations do not see an advantage in defining their integration with Europe in terms of a military alliance, but instead regard it as unwelcome or even dangerous? There is every reason for these nations to integrate themselves economically with Europe, and to varying degrees they are doing so. It makes no sense to endanger this and spoil it by revisiting NATO expansion into countries that do not want it and would be unable to afford the expenditures required to improve their militaries. These are developing economies and countries hit hard by the financial crisis and the recession. For interoperability between their militaries and ours, all of them would have to go through an expensive process of military modernization that none of them can actually afford. It is particularly perverse to argue that these states need to devote significantly more of their national resources to military spending, which is what Moldova and Belarus would have to do for Alliance membership. Nothing could be worse for new democratic governments than the creation of an outsized military establishment. Applebaum would have us repeat the terrible mistakes Washington made in Georgia, and she argues for this as if the war in Georgia and the suffering it caused never happened.

Jackson Diehl outdid himself with an exceptionally poor column today. It was odd enough that he decided to choose the week after the Lisbon NATO summit to declare that Obama’s foreign policy is defined by the concerns of the early ’80s. At that summit, which saw the first meeting of the NATO-Russia council since before the war in Georgia, there was an invitation to Russia to participate in a joint missile defense project. This is not exactly the same agenda that prevailed in 1983. Then again, NATO is itself an outdated, anachronistic alliance, so perhaps the Alliance’s support for New START is simply a function of outdated thinking all around, but Diehl has never said a word about the irrelevance and obsolescence of NATO. The remainder of the agenda was dominated by the U.S. war in Afghanistan, which is for good or ill very much a present-day priority of our government.

There are many criticisms one might make about the administration’s on-again, off-again efforts to halt Israeli settlements and the embarrassing groveling to which the administration has been reduced to get a temporary halt to some of the construction, but it is daft to imply that settlements were foremost on the agenda in the early ’80s. Far from becoming “a sideshow,” settlements have been an increasingly significant political and policy problem in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the last twenty years. No one needs to aspire to a “greater Israel” when the settlers have achieved de facto annexation of much Palestinian land in the meantime. There is no problem in formally accepting the idea of a Palestinian state provided that the Israeli government does what it can to prevent it from ever coming into being. Everyone can publicly agree that a two-state solution is desirable, and then most of the critical actors can refuse to do what must to be done to make it happen. Referring to Iranian “expansionism” in the same breath that he denies the significance of settlements is typical of this evasive style of argument: nothing is said about the state that is actually engaged in subsidizing and protecting an ongoing policy of territorial expansion, but its adversary is accused of expansionism for which there is no evidence.

As Michael Cohen observed, Diehl’s discussion of New START was ridiculous. Diehl’s praise for the treaty was the sort of passive-aggressive support that columnists for the Post seem to specialize in, and his apparent bewilderment at why the administration was spending so much time on the treaty conveniently ignored that it was maddening, unreasonable delaying tactics on the part of the minority that made the concerted effort necessary. The effort is an “uphill” one because the Senate GOP has apparently decided that all of the appeals of arms control experts, generals, and Republican elder statesmen are irrelevant.

I just saw today that Chalmers Johnson had passed away yesterday. Steve Clemons has written a long tribute to him at The Washington Note. Though he had a long career before he became a leading critic of American empire, it is for this criticism that he is best known to those of us in my generation. He and his arguments will be missed. Here is an excerpt from David Isenberg’s TAC review of Johnson’s The Sorrows of Empire:

The four sorrows that provide Johnson with his title, however, refer to much more long-term and dire developments, above all for Americans themselves, that follow from this empire of
bases and the military-industrial complex that stands behind it. As Johnson writes:

If present trends continue, four sorrows, it seems to me, are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative impact guarantees that the United States will cease to bear any resemblance to the country once outlined in our Constitution. First there will be a state of perpetual war leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a growing reliance on weapons of mass destruction as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second, there will be a loss of democracy
and constitutional rights as the presidency fully eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from an
‘executive branch’ of government into something more like a Pentagonized presidency. Third, an already
well-shredded principle of truthfulness will increasingly be replaced by a system of propaganda, disinformation, and glorification of war, power, and the military legions. Lastly, there will be bankruptcy, as we pour our economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchange the education, health, and safety of our fellow citizens.

