If President Bill Clinton had all his wits about him he would challenge the toughest hard-linerss on the Republican right to posit a plausible scenario for modern day Russia wanting to go to war with the West. Can anyone really make a case that if the US dropped its guard -- and its nuclear allies Britain and France did too -- that Russia would move into western Europe and bomb America's industrial heartland? It is simply intellectually outrageous, which is why no one spells it out. Even Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and Condoleezza Rice choose to speak in more general, vague, even elliptical terms, the content of which is more insinuation and prejudice than rational argument. As for General Colin Powell, the former chief of staff of the US armed forces, the man who could have been president instead of Clinton almost for the asking, and now being paraded as a possible top foreign policy appointee in the putative cabinet of would-be president George W. Bush, he doesn't even try. An eminently sensible man, he knows better and keeps his mouth shut.
Yet as Clinton prepares for his meeting on Sunday with Russian president Vladimir Putin, the White House has been letting it be known that the world should expect little from the summit in terms of arms control. The promise of a quick move to Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty 3 (START 3) that would cut nuclear weapons on both sides, as agreed by Clinton and Boris Yeltsin in Helsinki in 1997, to between 2,500 and 2,000 nuclear warheads looks remote. (At present there are around 7,000 but under START 2 they will fall to 3,000.) As for the briefly considered Russian wish that they be cut to 1,500, the Pentagon has just rubbished the idea in reports to the president and Congress. Clinton has returned to the position where he seems most comfortable: the do-nothing arms controller, who decided early on in his presidency that tussling with the Pentagon and its powerful congressional allies was not his vocation.
There is an enormous built-in inertia to the nuclear arms business on the Western side. (On the Russian side less so thanks to lack of means -- the Russian defense minister has said publicly that Russia could not afford to possess more than 500 warheads by 2012.) Western public opinion, in as much as it is roused at all, is more interested in the fate of civilian nuclear power stations and nuclear waste disposal than it is in nuclear armaments. Not even India's and Pakistan's graduation to the nuclear club seems to have shaken the torpor, though it is indisputable that if the nuclear powers had contributed their part to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and honored their commitment to make rapid progress on arms control, India would never had had the political face to start the nuclear ball rolling on the sub-continent.
Now on May 8th at the NPT review conference in New York the five established nuclear powers for the first time made an "unequivocal undertaking .... to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals."
Yet if the process doesn't begin in Moscow on Sunday where and when does it begin? This summit should be the defining moment of the Clinton presidency, when he summons up all his reserves of political capital and deploys his precious ability to speak to rank and file Americans. (Many people judge him even more persuasive than Ronald Reagan who, by the way, hatched an apparently forgotten understanding with Gorbachev to reduce nuclear armaments to zero.) Clinton also needs to convey to public opinion his sense of Russia's place in the order of contemporary life (as Putin said earlier this week, echoing Gorbachev, Russia's home is in Western civilization).
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