Posts Tagged ‘ Cold War ’

America’s Come Undone

Friday, April 8th, 2011
Lee Drutman


Lee Drutman is a senior fellow and the managing editor for the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Lee Drutman

Book Review: Age of Fracture, by Daniel T. Rodgers

The Princeton Historian Daniel T. Rodgers has written a fascinating new book about how the U.S. has gone from being one big beacon of light to a thousand little points. The title gives it away. We are in an Age of Fracture. We’ve gone from shared sacrifice and shared identities to individual expression and diffuse identities. We’ve gone from limits to dreams; we’ve shed the confines of the past for the endless possibilities of future reinvention. The only problem is, it’s starting to look like we might now want the past back after all, and limits are starting to look more prudent.

The story begins in the Cold War, an era of asking what you could do for your country. History and tradition weighed heavily; big institutions dominated. “Dedication, courage, responsibility, self-scrutiny and sacrifice,” writes Rodgers, “these were the nouns that bore the burden of the Cold War presidential rhetoric.”

But by the time sunny Ronald Reagan was in the White House, the confining rhetoric of the Cold War was gone and “terms like ‘crisis,’ ‘peril’ and sacrifice slipped one by one out of Reagan’s major speeches like dried winter leaves.” (What can he say? The man likes his collections of representative words.) In Reagan’s speeches, the historian detects the new optimism of self-actualizing philosophy, and the (re?)-birth of an American faith that from three simple words – “We, The People” – anything was possible.

But Reagan may just be the transition’s most visible mouthpiece. The shift away from institutions to individuals was just as much the rage among intellectuals. First, most visibly, in economics: In the 1960s, Keynesian economics was the consensus view, with its focus on institutions and macro-level supply and demand. But then it proved unable to either explain or solve the stagflation of the 1970s, leading Daniel Bell to proclaim that, “nobody has any answers he is confident of.”

Enter the new microeconomics: the atomized market of millions of socially-detached, utility-maximizing individuals, owing nothing to society other than to make themselves happy. “In its very simplifications,” writes Rodgers “it filled a yearning for clarity that the older, more complex pictures of society could not.”

Like Reagan’s soaring rhetoric, the new faith in markets was a way to break free of limits. In contrast to the gray pessimism of planners and government bureaucrats who wanted people to live within their means, the new models bespoke a land of heroic entrepreneurs and innovators, of an America that could re-invent itself constantly from the bottom up.

Other social sciences tracked the trends in economics.  In political science, models of rational choice, with their focus on individual utility, replaced the importance of larger institutional structures and forces. Everything now could be explained by examining the incentives of individuals as if they were independent from larger social institutions. Phrases like the “will of the people” became meaningless when complex models showed how impossible it actually was to usefully aggregate independent preferences.

In sociology, the guiding concept of power  “grew less tangible, less material, more pervasive, more elusive, until, in some widespread readings of power, it became all but impossible to trace down.” Michel Foucault found power everywhere, and by doing so, effectively rendered it meaningless – for if it was everywhere, than who could pin it down? In anthropology, Clifford Geertz found “nothing but a play of texts.” Everything was performance and masks.

In more popular books, Alvin Toffler’s widely-read Future Shock proclaimed “The death of permanence.” John Naisbitt’s Megatrends promised the triumph of the individual in the new information age.

The politics of race and gender were likewise affected. On the subject of race, conservatives embraced the notion of a color-blind society, and race as a social construct. “In the ‘color-blind’ society project,” writes Rodgers. “Amnesia was a conscious strategy, undertaken in the conviction that the present’s dues to the past had already been fully paid.” Again, the same theme: the triumph of individualism came at the expense of the past. One could not have a world of endless new opportunities if one got bogged down with worries about history and obligations.

On gender, the breakdown was internal to the movement. A representative 1977 woman’s gathering in Houston fell apart when it became apparent there was no single woman’s experience everyone could agree on. The feminist scholar Judith Butler concluded in her landmark book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity: “There were only scripts, nothing outside or beyond them.” Postmodernism strikes again. If everything is socially constructed, nothing has a foundation.

“Choice, provisionality, and impermanence,” writes Rodgers. “A sense of the diffuse and penetrating, yet unstable powers of culture; an impatience with the backward pull of history – these were the emergent intellectual themes of the age.”

And yet by the late 1980s, one could also detect a backlash. In the academy, Allan Bloom railed against the nihilistic deconstruction of everything in The Closing of the American Mind. Conservative think tanks began looking to local communities as sources of civic republicanism. Evangelicals saw the church as the center that could and must hold.

“Conservative intellectuals by the end of the 1980s still yearned for a common culture,” wrote Rodgers. “They could half-remember and half-invent in their mind’s eye a more consensual age, when terms like ‘civil religion’ and the ‘American creed’ had been sociological commonplaces.”

But the great irony was that the new conservative embrace of the American tradition was itself a creative reinvention –a mythic golden age that only selectively drew on actual history.

In conservative legal scholarship, Rodgers writes: “The originalist argument tapped not a desire to go back to any actual past but a desire to escape altogether from time’s slipperiness – to locate a trap door through which one could reach beyond history and find a simpler place outside of it. Originalism’s appeal to the past was, like the economists’ modelings of time, profoundly ahistorical.”

As a document of intellectual history, Rodgers’ book is brilliant. Learned, wide-ranging, delightful to read, full of keen little insights (and epoch-defining bundles of nouns.) But it leaves open the question: is the fracture permanent? “One might reach nostalgically for a fragment of the past,” Rodgers concludes. “But the time that dominated late-twentieth-century social thought was now.”

One way to view politics is about the tension between the individual and the group. All the great political trade-offs – liberty vs. security, equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome – are at root conflicts between the desires of individuals to do as they please and attempts by the group to keep individuals from doing so much of what they please that the group falls apart. Such a view takes history as civilizations as bouncing back and forth between the two poles: give people too little room for individual self-expression, and they’ll demand to be free. But give them too much room to do whatever they like and be whatever they want, and they’ll demand more order and group identity.

Rodgers leaves us at the moment in which a hunger for a rootedness in history seems to be growing. Have we gone as far as individualism will take us? And if so, what takes us back? Here’s a hypothesis: do the new social networking tools that increasingly dominate our lives restore the possibility of a new and different kind of collective identity? And am I the only one wondering this? Maybe I’d better post this review to Facebook, and see what other people think…

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Are Republicans Ready for Prime-Time?