When Palin told Barbara Walters last week that she believed she could beat Barack Obama in 2012, it wasn’t an idle boast. Should Michael Bloomberg decide to spend billions on a quixotic run as a third-party spoiler, all bets on Obama are off. ~Frank Rich

The sheer silliness of this scenario is comforting. It’s as if everyone knows that an Obama-Palin match-up would be a disaster for the Republicans, but some try to think up some way to make speculation about Palin’s presidential chances seem relevant. Enter Mike Bloomberg.

A Bloomberg candidacy is a natural fit for this kind of speculation, because it is both just absurd enough and possibly the only thing that gives Palin an outside chance of winning via Heilemann’s imaginary outcome in which the Republican-majority House selects Palin as President. Journalists and pundits love the idea of a Bloomberg presidential run for a number of reasons. Many of them are irrationally attached to the idea that what this country needs is more “centrist” governance, when this is what we’ve had in abundance for decades. In practice, this means the worst and/or least popular aspects of both parties, and Bloomberg is almost the perfect embodiment of this. He is liberal enough on all the social and cultural issues that would make him unacceptable to much of conservative Middle America, but also not remotely progressive enough to justify third-party protest voting from the left. As mayor of New York, he has naturally been an ardent defender of Wall Street interests, which is exactly the opposite of what most Americans want their President to be. There is no constituency that objects to some aspect of Obama’s record that desperately yearns for more “centrism” and watered-down bipartisan, pro-corporate compromises.

As for Palin’s chances, I don’t know why anyone keeps talking about them. Like a Bloomberg run, a Palin presidential campaign in the general election is the sort of thing that journalists and pundits would love to see for the same reason that many NASCAR fans watch those interminable, dull races: they are holding out hope for a spectacular, destructive multi-car pile-up. Imagine how terribly earnest and serious an Obama-Daniels competition would be. That would be no fun at all. It’s much more fun to imagine one of the major parties consciously deciding to destroy itself, which is what a Palin nomination would be for the GOP. It’s been a generation since a major presidential candidate flamed out in truly awe-inspiring fashion, and many of today’s political observers are hoping that Palin can be their generation’s political Hindenburg.

In the highly improbable event that Palin wins the nomination, she would go on to lose at least 35 or 40 states in a two-way contest. The outcome of a three-way race wouldn’t be much better for her, as she would drive many people into Obama’s camp who would otherwise never go there. If Bloomberg did waste his time and money on an independent campaign and picked up any votes, I suspect that they would be coming from moderate Republicans horrified by Palin’s nomination but unwilling to vote for Obama. After the midterms, everyone has been offering Obama advice on recapturing “the center” and winning back independents and so on, but at least half of his work would be done for him if Palin became the Republican standard-bearer.

What has been interesting to see in the last couple weeks is that Palin is receiving much more respectful treatment in the mainstream press at a time when conservative media outlets are becoming more critical. Some on the right appear to be less willing to pass over her ridiculous antics in silence than they used to be. Instead of tedious justifications and loyalist excuse-making, The Weekly Standard has a review of Palin’s “reality” show that is as derisive and dismissive of Palin as anything a major conservative magazine has published about her in the last two years. The reason for this is straightforward enough: Palin was useful during the first two years of the Obama administration as a rallying point against the other party, but now the midterms are over and she has become enough of an embarrassment and liability that some of her former boosters no longer feel compelled to cover for her. Meanwhile, her detractors in the mainstream press would like nothing more than to see her run, and then crash and burn.

Update: David Boaz makes a similar observation.

In The Washington Post recently, Robert Kagan advised his fellow conservatives to show maturity and readiness to govern: “Blocking the treaty will produce three unfortunate results: It will strengthen Vladimir Putin, let the Obama administration off the hook when Russia misbehaves and set up Republicans as the fall guy if and when U.S.-Russian relations go south.” ~Maureen Dowd

Many people have been citing Kagan’s op-ed in “support” of the treaty to contrast Kagan’s supposed neoconservative seriousness with the fecklessness of the Senate GOP. This is mistaken. As the quote from Kagan’s column shows, his concern has nothing to do with the effects of the treaty’s defeat on arms control, U.S.-Russian relations, or U.S. foreign policy more broadly. Presumably, those would be the concerns of someone interested in “maturity” and a “readiness to govern.” Instead, what we get from Kagan is a warning that the Republicans are putting themselves in a bad position politically and are in danger of taking the blame for bad relations with Russia. This is what I was saying last week when the op-ed first appeared.

