James P. Rubin: Farewell to the Age of the Treaty
[James P. Rubin, who teaches at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, was an assistant secretary of state for public affairs during the Clinton administration.]
DESPITE months of negotiations on Capitol Hill, Senate approval of President Obama’s New Start arms control treaty is in serious jeopardy. And it raises the question: Are treaties, and in particular arms control treaties, even worth the trouble anymore?...
Treaties on arms control, with elaborate legal definitions and verification procedures, were necessary during the cold war because the Soviet Union was a closed society, in which military programs were closely guarded secrets. And given the high stakes involved, treaties helped ensure that large-scale cheating could be detected in time to respond.
But that era is long gone. The freer flow of information makes American and Russian military programs and arms negotiations far more transparent, rendering formal treaties less important. At the same time, the ratification process can create a perverse effect: in the case of New Start, Republican senators led by Jon Kyl of Arizona are holding up the treaty to force the Pentagon to increase spending on the modernization of nuclear weapons and associated delivery systems....
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DESPITE months of negotiations on Capitol Hill, Senate approval of President Obama’s New Start arms control treaty is in serious jeopardy. And it raises the question: Are treaties, and in particular arms control treaties, even worth the trouble anymore?...
Treaties on arms control, with elaborate legal definitions and verification procedures, were necessary during the cold war because the Soviet Union was a closed society, in which military programs were closely guarded secrets. And given the high stakes involved, treaties helped ensure that large-scale cheating could be detected in time to respond.
But that era is long gone. The freer flow of information makes American and Russian military programs and arms negotiations far more transparent, rendering formal treaties less important. At the same time, the ratification process can create a perverse effect: in the case of New Start, Republican senators led by Jon Kyl of Arizona are holding up the treaty to force the Pentagon to increase spending on the modernization of nuclear weapons and associated delivery systems....