Friday, November 19th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

“High risk” seems to be the consensus term for President Obama’s decision to push for ratification of the new START Treaty during this year’s lame-duck session.   That’s understandable; hardly any Republicans senators are on board, and Republican senators-elect are complaining that no treaty votes should be taken until they have been sworn in (of course, they are complaining about the very existence of a lame-duck session, so that’s not a terribly distinctive argument).  The administration needs 67 votes for ratification, and once Mark Kirk obtains his early swearing-in just after Thanksgiving, there will only be 58 Democratic senators.

But fewer voices are asking if Republican obstruction of START carries any political risks.  There is virtually no evidence that foreign policy had a significant partisan impact on the midterm elections, even amongst the Republican-tilted November 2 electorate; no one can credibly claim any conservative mandate on arms control or other defense policy controversies.  The President has consistently obtained some of his strongest approval ratings on foreign policy and defense issues.  He has a glittering array of distinguished Republican backers for START representing past GOP administrations.  And the argument being made for delay on START by the most visible GOP senators—the treaty needs to be held hostage to higher defense spending (for nuclear modernization)–strikes a discordant note with GOP and nonpartisan demands for immediate reductions in federal spending, not to mention the desire for bipartisanship wherever possible.

Moreover, it’s not clear that Republicans have their own internal act together on defense and foreign policy; there are a host of potential rifts, some left over from the Bush administration, some dating back to the Cold War.  Perhaps the threat to delay START ratification is more of a bluff, and if the administration doesn’t call it, progress on any other legislation during the lame duck session could prove impossible.  The politics of this fight will now become clearer now that the White House has refused to back down.

The big overriding question, of course, is whether bipartisan cooperation will prove possible on any significant issue, with Republicans making full extension of Bush tax cuts and a drive to repeal health reform their top priorities.  There’s some interesting new political science data on the extent to which the midterms increased polarization in Congress (or at least in the House).  According to Adam Bonica, who is using the standard measurement for the ideological positioning of Members of Congress:

77 percent of freshmen Republicans in the 112th Congress will locate to the right of the party median from the 111th. In other words, nearly 8 in 10 incoming House Republicans would have been on the right wing of the party in the 111th Congress.

The problem for Republicans is that their “conservatism” does not necessarily dictate clear positions on many defense policy issues, or on the larger conflict between deficit reduction and other policy goals. But ideology by no means disposes the GOP to cooperate with Democrats, and particularly with the President whose defeat in 2010 is, according to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, their paramount goal.

On the public opinion front, pollsters are beginning to shift from retrospective looks at 2010 voters towards efforts to measure the likely 2012 electorate, which will be much larger, younger, less white, and less conservative. The shift in perspective can sometimes be dramatic.  Public Policy Polling caused a stir by releasing a large batch of state polls of likely 2010 voters showing President Obama trailing a “generic Republican” in all of them, some by big margins.  Then PPP released a poll of Virginians who voted in any of the last three elections, and measured Obama against named potential GOP opponents, and the picture was very different:  Obama not only had a positive (50/45) job approval rating in the Old Dominion, but led (or in the case of Mitt Romney, was tied with) all the Republicans who might run against him.  And this was in a state where on November 2 Republicans knocked off three Democratic House members and nearly beat a fourth.   It’s all about who gets asked, and how the questions are framed.

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Deficit Commission and Defense Spending: A Scorecard

Thursday, November 18th, 2010
Jim Arkedis


Jim Arkedis is the director of PPI's National Security Project.

by Jim Arkedis

Fully half – $100 billion – of Deficit Commission Chairmen Erskine Bowles’ and Alan Simpson’s reduction proposals target that infamous five-sided building on the Potomac. In a paper containing at least something for everyone to hate, you can almost hear the battle lines being drawn from parochial quarters: weapons makers, veterans groups, and personnel contractors will all howl as their respective cash cows linger in the cross hairs for uncomfortably long periods.

When parsing Bowles’ and Simpson’s suggestions, it’s worth bearing in mind the authors’ guiding principle: “America cannot be great if we go broke.” In essence, the proposal channels the White House’s own National Security Strategy, “Our economy… serves as the wellspring of American power.”

That’s the bad news: both the Deficit Commission and administration are right, and the country is in a bad spot.  Here’s the worse news, as told in the introduction of the Deficit Commission’s Report: The Problem Is Real; the Solution Is Painful; There’s No Easy Way Out; Everything Must Be On the Table, and Washington Must Lead.

The Bowles/Simpson proposals do deserve serious consideration. They also must be placed in context — first, they are “illustrative” cuts, ones that are on the table and illustrate how the Commission might save $100 million in defense over five years. These cuts are on top of Secretary of Defense Bob Gates plan, announced over the summer, to wring $100 billion out of the Pentagon’s $700+ billion budget over five years, by reducing contractors, saving on personnel costs, and riding herd on and/or canceling over-budget and delayed programs. While many of Gates’ plans coincide with Bowles/Simpson (contractors and V-22 Osprey, for example), reconciling what to do with the savings is sure to cause a fight.  More on that below…

It’s most useful to evaluate the Bowles/Simpson illustrative cuts against three core criteria:

  1. Does a proposal fundamentally weaken the country’s ability to defend itself?
  2. If not, does a proposal fundamentally weaken the country’s core non-military national interests?
  3. If not, does the savings benefit to the country outweigh the parochial interest of the proposed cut?

With that in mind, on balance, most of the Commission’s proposals on Defense spending are quite sensible.  For readability’s sake, I’ll lump several of the proposals into larger categories.

First, a starting point:

A simple way to enforce budgetary discipline at the Pentagon starts with one basic policy adjustment: end the practice of supplemental budgeting. DoD has three budgets, not one: a baseline appropriation, plus two “supplemental” appropriations that are supposed to pay for the war, but do oh-so-much-more. I’ve written about the problem for Forbes.com, and you can see an excerpt here:

Having three budgets is like having three strikes in a baseball at-bat — you have the luxury to swing and miss twice. Projects that don’t make the baseline DoD budget (strike one!) can be considered in either of the additional supplementals (strike two! strike three!) before they’re “out.” Ending the supplementals would be like giving the batter just one strike. By combining all defense spending into one (larger) appropriation each year, the batter has just one swing — miss the first time, that’s it. The practice would force Congress to make hard choices that prioritize the war-fighter.

If we have just one budget, it would be much easier to implement many practices recommended in the Bowles/Simpson plan, such as “reducing procurement by 15 percent” and “reduce ‘other procurement’”.  Procurement is bloated with multiple, supplemental budgets.  Having just one a year forces appropriators to make hard choices.

Savings over five years: $28.5 billion, per Commission estimates.

