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Shield Embattled: Missile Defense as a Foreign Policy Problem
Peter W. Rodman
The Nixon Center, Washington, DC 2001
Table of Contents
Executive
Summary
Introduction
The Controversy
Why BMD Is Back
I. The Domestic Debate
U.S. BMD from Eisenhower to Clinton
The Debate over Strategic Doctrine
A New Consensus?
II. The Debate with Russia
The ABM Treaty: Why It Really Happened
The Clinton Negotiation
Where Do We Go From Here?
III. The Debate with China
Strategic Stakes in Asia
China's Complaint
Russia: The Weakest Link?
IV. The Debate with Europe
European Concerns
The Bush Factor
Conclusions and Recommendations
Notes
Acknowledgments
Executive
Summary
It
has been a cliché of the missile-defense debate that a U.S. deployment would be
enormously controversial abroad. We seemed to be heading toward the perverse
result that a defensive system designed to protect against rogue states would do
major harm to our relations with all the other major powers. But the
international context is fluid, not static; it is very much affected by how the
U.S. conducts itself. This is evident in the moderate reaction to President Bush’s
speech of May 1 and to his meetings in Europe in the summer. The diplomatic
environment has in fact been evolving over the past year. Other countries’
motivations are more complex than the conventional wisdom has it.
U.S. missile defense has been debated --and resisted-- for over 40 years. Technological infeasibility has been an obstacle. But there have always been critics who, as a matter of strategic doctrine, fear or deplore missile defense all the more passionately if it does work. (Ironically, these do not include the main U.S. and Soviet architects of the 1972 ABM Treaty, who did not subscribe to the doctrinal orthodoxy that the Treaty has come to embody.)
Foreign opposition to missile defense is ascribed to a variety of sources, including: a fear of U.S. "Fortress America" isolationism; a fear of "decoupling" U.S. security from that of our allies; a fear of destabilizing the structure of international arms control and security. The first two of these are misguided fears. The key motive for U.S. missile defense is not isolationism but its opposite: It is precisely U.S. regional engagement -- in the Gulf, in East and Northeast Asia-- that is most at stake, menaced as it is by proliferating missiles in the hands of those eager to deter us from intervening in the next regional crisis. This is not "Cold War nostalgia" but a principal geopolitical responsibility of the United States today. Some of the hostility to U.S. missile defense, indeed, comes from those who deplore this U.S. role and prefer that the U.S. remain vulnerable, rather than protected, as it seeks to fulfill these global commitments.
This also rebuts the "decoupling" argument: The U.S. is more likely, not less likely, to come to the aid of allies and friends if it feels protected.
As for the "destabilization" fear, this is a more substantial question but it prejudges Russian and Chinese responses and takes too much of the public rhetoric at face value.
Russia, despite its criticisms, is in fact schizophrenic about missile defense. Moscow’s strategic doctrine has always favored it, and Russia’s military today worry about emerging threats to Russia from neighboring regions. However, they have always been alarmed by American advances in the missile-defense field, precisely because they take the field so seriously and because they have a healthy respect for U.S. technology. Thus, they have never passed up an opportunity to block U.S. technological development, as was handed to them by the Clinton Administration’s unwillingness to proceed without agreed changes in the ABM Treaty. However, there is reason to believe that Russia can be persuaded to join the U.S. in a productive discussion of a new strategic balance including defenses and offensive reductions. (The Chinese, indeed, publicly express their fear that Russia will in the end cut a deal with the U.S.)
Our allies and friends in the Asia/Pacific region have, by and large, been conspicuously absent from the chorus of critics of missile defense. This is because they live in a region of multiplying missiles, some of which have already been fired in a threatening manner. U.S. consultations with regional allies have been productive. It is hard to imagine how U.S. alliances in the region would survive if a counter to this missile threat became available and the U.S. were unwilling to share it – especially if the reluctance were out of fear of antagonizing the countries wielding the missiles.
China is not a target of U.S. missile-defense planning, but it will be affected nonetheless. A formal agreement between Washington and Beijing is hard to envision, for a number of reasons including China’s refusal of transparency about its own strategic posture. But a U.S.-China conflict over this is not inevitable, depending on the nature of the U.S. deployment and the overall state of relations as shaped by other factors. China is proceeding with a significant missile modernization regardless of what we do. The U.S. has some freedom of action, therefore, to deploy a system that protects its own population from limited threats; nor is it unreasonable if that system also complicates China’s ability to deter U.S. intervention in a Taiwan crisis.
The Europeans should have been consulted earlier and offered inclusion under a missile-defense umbrella; the Clinton failure to do so allowed some European misconceptions to fester. They have expressed many concerns, the most important being their fear of a U.S.-Russia quarrel that undermines international stability. They are soothed, conversely, by evidence that a U.S.-Russia dialogue is in train. Yet, despite all the public excitement, European opposition to U.S. missile defense has essentially peaked. Europeans essentially see U.S. pursuit of missile defense as inevitable and prefer to avoid a major confrontation with the new U.S. President over it.
One of this report’s main conclusions, indeed, is that a sense of inevitability about U.S. determination to proceed, unilaterally if necessary, has helped to reduce international resistance. This is the paradox of the negotiation with Russia as well: that the U.S. determination to proceed furnishes a crucial incentive for Moscow to reach an understanding with us. How the change-over in the U.S. Senate may affect these calculations remains to be seen.
Among the specific recommendations in the report are: to free up theater-missile defenses immediately, since the ABM Treaty never meant to cover them; to try to pin down a political consensus that may be developing on certain technologies in order to break, finally, the decades-old taboo against U.S. deployment; to offer the Europeans technology- and intelligence-sharing as a further inducement to transatlantic cooperation on missile defense; and to seek a new understanding with Moscow as a preferred outcome, because it would deflate the domestic and European controversies as well as separate the Russians from the Chinese.