Of course, Kagan and many Republican hawks want to pursue policies that will guarantee bad relations with Russia (e.g., NATO expansion, re-arming Georgia, etc.), and they are not terribly concerned if U.S.-Russian relations deteriorate. In their view, that is what must happen so long as Russia is dominated by its current form of authoritarian populist government. This is an ideologically–drivenview that insists that democracy and “autocracy” (as Kagan calls it) are inherently antagonistic and will work to undermine one another in international relations. What the hawks don’t want is to have to take responsibility for causing that deterioration. Ideally, they would like to blame the Russians or Obama or both together, because many of the hawks who supported Bush-era provocations of Russia believe that those policies had nothing to do with declining relations with Moscow. It is always someone else’s fault. Kagan is displaying the same ideological blindness that contributed so much to Bush administration failures in foreign policy, especially in U.S.-Russian relations, and yet somehow he has been getting credit for being a responsible or serious part of the debate.

Kagan argues that Republicans ought to support the treaty–which Kagan wrongly dubs a “nothingburger”–as a way of better serving their larger goal of outmaneuvering Obama. In answer to the Senate GOP’s short-term cynicism, Kagan proposes that they take a longer cynical view. He assumes that the “reset” is doomed to fail, presumably because he continues to labor under the assumptions of his faulty ideological reading of modern great power politics, and he wants Republicans to be in the right position to profit politically when that happens. To maximize the blame that Obama receives for the expected failure of the “reset,” which Kagan considers wrongheaded anyway, Republicans must play along for now. This is certainly a more subtle form of rejectionism, but it is substantively not much different from the views of the Senate Republicans Kagan is lecturing. Kagan has happened to land on the right side of the treaty issue for tactical reasons, but that shouldn’t blind anyone to the reality that Kagan’s overall rejection of Obama’s foreign policy is rooted in the same ideological delusions that prevailed in the Bush era.

Many of us in Foreign Policy Wonk-land have felt that New START is the perfect fault line dividing sober-minded Republicans and reflexive, unabashed, unthinking, ideological obstructionists. Senator Kyl has been the center-of-attention swing vote and had been trying to straddle the line. Now having pushed his luck by trying to further postpone a vote, he got called out. ~David Schorr

As much as I sympathize with Sen. Lugar’s arguments, I have to wonder if the critique of his Senate colleagues that he issued earlier this week will have much of an effect. Some of them have drunk so deeply of the Heritage Kool-Aid that they may have convinced themselves that their bogus objections to the treaty are serious defenses of principle, and others will simply dismiss Lugar as a RINO and leave it at that. Over the summer, Mitt Romney took up the anti-START cause, and Lugar directly and publicly refuted his op-ed. Lugar dismissed Romney’s op-ed as a “hyperbolic attack” that repeated “discredited objections.” This did not change Romney’s behavior in the least. He kept repeating the same “discredited objections” in other articles, and Lugar’s warning shot evidently had no effect on most of his Republican colleagues in the Senate. As I wrote in a column afterwards, Lugar’s criticism was more likely to hurt Lugar within the GOP than it was likely to damage Romney’s credibility on national security:

The ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Richard Lugar, issued a statement that completely dismantled Romney’s argument against ratification, but the clash between Romney’s demagoguery and Lugar’s expertise seems likely only to secure Romney the sympathy of neoconservatives who distrust Lugar for his foreign policy realism and movement activists who dislike Lugar as a moderate. Unfortunately, all signs suggest that Romney represents the future of the party and Lugar represents the past.

Nothing I have seen in the last week suggests that this assessment from July is wrong. I saw one report in The Wall Street Journal that Lugar’s colleagues were offended that he was actively aiding the administration push for the treaty:

But it is Sen. Lugar’s stance on New START that went over badly with Republican colleagues. When Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl on Tuesday announced his opposition to a ratification vote this year, the other members of the GOP caucus took their cue from him to push the issue into the new Senate. The lame duck docket is full as is, and Sen. Kyl wants firmer promises from the Administration on nuclear modernization and missile defense before taking up the treaty with Russia.

Sen. Lugar, who prides himself on his non-proliferation work over the years, came out in favor of New START early on. That wasn’t surprising. But Republicans were taken aback by his willingness to join the White House PR push this week, and especially his harsh words for the GOP caucus.