Next, the low hanging fruit amongst the “illustrative” cuts:

Salary freezes for civilians and military, doubling cuts to contracting personnel and replacing some with civilians. These check all categories without question. The commission could perhaps go even further by advocating a freeze in combat pay as well — Yes, our military has performed heroically in difficult circumstances, but we’re talking about not increasing warzone pay, we’re not talking about eliminating it.  Reducing contractors is a no-brainer.

Troop reductions in Europe and Asia. Europe is the easier sell: Twenty years after the Cold War and with staging needs for Iraq and Afghanistan winding down, the American military does not need as extensive a footprint on the European continent.  The Commission proposes reducing American forces in Korea by 17,000 troops, which leave 11,500 by my math. That’s hardly a comforting thought, with an unstable and nuclear-minded North Korean regime in the midst of a power transition.  We would continue to maintain 32,000 in Japan, and it perhaps makes more sense to split reductions between the two countries, even though removing troops from Japan has been a local political hot potato of late.

Modernize TriCare: Let’s be honest: this isn’t a move to “modernize” defense health care, it’s an effort to bring the military’s health system’s co-pays and deductables in line with cost-structures of private insurers.  Does it seem like we’re giving our servicemembers the shaft?  Yes.  But are military health care costs, “are eating the Defense Department alive,” according to Secretary Gates. It’s unfortunate, but servicemembers’ premiums must rise to correct this problem.

Reduce base support, facilities maintenance, retail activities, and DoD schooling: With the exception of closing unused DoD schools, there’s no question these cuts will hurt.  But is reducing the deficit more important?  In these times, yes.

Savings over five years: $45.1 billion, per Commission estimates.

Slightly tougher to swallow:

Weapons Cuts: Not all platforms are created equal: certain are needed for modernization, others for replacement, and yet others to fill niche capabilities.

The Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) takes a beating from Bowles/Simpson, something followers of the program probably suspected.  After all, when procurement of the F-22 was ended last year at 187 planes, DoD proclaimed itself ready to buy 2,443 F-35 JSFs instead.  At the time, 2,443 JSFs seemed a preposterously and unrealistically large number.  It still does, which is why a revised purchase plan, mixing in refurbishments of cheaper F-16s and F-18s while cancelling the USMC’s version of the JSF outright, falls within my comfort level.

We’ve already purchased 288 V-22 Osprey, which is two-thirds of the planned buy, and enough to meet the lion’s share of mission requirements.  Along those lines, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle’s (EFV) capabilities are ably substituted by other technologies under development, allowing for EFV’s cancellation.

The Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, Ground Combat Vehicle, and Joint Tactical Radio would be delayed, not canceled, under the Bowles/Simpson plan, which seems reasonable as the Army’s tactical vehicle fleet received an unexpected influx of cash to procure IED-hardened MRAP vehicles for Iraq.

Reduce R&D: This might seem unwise (“Why do we want to cut R&D while we’re dropping weapons? Shouldn’t we invest in developing weapons even if we don’t end up producing them?”), but it’s not as big a deal as it originally seems.  Fact is, by combining the defense budgets and reducing certain weapons buys, R&D organically decreases as a natural function of those actions.

Knowing how Congress works, it’s highly unlikely that these planned weapons buys will be fully endorsed.  But they will likely be negotiated reductions, in order to maintain capability while sending a strong signal that there’s a changing culture of fiscal discipline.

Savings over five years: up to, but probably less than $30.45 billion, per Commission estimates.

Up in the Air:

Secretary of DefenseBob Gates came out with his own plan to trim $100billion from the Pentagon’s budget, which he intended to reinvest in DoD modernization plans. He was coyly getting out in front of Bowles-Simpson, who want to take Gates’ savings and apply them not to modernization, but rather to deficit reduction.

The trick is convincing the Secretary to follow through with these plans, knowing that the Pentagon won’t get to keep all the planned savings. The good news is this fight probably won’t happen, as Gates will likely leave his post before final decisions are made. Savings reinvestments is just one of the reasons the new Secretary’s views on deficit reduction will have to align with Obama’s.

You Can’t Touch This:

The only illustrative cut in the Bowles-Simpson plan that I whole-heartedly disagree with is the notion of canceling the Navy’s Future Maritime Prepositioning Force. These plans are currently under study, and if executed correctly, could end up saving money while allowing the Navy to project force more efficiently in an era of restrained budgets. There’s still work to be done here, and at $2.7 billion in potential savings, isn’t exactly a budget buster.

Photo credit: pingnews.com

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Posted in A Progressive Security Strategy, Daily Fix, Issues | 1 Comment »

These Just May Be The Lunatics We’re (Not) Looking For: Conservatives on Conservatives

Monday, November 8th, 2010
Jim Arkedis


Jim Arkedis is the director of PPI's National Security Project.

by Jim Arkedis

Here’s how Bill Kristol, Fox News contributor and editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, summed up a panel discussion I attended at the conservative American Enterprise Institute:

This is a truly distinguished panel, and one I’m happy to say that’s fair and balanced.  We have (former Republican Senator from Missouri) Jim Talent, a responsible, respectable hawk.  We have a slightly crazed militarist in Tom Donnelly, and a really insane hegemonic imperialist… me.  It’s the correct spectrum of opinion.

The crowd chuckled its DC chuckle, and Wild Bill began. As it turned out, he was ironically prophetic – these people are batshit crazy. That tens of newly-elected Tea Partiers – folks who have never had much to say on national security and foreign policy issues – are now taking their cues from these jokers is downright terrifying.

But before diving into the political angles, here’s what makes these nutcases tick:

My suspicions were first aroused when former Senator Jim Talent (MO) blamed Bill Clinton for Iraq.  Would that I were joking! Indeed, Talent bemoaned Clinton’s decision to scale down the size of the military in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. He correctly claimed that we were “fully deployed” during Iraq and Afghanistan, meaning that we simply didn’t have the numbers of troops necessary to properly resource both conflicts.  It’s painfully and unfortunately obvious that Talent learned exactly the wrong lesson from Iraq and Afghanistan:

How much money and how many lives would it have saved if we’d have had 14 divisions instead of 10 and had been able to do in Afghanistan at the same time as we were (doing) in Iraq? … The blood, the lives, the people who were dying… we could have been years ahead of that schedule!

In other words, not only was invading Iraq the right call, we should have gone bigger and harder. It’s just too bad that all those people had to die and we had to waste all that money there because Bill Clinton decided to cut the size of the military after the Cold War.

Is Jim Talent a co-author on Decision Points or something?  And here I was thinking that the decision to go to war without fully understanding what we were getting ourselves into caused all the slow progress.

