September 11, Crisis Resolution

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U.S. Scrapping of the ABM Treaty:
Fulfilling an Ideological Need for Enemies

Dennis J. D. Sandole
ICAR Professor

Many years ago Albert Einstein lamented that, " ... nuclear weapons [have] changed everything -- except the way we think...." With the events and aftermath of 11 September 2001, many had thought that the applicability of that kind of statement to the Bush Administration, characterized earlier by a unilateralist policy orientation, was less and less valid.

Indeed, in response to 11 September, the U.S. had crafted a coalition, inclusive of Arab/Muslim states, to pursue a global campaign against terrorism. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell had appointed Richard Haass, Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, to be his personal emissary to the United Nations, to work collorabatively with others in "winning the peace" in post-Taliban Afghanistan. A very special relationship had developed between the U.S./NATO and the Russian Federation.

These and other developments were signs that the U.S. had clearly realized that there are objectives which, despite national resoluteness and military strength, cannot be achieved by any nation alone, but only by nations working together in coordinated fashion. In other words, it seemed that unilaterlist ideology had given way to multilateral reality! But, with the recent announcement that the United States will withdraw from the 1972 ABM Treaty, this appears not to be the case (see "U.S. Sets Missile Treaty Pullout," Washington Post, 14 Dec 2001, pp. A1 & A40).

Bush ballistic missile defense advocates argue that the ABM Treaty is a "a relic of the Cold War" standing in the way of further progress on U.S. "national" defense. For the Russians and others, however, including NATO allies, the ABM Treaty is a bulwark of East-West stability that should be preserved, despite advances in technology and changes in "the nature of the threat" that might otherwise call it into question. And only then, by working together with the Russians, should modifications be made or other steps taken.

But all that the Bush people have been doing for some months now is preparing the Russians for yesterday's announcement that they will withdraw from the Treaty (which, to be fair, is clearly better than presenting the Russians with an unanticipated fait accompli). If the Russians were to accept, fine; if not, which seems more likely, then ... back to unilateralism as usual, until the next crisis!

In the meantime, in a complex world where more than ever before, coordinated multilateral action is called for to deal with complex global problems, we can only wonder what the impact of this latest example of "U.S. leadership by unilateral example" will be on others who also feel constrained by their multilateral commitments. Somehow, the expression, "cascading chaos" -- or the Prisoners Dilemma collapsing back into win/lose options and lose/lose outcomes -- keeps coming to mind!