For some reason, Senate Republicans find it surprising that their leading expert on arms control would want to try to keep arms control alive rather than see it die a slow, agonizing death on account of his colleagues’ preposterous opposition. Apparently, they can play games with national security issues, and he is supposed to sit there quietly and not point out what they are doing. As the report explains, Lugar is running for re-election in 2012, and he has compiled quite a record on domestic issues that marks him as a moderate-to-liberal Republican. This record would have made him very vulnerable had he been up for re-nomination this year, and he could face a primary challenge in 2012, especially if he continues (correctly!) to berate other Republicans for their irresponsibility. It wouldn’t surprise me if Lugar ends up choosing to go the Hagel route and retires. As out of step with the public and the military as treaty opponents are, Lugar is equally out of step with most of the elected officials and activists in his party. It is generally bad news for the quality of Republican thinking on foreign policy and national security that Lugar is increasingly the odd man out in the GOP.

“There was a lot of passion in that room,” one senator said. “The reason is because the public is with us on our policies, but they’re not getting the message.” ~The Politico

Have you heard the argument made this way? Anywhere? My point is not that pressing this point would suddenly get everyone to vote for the treaty. But it’s folly to assume they’re going to budge if you’re not applying any real pressure, with an actual argument, in the political context. This is not unrelated to the way Democrats lost the public argument on Health Care Reform while they spent almost a year in a Capitol Hill debate about the innards of health care policy and how to leverage two or three Republicans senators. It’s a broader problem. But for right now, can the White House start making a public case on this? Start raising the temperature at least a touch on the opponents? ~Josh Marshall

Poor messaging could conceivably be a problem when it comes to domestic policy, but I am not persuaded that the resistance to New START would be any less had the administration launched a public campaign for ratification or applied more pressure to the opponents. What would that pressure look like? Ridiculing the GOP for neglecting national security? This is already being done extensively in the press, and the GOP already has Sen. Lugar upbraiding them for their “inexcusable” behavior. They are very clearly on the wrong side of a significant security issue, a lot of people are calling them on it, and their resistance is becoming stronger than it was a few weeks ago.

The public already supports ratification by a 2-to-1 margin, so it’s not as if there is a skeptical public that needs to be won over. The Republicans who are throwing up obstacles to ratification, including Senator-elect Mark Kirk, are already going against the consensus of the military, most arms control experts, and most prominent former national security officials. There are others, such as George Voinovich, trying to haggle with the administration for Polish visa waivers in exchange for supporting the treaty when the government of Poland strongly supports ratification and has no interest in trying to tie the visa issue to the treaty. What this means is that resistance to New START is not just purely political and “totally without merit,” but that there seems to be no way to make the relevant Senate Republicans see that they are actively working against something strongly endorsed by the institutions and allies they would normally support. Here we have the spectacle of Mark Kirk, who made much (indeed too much) of his military career during his campaign for Senate, trying to throw a major wrench into the works and declaring that he can’t support the treaty overwhelmingly endorsed by the military until his unrealistically large demands for information are met. George Voinovich is dragging his feet on supporting the treaty ostensibly for the sake of the security of eastern Europe, while the Polish government unequiovocally supports the treaty Voinovich is currently helping to block. Thus a treaty that serves American and Polish security interests is being partly held hostage to Voinovich’s anachronistic view of Polish-Russian relations and his mistaken belief that he is serving the security interests of eastern Europe, when he is effectively working to harm them. This is what the Polish FM, Radoslaw Sikorski, wrote in support of the treaty (via Rozen):

Without a treaty in place, holes will soon appear in the nuclear umbrella that the US provides to Poland and other allies under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, the collective security guarantee for NATO members. Moreover, New START is a necessary stepping-stone to future negotiations with Russia about reductions in tactical nuclear arsenals, and a prerequisite for the successful revival of the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE).

While we in Poland do not perceive an immediate military threat from Russia, most of the world’s active tactical or sub-strategic nuclear weapons today seem to be deployed just east of Poland’s borders, in speculative preparation for conflict in Europe. The cataclysmic potential of such a conflict makes it essential to limit and eventually eliminate this leftover from the Cold War.

This was the reasoning behind the Polish-Norwegian initiative aimed at addressing the issue of tactical nuclear weapons within the larger arms-control framework that was launched in this past April. In effect, New START is the sine qua non for effective US leadership on the arms-control and non-proliferation issues that matter to Europe – from reviving the CFE treaty to preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

More broadly, New START will cement the new, more positive tone in relations between Russia and the West. Indeed, we in Poland have adopted our own way of reconciliation with Russia, one based on dialogue and reciprocity.