Then there was Kristol’s fundamentally misguided view of defense spending. And that’s odd because he starts out with a correct general premise: “We should cut what should be cut and shouldn’t cut what shouldn’t.”  That’s all well and good, provided you think that there are things to be cut.  So over to you, Bill:

The best possible spending you can have is defense spending! We got out of the Great Depression by having a big defense build up…. The Pentagon has plenty of shovel ready projects!

F-22? No way! Foreign aid? Why not? It was deliciously ironic that while Kristol supported the idea of foreign assistance, he was open to restructuring its $45 billion budget; at the same time, Kristol lauded Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), incoming House Appropriations chairman, saying Ryan “knows how little can be saved in the defense budget — maybe $20 billion.”  Pssst: Bill, that’s almost half of the foreign aid budget you think is big enough to reexamine. It’s also half of State’s.

It all seems so obvious to Talent: The defense budget “is affordable. To argue that it’s not affordable just isn’t right.” It’s especially affordable if we keep cutting taxes, right Jim?

Talent wrapped it all up in a nice big Fox News bow by tying alleged American declinism to Obama’s nefarious plan to nominate Joseph Stalin’s ghost as Tim Geithner’s replacement: “A socialized economy will not let America remain a great power.”  But hold on there –- does a socialist want to “position our nation for success in the global marketplace” via a “strong, innovative, and growing U.S. economy in an open international economic system that promotes opportunity and prosperity”?  Then Talent has some explaining to do, because that’s what the president says in this year’s National Security Strategy.

Thankfully, there was one area these mental dwarfs didn’t completely screw up: New START.  Let’s be clear: Their partisan glasses won’t let them whole-heartedly endorse a very sensible treaty.  Instead, they’re holding it hostage to more missile defense spending.  But they’ll vote for it… hopefully.

Now, this all gets incredibly fascinating when you put it in a political context. The major take-away from this session is that the conservative establishment is pissing down their collective leg at the Tea Party’s soon-to-be dominant position on the Hill.  Their plan is to co-opt the Tea Party by supplying it with mainstream conservative positions in an area the Tea Party doesn’t spend much time thinking about.

Kristol liquored up new Tea Partiers in hopes of bringing her home after the prom:

I think the Tea Party gets a bum wrap. They don’t believe we should lose wars, they don’t believe we should weaken the military, they do believe the world would be safer if Iran didn’t have nuclear weapons.

Jim Talent poured a few shots into Kristol’s punchbowl by hitting the “DC Republican establishment” (note to Talent: you’re a member.)

People who sat around and didn’t do what had to be done in 2001-2004 (specifically: Don Rumsfeld)… it’s a little much for them to be all up in arms because one Tea Party candidate said something that sounded vaguely not quite correct from the point of view of a strong U.S. foreign policy.

They’re pandering, and hard.  Rand Paul doesn’t know it yet, but the Tea Party’s biggest spending hawk is about to vote for an ever-increasing defense budgets soon enough.

It was a mind-blowing Friday morning for yours truly, but was very reassuring in a way: The conservative establishment is as out of touch and irresponsible as always on national security, and they’re trying to take advantage of the strongest but most impressionable subset of their caucus.  That’s why now more than ever, progressives have to offer strong, smart, rational approaches to U.S. national security, military, and foreign policy challenges.

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The Strange Logic of Samuelson’s High-Speed Rail Critique

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010
Mark Reutter


PPI Fellow Mark Reutter is the former editor of Railroad History and author of Making Steel: Sparrows Point and the Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might (2005, rev. ed.).

by Mark Reutter

Give Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson credit – he’s a strong believer in recycling. Last year, he loudly derided the “mirage” of high-speed rail as “the triumph of fantasy over fact.” Yesterday, he denounced the “absurdity” of fast trains as “a triumph of politically expedient fiction over logic and evidence.” OK, he’s gotten a bit wordier, but you can see that once his mind is made up, it’s fixed in stone.

The same kind of thinking comes from nearly all critics of high-speed rail who bunker at the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and other right-leaning groups – they have a curiously static view of transportation. To them, investing in future high-speed rail is an extravagant and illogical expenditure of public money because the lack of prior investment in high-speed rail has done little to change our travel patterns.

By that logic, America should never have built a transcontinental railroad. Consider that only a handful of wagon trains made it to California in 1862. Had Samuelson been writing then, he probably would have criticized President Lincoln’s proposal to spend taxpayer money on a steam railroad to San Francisco as a plan that “would subsidize a tiny group of travelers and do little else” – to borrow a phrase from yesterday’s column.

What’s missing from Samuelson’s worldview is that major advances in transportation drive economic growth. They have throughout human history. The joining of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads in 1869 ushered in what economic historian Walt Rostow called the “takeoff period” of American industry.

Likewise, President Dwight Eisenhower did not justify interstate highways on the basis of established transportation patterns. U.S. railroads – not roads – carried the bulk of interstate freight, military personnel, and civilians during World War II. Instead, he warned that our national security in the Cold War 1950s depended on our ability to establish fast new highways to transport supplies throughout the country.

So when Samuelson denounces high-speed rail by citing today’s Amtrak ridership levels, he’s forgetting that rail traffic is far below what it would be if our passenger trains were remotely up to world standards. When we begin opening 200-mph railroads, a new level of traffic will appear very rapidly. It’s been dormant, waiting for a chance to move.

It is impossible to predict how much dormant traffic is waiting for a truly modernized rail system. Economic models don’t tell us, and Samuelson fails to even pose the question amid his attacks on high-speed rail as government “pork barrel.”

What’s remarkable (though not surprising, if one reads Cato’s Randal O’Toole and other rail critics) is Samuelson’s utter blindness to the fact that highways and airports require massive government “pork” to build and maintain. They don’t pay for themselves through fuel or ticket taxes, as their backers like to assert.

A Texas Department of Transportation study found that a new section of highway in Houston would generate only 16 percent of its total lifecycle cost from gas taxes. Texas DOT estimated a gas tax of $2.22 per gallon – nearly six times the present state and federal tax of 38.4 cents – reflected the actual cost of building and maintaining the highway.

Constructing 800 miles of high-speed rail in California is liable to cost more than $40 billion. Constructing and operating all 13 corridors proposed by the Obama administration could easily approach $200 billion. But these dramatic headline figures need context. The current transportation act allots $300 billion to highways – not for new construction since the interstate system is completed, but just for maintenance and rebuilding.

Huge costs loom as America’s highways reach the end of their productive life. Replacing the Tappan Zee Bridge in New York State is estimated to cost $17 billion. That figure is guaranteed to rise.

If interstate thoroughfares and vital bridges paid their way, private investors would be clamoring to commit funds to refinance them. They aren’t.

