Posted on 05/30/2002 9:50:36 AM PDT by chimera
A year ago, when President Bush announced that the United States would withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty signed with the Soviet Union, the doomsayers went, well, ballistic.
The U.S. move to get out of the treaty's prohibition against building a national missile shield would be disastrous, they shouted. The world would be launched into an escalating arms race that would drive nuclear tensions to a pitch unseen since the Cold War. It was insane, dangerous, reckless, they declared.
But it wasn't.
On Friday, Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a treaty that will cut each nation's nuclear arsenal by nearly two-thirds, leaving each with no more than 2,200 warheads by the end of 2012.
On Monday, Russia signed an agreement making it a junior partner of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, an alliance created after World War II with the express purpose of defending Western Europe from an expansionist Kremlin that was implacably hostile and armed to the teeth.
So much for the new arms race.
By any measure, the threat of nuclear war between the former bitter adversaries, already much diminished, has shrunk further.
This is precisely the opposite of what was predicted by the skeptics, who insisted that Russia would undertake a massive nuclear buildup to overcome Washington's yet-to-be- developed missile defenses.
Of course, this prediction never had any logical underpinning and at best reflected an inability to grasp that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there no longer was any reason for Washington or Moscow to go on threatening each other with mutual destruction.
The Cold War was driven by the Soviet desire to destroy liberal democracy and subject the world to communism. That dark dream died along with the Soviet Union. Whatever rivalries and disagreements remain between the United States and Russia are routine and hardly likely to provoke a fistfight, much less a nuclear exchange.
The U.S. desire to build a shield was not to increase its edge over its former rival but to protect itself against the handful of smaller, more hostile powers such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea, all of which have been developing missile capabilities that threaten the United States.
The chief nuclear threat at the moment is the tense standoff between India and Pakistan, two nuclear powers that never have been subject to the ABM treaty anyway.
China also is a member of the nuclear- armed family and, like India and Pakistan, was never a signatory to the ABM treaty. But seeing its two greatest rivals, Russia and the United States, voluntarily reducing their nuclear stockpiles cannot help but ease stress levels in Beijing. And though China objects to a U.S. missile-defense system, China's leaders can blame themselves. They are responsible for spreading missile knowhow to the smaller nations that are becoming a threat to the United States.
When Bush announced withdrawal from the ABM treaty in 2001, it was widely condemned as another example of arrogant U.S. unilateralism.
But given the positive result for the entire world, it is time to call this kind of unilateralism by its more accurate name, leadership.
Perhaps there is more going on behind th scenes than we realize. It looks like there is a new polarization forming in the world: the Arab-Islamic people vs. the "new" West. Russia fears Islamic fundamentalism's relentless and insidious infiltration, just as the U.S. does. This is a logical strategic move to hinder the Islamization of the rest of the world. Even China is worried about Islamicists.
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