ATTACHING THE WORDS "risky" and "scheme" is Al Gore's favorite way to discredit any idea that he has yet to claim as his own. He has already used this trick to disparage George W. Bush's proposals for cutting taxes and reforming Social Security. Most recently, at his foreign-policy address in Boston, the Vice President added national missile defense to the list. Shielding American cities from the threat of nuclear attack, Gore warned, is (drum roll) a "risky foreign-policy scheme."
Seemingly less risky, as far as the Vice President is concerned, is leaving America defenseless even as Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and sundry others scramble to assemble weapons of mass destruction. Gore's preferred foreign policy is to assume that such countries, which routinely flout international law, will abide by unenforceable global treaties. The Vice President is also content to trust that Russia's nuclear arsenal will never fall into dangerous hands, and that China will put the top-secret defense technology it stole from the US to humanitarian use.
Because George W. Bush lacks Gore's confidence in these countries' benign intentions, he is "stuck in a Cold War mindset." Gore charges that the Texas governor "dangerously fixates on the Cold War past." But it is the Clinton–Gore Administration, by refusing to embrace a meaningful response to the dangers of nuclear proliferation, that clings to an outmoded worldview.
The crux of the Administration's opposition to missile defense has long been that a nationwide system would violate the terms of an ancient Cold War agreement—America's 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty with the USSR. The pact banned both sides from deploying defensive missiles that could shoot down incoming nuclear warheads, thus ensuring what was aptly known as MAD, or Mutual Assured Destruction: neither side would start a nuclear war because to do so would mean suicide.
The ABM Treaty was a joke when it was signed, promptly ignored by the Soviets, who could not be trusted to keep their word any better than Clinton and Gore can. But if the pact was laughable almost three decades ago, it is perilous today, leaving the US vulnerable to any number of new, hostile, and unstable members of the nuclear club. Still, Gore, like Clinton before him, clings to this Cold War relic, jeopardizing national security for the sake of a commitment the US made to a country that no longer exists—a commitment which either side can terminate with six months' notice.
"Even now," the Vice President commented in Boston, "a decade after the end of the Cold War, we hear echoes of the old arguments." Indeed, we do. When Gore derides national missile defense as "risky," we are reminded of Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov calling the idea "insane" back in 1983. When the Vice President complains of the "dangerously destabilizing consequences of traveling down (the missile defense) path," he sound like a Soviet state newspaper's 1986 warning that it would lead to "an even more ruinous arms race."
Ever since President Reagan proposed the idea of a nationwide nuclear shield in 1983, Democrats and Russians alike have obstructed its development on the grounds that Gore cites today: It will never work, and it would dangerously jeopardize the balance of power with the Soviets.
It has been almost twenty years, but the inherent contradiction of this logic is still lost on the Democratic Party—how could a useless defense system have any impact on the balance of power? There's a reason why every Soviet leader who dealt with Reagan, especially Mikhail Gorbachev, desperately opposed missile defense—they knew that it could work. The captains of Soviet Communism had more faith in American ingenuity than America's current top two leaders.
Sixty billion dollars over fifteen years is the price tag the Congressional Budget Office puts on national missile defense—a cost Al Gore calls "fantastical." At $4 billion a year, assuming federal budgets continue to grow at their current rate, that amounts to about one percent of defense spending each year. Or, to put it in terms that Gore can appreciate, the expense of protecting millions of Americans from the prospect of a nuclear holocaust is a little more than one-sixth of the amount Bill Clinton has proposed to boost Medicare spending.
Yes, the Russians oppose missile defense, just as the Soviets did in the 1980s. But as Ronald Reagan demonstrated, there was little reason to appease Moscow then, and now that Russia is a beggar state desperate for international aid, there is even less reason to do so today.
Al Gore is right when he says "We need a new approach for a new century"—if only he meant it.