All modes of transporting people require subsidies. Amtrak’s direct subsidies of about $1.5 billion a year are transparent and highly publicized. Subsidies for cars and airlines are hidden in trust fund appropriations, user tax breaks, and local and state programs paid for by all taxpayers, including those who rarely drive and never fly.

In portraying himself as a hard-nosed realist free of the “fashionable make-believe” of rail advocates, Samuelson would do well to explain how he’d fix congestion, advance mobility, lessen pollution, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil by jettisoning an infrastructure program that directly addresses these issues.

photo credit: arbyreed

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Posted in Clean Energy and Modern Infrastructure, Daily Fix, Issues | 4 Comments »

Why It’s Easier For Conservatives To “Brand” Themselves

Monday, October 18th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

There’s been quite a bit of buzz over the last few days about a TNR article by Sara Robinson of Campaign for America’s Future that argues progressives need to emulate conservative “brand-building” through professional marketing techniques and institution-building.

It’s not exactly a new argument. At TPM Cafe, Todd Gitlin, who strongly agrees with Robinson, notes:

I mean no disrespect when I say that some version of this piece has appeared during every election cycle of the 21st century, and a lot of good books have sounded the theme.

Sometimes, of course, arguments for “branding” or “promoting frames” for progressives are less about using savvy marketing techniques or paying attention to basic values and themes, and more about insisting that the Democratic Party enforce the kind of ideological consistency that has made “branding” a more mechanical undertaking for Republicans, at least since Reagan. Robinson acknowledges that progressives don’t have the sort of level of consensus as conservatives, but argues that disagreements must be submerged in the interest of projecting a clear message.

Personally, I’m all for using smart techniques in politics, and have spent a good chunk of my own career in training sessions aimed at helping Democrats unravel and articulate their values, policy goals, and proposals in a way that promotes both party unity and effective communications.

But it’s important to understand that conservatives have an advantage in “branding” that I don’t think progressives can or should match. The best explication of this advantage was by Jonathan Chait in a justly famous 2005 article (also for TNR) entitled “Fact Finders,” which argued that conservatives, unlike progressives, have little regard for empirical evidence in developing their “brand,” and thus can maintain a level of simplicity and consistency in political communications that eludes the more reality-minded. Here Chait makes the key distinction:

We’re accustomed to thinking of liberalism and conservatism as parallel ideologies, with conservatives preferring less government and liberals preferring more. The equivalency breaks down, though, when you consider that liberals never claim that increasing the size of government is an end in itself. Liberals only support larger government if they have some reason to believe that it will lead to material improvement in people’s lives. Conservatives also want material improvement in people’s lives, of course, but proving that their policies can produce such an outcome is a luxury, not a necessity.

Thus conservatives are entirely capable of arguing that deficits don’t matter if they are promoting tax cuts, while deficits matter more than anything if they are trying to cut social spending; that tax cuts and deregulation are essential if the economy’s good, and tax cuts and deregulation are essential if the economy’s bad; and that particular totems like, say, missile defense, should be a top national priority both during and after the Cold War. Their agenda rarely changes, no matter how much the world changes, or how little evidence there is that their policy prescriptions work. The continued adherence of most conservatives to supply-side economics, that most thoroughly discredited concept, is a particularly important case in point.

As Chait notes, the refusal of progressives to ignore reality creates a real obstacle to consistency (and by inference, “branding”):

[I]ncoherence is simply the natural byproduct of a philosophy rooted in experimentation and the rejection of ideological certainty. In an open letter to Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes called him “the Trustee for those in every country who seek to mend the evils of our condition by reasoned experiment within the framework of the existing social system. If you fail, rational change will be gravely prejudiced throughout the world, leaving orthodoxy and revolution to fight it out.” Note how Keynes defined his and Roosevelt’s shared ideology as “reasoned experiment” and “rational change” and contrasted it with orthodoxy (meaning the conservative dogma that market economics were self-correcting) and revolution.

What progressives gain in exchange for this sacrifice of the opportunity to pound in a simple message and agenda for decades is pretty important: the chance when in power to promote policies that actually work. And of all the “brands” that are desirable for the party of public-sector activism, competence is surely the best. Indeed, the most ironically perilous thing about the current political environment is that Democrats are paying a high price for the consequences of ideologically-driven incompetence–not to mention very deliberate efforts to destabilize the planet and promote economic inequality and social divisions–attributable to the last era of conservative control of the federal government.

The best news for progressives right now is that conservatives are engaged in another, and even more ideologically-driven, effort to promote their “brand” at the expense of reality. Indeed, one way to understand the Tea Party Movement is as a fierce battle to deny Republicans any leeway from the remorseless logic that will soon lead them to propose deeply unpopular steps to reduce the size and scope of government, while also insisting on policies virtually guaranteed to make today’s bad economy even worse, certainly for middle-class Americans. I’m willing to grant conservatives a “branding” advantage and keep my own political family grounded in the messy uncertainties of the real world

This piece is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist

Photo credit: Ian Mansfield

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Posted in Daily Fix, Fixing Our Broken Politics, Issues | 1 Comment »

Will This Call For High-Speed Rail Spending Be Ignored?

Thursday, October 7th, 2010
Mark Reutter


PPI Fellow Mark Reutter is the former editor of Railroad History and author of Making Steel: Sparrows Point and the Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might (2005, rev. ed.).

by Mark Reutter

America’s transportation infrastructure is enfeebled, Washington’s transportation policy is broken, and we need to start building fast trains.

While that might be old news to readers of Progressive Fix, what is news is who’s saying it this week: Samuel Skinner, Secretary of Transportation under George H.W. Bush, and Norman Mineta, DOT Secretary under George W. Bush, were co-chairs of a conference at the University of Virginia behind a new report making this case. Mary E. Peters, Mineta’s successor under Bush, and a smattering of ex-DOT undersecretaries filled out the roster of 80 transportation experts.

Describing government spending on transportation as woefully underfunded, the report estimated that between $134 billion and $267 billion more is needed each year from now to 2035 to make U.S. roads, rail, and air transportation competitive with other countries.

The report lamented the “pork and political opportunism” in the current transportation reauthorization act, SAFETEA-LU, and advocated the setting up of core national priorities for transportation such as high-speed rail networks.

“High-speed rail has the potential to provide a fast, efficient and integrated alternative to driving and flying,” the report said. The best approach for genuine high-speed rail would be rights of way separate from existing freight lines – a policy strongly advocated by PPI (see here and here).

A major increase in the federal gas tax, which has remained unchanged at 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993, would help pay the bill for getting America’s transportation systems back to state-of-the-art standards.