As a result, Polish-Russian relations have improved significantly over the last three years – no easy feat, given the burden of our shared history. Though difficulties still lie ahead, Poland is determined to build a relationship with Russia based on mutual respect.

The message is quite clear, and it’s not as if Republican opponents haven’t received it. Delaying and effectively blocking this treaty will harm American and allied European security. Causing the treaty to fail means letting down all those European allies that have been counting on ratification. After two years of crafting a storyline that the administration has been “abandoning” U.S. allies, the Senate GOP appears prepared to do just that. It is doubtful that any amount of pressure could be great enough to make them reverse course and recognize their folly.

Like James, I generally support the START Treaty and think the Senate should pass it, but I don’t think it would be a travesty if the current Senate were to let the next one make the call on ratification. ~Doug Mataconis

I’m not sure that it would be a travesty, but I am quite sure that it would be a mistake. It is true that the treaty isn’t “emergency legislation.” It is a treaty that has been exhaustively studied and discussed for the last six months. The “assurances” skeptics have asked for have all been given, and the “concerns” they have raised have been addressed so many times that one might suspect those “concerns” are really just delaying tactics. The lame-duck argument is just the latest in a string of delaying tactics, which is another reason why it shouldn’t be taken that seriously.

Presuambly, having inspectors in Russia who can monitor Russia’s arsenal rather than not having them is valuable, and without ratification in the next month we won’t have inspectors there for the better part of another year at best. As Republican numbers go up, the chances of the treaty’s ratification go down. We all know this. This isn’t a choice between ratifying in December and ratifying in January. It is a choice between voting on the treaty, and delaying consideration of the treaty on the Senate floor for months or even longer. If the treaty is worth supporting and should be ratified, it really does matter that this happen now. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs The Politico

“>describes the treaty as “essential” to national security. Maybe he’s exaggerating for effect, but I don’t think that’s true in this case. I don’t know of other things that are deemed “essential” to national security that can be put off until much later and perhaps indefinitely.

There are other security matters that will be affected by the treaty’s fate. Ratification or the promise of it would probably improve the chances of NATO-Russian cooperation on missile defense. In the absence of that, the upcoming Lisbon summit will probably produce nothing on this. Sen. Lugar has talked about the importance of ratification for continued cooperation in securing Russian nuclear materials. As Rogin reported yesterday:

Lugar also warned that the failure to ratify the treaty could have drastic consequences for other facets of U.S.-Russia nuclear cooperation — especially the Nunn-Lugar effort to secure loose nuclear materials throughout the former Soviet Union.

If START fails, the cooperation between the United States and Russia on securing loose nukes could be imperiled, representing an even bigger risk for national security, Lugar said.

As Lugar is one of the architects of this effort, his opinion should count for something. Since Russian nuclear materials are the most likely source of weapons proliferation, securing them would seem to be a fairly high priority, and putting that effort in jeopardy seems unwise. Failing to ratify New START, or putting it off for months or years, will have the added unfortunate consequence of eating up time that could conceivably be spent on beginning to work out agreements with Russia on tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. As I mentioned earlier this week, several European governments are eager to have the U.S. remove its tactical nuclear weapons from their soil, and START ratification could be the first step to realizing that end. This would be desirable for American, European, and Russian security. As former Sen. Nunn explained in an op-ed yesterday, the physical security of U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe is not very good, which makes their presence there a real threat. Hastening the day when the U.S. and Russia can agree to reduce significantly or eliminate these weapons would therefore be in the interests of all parties. The idea of reducing or eliminating tactical nuclear weapons will go nowhere if the U.S. cannot ratify a strategic arms agreement in a timely fashion. The longer that this is put off, the worse it will be for American security.

“On Election Day we were elected to represent the constituents of our respective states in the Senate,” the incoming Republicans wrote to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), in a letter (PDF) obtained by The Cable. “Out of respect for our states’ voters, we believe it would be improper for the Senate to consider the New START Treaty or any other treaty in a lame duck session prior to January 3, 2011.”