Derailing High-Speed Rail

The group’s “call for action” comes at a time when Republican leaders have steered the GOP in a completely different direction. Extending the Bush tax cut has become their top national priority. The White House’s plan last month for $50 billion in infrastructure spending on highways and rail was met with open contempt by House Republican Leader John Boehner.

Several state races are shaping up as tests of whether President Obama’s higher-speed rail initiative can survive Republican hostility. In Wisconsin and Ohio, Republican candidates for governor have called federal stimulus money awarded for train improvements a major waste of taxpayer funds.

Scott Walker, the Republican candidate for governor in Wisconsin, has launched a website called notrain.com. He’s ahead in the polls, as is John Kasich, the former House Republican who vows to kill a $400 million federal stimulus project to link Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati by rail if elected the next governor of Ohio.

The anti-rail contagion has spread to New Jersey, where Republican Gov. Chris Christie is threatening to scuttle a train tunnel to Manhattan – and forfeit $6 billion in pledged funds from the federal government and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey – citing concerns of large cost overruns.

Christie yesterday postponed his announcement of whether he will back out of the agreement to build the tunnel – which would create 6,000 long-term construction jobs – in part so that he could campaign for other Republicans in the Midwest.

In California and Florida, where full-scale high-speed train networks have been awarded federal stimulus grants, GOP candidates are suggesting that they would delay or disrupt the projects.

Meg Whitman, running as the Republican candidate in California, says the state cannot afford “at this time” the costs associated with new high-speed rail. Rick Scott, Republican candidate for governor in Florida, has jumped on the same bandwagon, questioning whether the state can afford a rail line between Orlando and Tampa that has been awarded $1.25 billion in federal stimulus money.

Ironically, the current governors of California and Florida, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Charlie Crist, gained office as Republicans and have been big rail supporters. “To say ‘now is not the time’ shows a very narrow vision,” Schwarzenegger’s communications chief told the New York Times in response to Whitman’s tepid support for California’s rail investment.

The Eisenhower Model

“We’re going to have bridges collapse. We’re going to have earthquakes. We need somebody to grab the issue and run with it,” Mineta told reporters on Monday.

His earnest tone, delivered at the Rayburn House Office Building, was at odds with the anti-tax, anti-government vitriol coming from those of the same political stripe occupying nearby offices.

Advocates of infrastructure spending must offer specific data and concrete examples of the damage that continued underfunding of transportation projects could inflict on America’s standard of living and economic security. A starting point would be America’s dangerous overdependence on gasoline coming from unstable or hostile foreign countries. Add to this the lost productivity for U.S. drivers stuck in traffic jams, which the Mineta-Skinner report estimated at $87 billion in 2007, or $750 for every driver.

And consider that our population is expected to grow by 90 million in the next 40 years. These citizens will need to move, and high-speed rail is cheaper to build and causes much less environmental damage than new highways and airports.

A role model for such educational outreach is Dwight Eisenhower. The Republican president launched the Interstate Highway System by articulating a vision of top-quality roads benefiting all citizens and secured bipartisan support in Congress. It was part of his crusade to win the Cold War.

There’s a new battle out there – in the form of competition from emerging economic powerhouses like China, which plans to spend over $1 trillion in the next 10 years on a comprehensive 220-mph train system. While China builds its future, many of our politicians welcome gridlock as a way to wrest short-term partisan gains.

Photo credit: aussiegal

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Posted in Clean Energy and Modern Infrastructure, Daily Fix | 1 Comment »

Not in Our Backyard: China’s Emerging Anti-Access Strategy

Thursday, October 7th, 2010
Michael Chase


Michael S. Chase is an associate professor in the Strategy and Policy Department at the U.S. Naval War College and a fellow with the Truman National Security Project. The views expressed here are his own.

by Michael Chase

Download the entire memo.

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has enjoyed an unparalleled ability to project military power around the globe, as the world’s leading superpower.

But in recent years, potential U.S. rivals have invested in weapons systems and strategies that challenge America’s ability to project such global power. It is part of an “anti-access and area denial” (AA/AD) approach based on operational concepts and military capabilities that deter, delay, or disrupt U.S. military power projection. An AA/AD strategy works not by threatening to best America in a direct contest, but by preventing U.S. military engagement in the first place.

China’s strategists may not use the same terminology as their American counterparts, but there is ample evidence to suggest that Beijing is becoming AA/AD’s leading proponent. Beijing now has capabilities that could dramatically raise the costs of U.S. military intervention in areas vital to national interests, especially Taiwan and the South China Sea. As strategic analyst Andrew Krepinevich observes, “Since the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1996…China has moved to shift the military balance in the Western Pacific in its favor by fielding systems capable of driving up the cost of U.S. military access to the region to prohibitive levels.”

While China might not have the capability to sink an American aircraft carrier (or want to because of the risk of escalation), it might cause enough damage to achieve a “mission kill,” preventing air sorties from the ship and forcing it out of the conflict zone. In theory, the threat of this kind of attack would cordon U.S. aircraft carriers so far away from a Chinese theater that their operational and strategic effectiveness would be greatly diminished.

The growing threat to U.S. aircraft carriers—perhaps the greatest symbol of America’s power projection capability—is but one example of China’s military modernization and strategic pivot since the mid-1990s. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is increasingly capable of posing a credible threat to Taiwan and raising the potential costs of U.S. military intervention in a regional conflict.

How and why did China’s approach shift in this new direction? What are the most potent anti-access and area denial capabilities in Beijing’s arsenal? And what are the implications for U.S. interests in the Asia-Pacific region?

Download the entire memo.

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Posted in A Progressive Security Strategy, Daily Fix, Issues, Policy Memo, Priority 1, Report Weight | 1 Comment »

The Eastern European Energy Void: A Case For American Leadership

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010
Jim Arkedis


Jim Arkedis is the director of PPI's National Security Project.

by Jim Arkedis

Parts of Hungary may well still conjure drab images of the Cold War: bleak and desolate wheat fields, maybe a blue-gray sky, skeletons of Soviet-era construction.

Stereotypes, of course, often contain a grain of truth. The New York Times’ recent profile of Oroszlany, some fifty miles east of Budapest, harks back to that bygone era.  Some 3,000 of the town’s 20,000 residents work in industries related to coal; with that many directly tied to the industry, it’s not hard to imagine how deep into the economy coal’s tentacles stretch.

But that’s changing — authorities announced that Oroszlany’s coal mine would close within three years.  The mine’s closure is well-intended, as the European Union — of which Hungary became a member in 2004 — seeks to end government subsidies for carbon-producing sources of energy.  Dirty coal is, of course, a chief protagonist.