The letter was organized by Senator elect Roy Blunt (R-MO) and was signed by both moderate and conservative incoming senators such as Marco Rubio (R-FL), Ron Johnson (R-WI), Rob Portman (R-OH), and Rand Paul (R-KY). ~Josh Rogin

Of all the lousy arguments for delaying the consideration of New START, this has to be one of the worst and most laughable. The treaty was brought up this year, and voted out of committee this year. The Senators serving in this session were duly elected to serve a full six years. By calling for them to delay consideration of an important treaty, these new Senators are not only starting off their Senate careers by making a terrible mistake and effectively aiding in the defeat of that treaty, but they are trying to prevent their constituents’ current representatives in Congress from doing their jobs. Of course, they are banding together to delay nothing else in the lame-duck session. The only thing they believe absolutely must not be considered in the lame-duck session is the one unobjectionable item that has near-universal support from the military, arms control experts, and former national security officials.

This is a pointed act of disrespect toward the voters of their respective states. Several of the new Senators don’t even represent new Republican seats. Kansas, New Hampshire, Florida, Kentucky, Ohio, and Missouri* are all currently represented by Republicans, and the voters in those states can be represented just as well by their retiring Senators as they can be by the newly-elected ones next year. It’s not as if the outgoing Republicans and the newcomers have dramatically different views on the treaty. Ayotte, Moran, Paul, Portman, Rubio and Blunt have no excuse for signing this ridiculous letter. The entire thing is embarrassing for the new Senators, but it is particularly shameful for those seven. Since the treaty enjoys overwhelming public support, it is absurd to claim that a delay in ratification shows respect for what their voters want. It certainly doesn’t, the new Senators must be aware that it doesn’t, and we all understand that they are doing this for to maximize partisan advantage for no other reason than to make ratification virtually impossible.

Update: James Joyner is correct that the new Senators are doing nothing illegal or unconstitutional by asking Reid for a delay. I understand Steve Clemons’ frustration with these antics, but he’s wrong on this point. James goes on to say this:

My preference would be for politicians in these circumstances to limit themselves to uncontroversial matters and responses to genuine emergencies.

If ratification is indeed a “no-brainer,” as James says, and if the substance of the treaty is unobjectionable, which it is, what could better qualify as uncontroversial than the ratification of an arms reduction treaty that enjoys broad public support and the consensus of the military and national security figures across the spectrum? New START would normally be the sort of thing that can be saved until lame-duck sessions because ratification is obviously desirable. The Senate delayed until now out of deference to the concerns of the minority, so Republicans have some nerve to say that there is a “rush” to consider the treaty. There has most certainly been no “rush” because of previous Republican requests for more time. Having frittered away all of the time available in the regular session this year, and not wanting to bring the treaty to a vote ahead of the elections for fear of giving Obama an important victory, Republicans now want to wait some more until their numbers increase. We can all see why they are doing this, but why should this self-serving grandstanding be rewarded?

* Mike Lee of Utah is also a signatory to the letter and is replacing a Republican incumbent, but obviously he and Bob Bennett do have significantly different views on the treaty, since Bennett’s is an informed view and Lee’s is not.

I cannot in good conscience determine my support for the treaty until the administration assures me our ‘reset policy’ with Russia is a policy that enhances rather than diminishes the national security of our friends and allies throughout Europe. ~Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH)

Voinovich has a reputation as a “moderate,” but this statement is a useful reminder that on national security questions there is incredible, mind-numbing uniformity among virtually all Republicans in Congress. Improved U.S.-Russian relations naturally enhances the security of “friends and allies” by not making them into front-line states against Russia. Polish-Russian relations have gone through a dramatic change between late 2008 and now thanks in part to the administration decision to cancel the missile defense installation planned for Poland. The administration has repeatedly assured critics of the “reset” that this is the case, but they keep coming back with demands for more assurances.

During much of the speech, Voinovich dwelled on the theme of the former “captive nations” and his past support for NATO expansion. He claimed that history always seems to repeat itself, when in reality history never repeats itself. Voinovich is concerned about future Russian expansionism, and he was very alarmed by the idea that the Russians view NATO expansion as a threat to Russian security. Of course, there is no other way for them to view the expansion of a major military alliance right up to their borders, and it is incredible that a leading proponent of NATO expansion believes that Russian expansionism is the most likely source of insecurity and instabilty in the region. He somehow thinks that an arms reduction treaty that could pave the way for future negotiations on Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons could imperil eastern Europe. Voinovich wants to make sure that there are no “side agreements” giving Russia a sphere of influence, when it is the stated policy of the current administration that it does not accept the idea of a Russian sphere of influence anywhere. The man is obsessed with Yalta, which has absolutely nothing to do with what we’re discussing. These are arguably even less serious reasons to oppose the treaty than the bogus reasons treaty critics usually bring up.