This noble clean-energy goal has created a painful short-term “bridging” problem: The coal-fired power is disappearing too fast, and Hungary is left with an energy shortfall. It simply doesn’t produce enough domestic power right now to keep up with demand.  Figuring out any role that the U.S. or EU might play as Eastern Europe makes this transition is becoming ever more important.

This energy transition is an issue Gabor Rajnai, Oroszlany’s mayor, understands all too well. He wonders how his town is going to keep warm in the winter.  He frets Russian natural gas will fill the gap.  Rajnai probably remembers New Year’s Day 2006, when Vladimir Putin, then Russia’s president, sent a shockwave across Europe when he directed Gazprom, the state energy company, to shut off the flow of gas to the Continent.  Thanks to a price dispute with Ukraine, Europe froze, as it did again when Russia slowed down gas supply again in March 2008.  To make up for this year’s drop in coal-fueled power, Hungary will again import Russia gas.

This is the latest in a deepening dependency.  In March 2008, Putin and Ferenc Gyurcsany, his then- Hungarian counterpart, signed a contract that deepened cooperation on natural gas projects, including Hungarian financing of a Russian pipeline through the country.  In other words, as NATO-member Hungary transitions to a cleaner fuel sources, it is lashing itself ever tighter to the world’s coldest petro-dictator.

Let’s hope this deal doesn’t end up putting Hungary on par with its Eastern European neighbor, the Czech Republic.  As detailed in a stunning mid-September article in The New Republic, Russia and Gazprom camouflaged a network of Czech shell companies to obfuscate the money trail that leads directly from Prague’s hand to Moscow’s mouth.

The Czech Republic faces the same bridging problem as Hungary, too: As coal plants are phased out, how will the country power itself before domestic, self-sustaining energy sources are brought online?  Nuclear power, as regularly championed by PPI, is an option, but as TNR chronicles, even the Russians are likely to win that bid too.

However, that doesn’t mean Hungary and the Czech Republic are doomed to fall in some sort of Cold War-style Soviet sphere of influence.  According to one industry expert, the region’s long-term prospects of creating secure domestic energy sources are more solid: Alex Cranberg of Aspect Energy thinks Hungary has solid reserves of its own gas yet to come online.

He told me he was first drawn to Hungary because its geological fingerprint reminded him of the southern US, and thinks the country’s natural gas industry — where Aspect has invested — is well-run and could produce a stable supply of clean natural gas over the long-haul.  The trick, he says, is getting to the tough-to-reach underground gas fields, which make up some 90 percent of the domestic supply.  That appears to be happening: in the last four years, Cranberg claims that his joint venture has gone from producing none of Hungary’s natural gas to 20 percent, and that slice of the pie should only grow.

But growing takes time, and ensuring that Hungary — and Eastern Europe — has access to a diverse supply of energy in the interim is an important policy initiative that Brussels, not to mention Washington, seems to have glossed over.  Vice President Biden was in Prague to lobby for Westinghouse’s nuclear bid, but local experts believe it might be too little too late. Helping develop domestic clean power sectors could be a productive initiative for both capitals, from economic, energy, and security perspectives.

Photo credit: Wally Gobets

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Holding Romney Accountable on Foreign Policy

Friday, July 9th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

When a presidential hopeful like Mitt Romney signs a Washington Post op-ed attacking the president for an arms agreement with Russia, there’s a tendency among Democrats to shrug and ignore it. Mitt, we all understand, is a former governor with no foreign policy experience who needs to burnish his credentials in this area, even if it’s only by bloviating. And Mitt, we know, is vulnerable on his right flank, partially because the GOP has decisively moved in a more conservative direction since Romney posed as the “true conservative” candidate in 2008, and partially because his sponsorship of a Massachusetts health reform initiative that’s hard to distinguish from the hated ObamaCare is going to be a constant problem for him in 2012.

So you read Mitt’s op-ed and maybe laugh at the extraordinary retro feeling of it all — you know, all the Cold War hostility to the godless Russkies — and note the many right-wing boxes he checked off, from the ancient conservative pet rock of missile defense, to the ill-repressed desire for war with North Korea and Iran, to the ritual denunciations of Obama for his alleged fecklessness in negotiating with bad people. But initially, few if any Democrats had anything to say about it.

That certainly changed Wednesday, when Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) took to the same WaPo pages to pen a devastating riposte to Romney for getting, well, just about all the facts wrong. After tearing Romney apart on missile defense, on MIRVs, on what the treaty would and wouldn’t let the Russians do, and on the bipartisan support for what Obama’s done, Kerry concluded with this well-placed jab:

I have nothing against Massachusetts politicians running for president. But the world’s most important elected office carries responsibilities, including the duty to check your facts even if you’re in a footrace to the right against Sarah Palin. More than that, you need to understand that when it comes to nuclear danger, the nation’s security is more important than scoring cheap political points.

As it turns out, Kerry was nicer to Romney than was foreign policy wonk Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate:

In 35 years of following debates over nuclear arms control, I have never seen anything quite as shabby, misleading and–let’s not mince words–thoroughly ignorant as Mitt Romney’s attack on the New START treaty in the July 6 Washington Post.

Whether or not Romney’s efforts to display conservative ferocity on foreign policy work with the GOP base, he could pay a price down the road in terms of the impact on people who aren’t hard-core conservative ideologues. Talking to progressives, you generally get the sense that while they would fight Mitt Romney like sin itself if he’s the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, they basically think the man’s sane and relatively competent, and wouldn’t threaten the foundations of the Republic like some possibilities they could name. But a few more rabid op-eds on world affairs like Romney’s latest effort will definitely undermine any latent tolerance for Romney in center-left precincts, and will also provide some target practice in case the endlessly flip-flopping former governor’s act gets him to a general election.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: marcn’s Photostream

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The Cold War Is Over, But the Nukes Are Still Here

Monday, April 12th, 2010
Jim Arkedis


Jim Arkedis is the director of PPI's National Security Project.

by Jim Arkedis

President Obama sure is spending a lot of time worrying about nuclear weapons this week. Today’s Nuclear Security Summit – a meeting of over 40 world leaders in Washington, D.C. – caps seven days of highly publicized events on nuclear security.

The attention lavished on atomic weapons feels almost anachronistic, invoking a Cold War-era standoff that now seems so distant. Twenty-five years ago, I was a third grader at St. Joan of Arc in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Once a month, Ms. Elliot would trot my class into the hallway where we’d kneel down and clasp our hands behind our necks. This wasn’t some strange Catholic school ritual – we were “protecting” ourselves from a Soviet nuclear attack.

While I realize now that this defensive maneuver wouldn’t have kept me safe from a direct hit on the jungle gym, the looming threat of a mushroom cloud over the American Midwest felt real.

It doesn’t today. The end of the Cold War, years of American military dominance and improving, if occasionally frustrating, relations with Moscow have effectively banished the threat of mutually assured destruction. Beyond Russia, it’s nearly impossible to imagine China, perhaps the United States’ “near-peer” military competitor but also its financial Siamese twin, launching its nuclear weapons.

But nuclear security must be important – just glance at Obama’s schedule. Before signing the New START accord with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev last Thursday, his administration released its Nuclear Posture Review, an important document that redefines the way America will use the 1550 deployed warheads New START permits. And today the president is convening the summit of world leaders in Washington, D.C.

It’s not only this week. These events are part of a yearlong effort that began last April when President Obama spoke about his vision of a world without nuclear weapons.

It’s a long-term goal to be sure — Obama has been clear that America would retain its arsenal as long as others did. But it’s hardly a liberal fantasy — conservative icons like former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz have joined forces with mainstream Democrats like former Senator Sam Nunn and Defense Secretary Bill Perry to promote a nuclear-free world.

They’re following the legacy of Ronald Reagan, who nearly signed on to sweeping nuclear restrictions with Mikhail Gorbachev in Iceland in 1986, and George H.W. Bush, who signed the START treaty in 1991.

So with no Cold War threat, what’s the urgency? Why is the president wasting time negotiating with countries that wouldn’t dare attack us anyway?

Here’s why — it’s not state-sponsored atomic destruction that’s the threat. It’s the al-Qaeda operative with a nuclear suitcase. That sounds crazy, right? Then again, we never could have imagined that three airliners could bring down the Twin Towers and slam into the Pentagon. President Obama realizes that a nuclear arsenal in the hands of nation-states still poses a threat, albeit from stateless ones.

How, then, does a stuffy gathering of world leaders at a conference center in Washington, D.C. keep the bomb away from a small-fry terrorist? First, curbing nuclear proliferation depends on the large nuclear powers — U.S., Russia, China, U.K. and France — showing a serious and sustained effort towards nuclear disarmament that convinces the smaller nuclear powers — India, Pakistan and Israel — and nuclear weapons aspirants — North Korea and Iran — to feel comfortable without them. That dialogue needs to start on a big stage, particularly for American allies India and Pakistan, who may want to do the right thing but happen to be mortal enemies.

What’s more, it’s the North Koreas, Irans and Pakistans of the world that stand the greatest chance of selling nuclear technology to the black market’s highest bidder. Getting those countries to swear off nuclear weapons planning is critical. Just ask A.Q. Khan — he might be a hero as the father of the Pakistani A-bomb, but he has also sold nuclear secrets to Iran and North Korea in the 1980s and 1990s for tens of millions of dollars.

We need nation-states to control their nuclear scientists, and getting everyone on the same page — as Obama’s doing — is the first step to achieving that goal.

We are long-removed from cowering in the hallway of my Catholic school in Ohio, but that doesn’t mean the nuclear threat died with the Cold War. It has simply changed. That’s why the Obama administration is spending so much time yanking America’s nuclear security policy into the 21st century.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/travlr/

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KickSTART to the 21st Century

Thursday, April 8th, 2010
Joseph Cirincione


Joseph Cirincione is the president of Ploughshares Fund and the author of Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons.

Alexandra Bell


Alexandra Bell is the project manager at Ploughshares Fund and a Truman National Security Fellow.

by Joseph Cirincione and Alexandra Bell

The president got a New START. Now he needs the Senate to ratify it.

This should be a no-brainer. When Presidents Obama and Medvedev signed the treaty, dubbed New START, in Prague today, they were doing a lot more than concluding a dry, complex arms reduction agreement. The accord is a pragmatic and essential first step in strengthening American security.

The Cold War is over, but the weapons remain. Though we no longer fear global thermonuclear war between America and Russia, a nuclear explosion in an American city would be an unimaginable catastrophe. There are still 23,000 nuclear weapons held by nine different nations. Our military and security leaders agree: nuclear terrorism and the emergence of new nuclear states are the greatest threat to our nation. To prevent these threats we have to reduce the global stockpiles, secure all weapons material and block new nuclear-armed nations.

The New START treaty is part of the administration’s effort to develop a comprehensive national defense strategy that focuses on these 21st-century threats. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen gave his emphatic endorsement:

Through the trust it engenders, the cuts it requires, and the flexibility it preserves this treaty enhances our ability to do that which we have been charged to do: protect and defend the citizens of the United States.  I am as confident in its success as I am in its safeguards.

That is why this administration worked for a year to secure this follow-on to the 1991 START agreement, which was a legacy of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Those presidents knew, as did Nixon, Kennedy and Eisenhower before them, that sustained attention to arms control reductions made the U.S. stronger and safer.

The New START will make this country more secure in several ways. It lowers the limits on deployed strategic bombs to levels not seen since the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. It also establishes a cutting-edge verification process that allows us to track Russia’s nuclear activities and verify their reductions. Our intelligence agencies will enjoy enhanced monitoring capabilities that will give them greater knowledge of Russian nuclear forces and plans.

We will also gain greater international stability. This treaty is a key step in gaining the global cooperation that we need to prevent nuclear terrorism and the spread of nuclear weapons. It will also help us to box in hostile states like Iran and North Korea by clearly reaffirming the U.S.’s and Russia’s commitment to disarmament, and move other states to take the steps necessary to secure nuclear materials and block nuclear weapons trade and development — steps that are often expensive or cut against the commercial interests of many key nations.

A Bipartisan Issue – But Will We See Bipartisan Support?

This is why New START has broad, bipartisan support from former military and national security leaders. Former Republican Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger and former Democratic Secretary of Defense Bill Perry and Sen. Sam Nunn (D-GA) have lauded the treaty (PDF) as an important step.

But there are problems standing in the way of quick Senate action. For one thing, there are nuclear Neanderthals that remain inside the beltway, clinging to Cold War theories and strategies. And the partisan rancor in Washington has become almost radioactive, with cheap political point-scoring taking precedent over the business of governance. Remember that treaties need to be approved by two-thirds of the Senate — a heavy lift considering the political environment.

Can the U.S. Senate rise above the partisan bluster and Tea Party talking points and focus on what’s good for American national security? The New START is an integral part of a smart, strong and pragmatic nuclear policy plan. Senators should approve this treaty before they take off for summer vacation.

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