EDITOR’S NOTE: Jeane Kirkpatrick, U.S. ambassador to the U.N. under Ronald Reagan and recepient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, died Thursday .
This piece by Kirkpatrick appeared in the February 22, 1999, issue of National Review.
A good many Americans still have trouble understanding why the United States needs a missile defense — this despite the only slightly veiled threat made by a Chinese general during the Taiwan Straits crisis in 1996 to bomb Los Angeles. Since then the reach and accuracy of China’s missiles have increased, with the help of generous infusions of advanced U.S. missile technology.
At the end of January, news surfaced that the Chinese army had conducted exercises against Taiwan and — most remarkably — U.S. troops in the area. Reluctant to face, much less to publicize, China’s new posture and power, the Clinton administration is said to be delaying a report to Congress on these developments. It has had too great an investment in its special relationship with China and too great a stake in the longheld conviction that the United States does not need, and will not need, an effective missile defense. Meanwhile, the role of the “People’s Liberation Army” in the Beijing government grows.
Nor is China the only power in the region breaking through to the production of long-range ballistic missiles. Since summer. North Korea has tested weapons capable of reaching Taipei, Tokyo, Alaska, Hawaii, and other U.S. bases in the Pacific. The North Korean Taepo Dong 1 missile was tested over Japan last August. Moreover, Charles Kartman, the State Department official who led a recent mission to Pyongyang, said that “compelling evidence exists” that North Korea is attempting to restart its nuclear-weapons program, in spite of its 1994 “Framework Agreement” with the United States. Pyongyang’s refusal to open a major facility to inspection has further heightened suspicion.
In Iran, the long-range missile Shihab 3 was flight-tested last summer, and development is moving ahead on a still-longer-range missile, the Shihab 4. To its credit, the Clinton administration has worked hard to prevent Russia from aiding Iran’s progress in missile technology guidance systems. But this effort has failed.
The administration has failed, too, in Iraq, which like North Korea has broken commitments to permit inspection. No one should have forgotten that inspections after the Gulf War revealed Iraq to be much closer — dangerously closer — to production of a nuclear missile than the world had suspected. So too, India and Pakistan have established themselves as members of the nuclear club. The bipartisan Rumsfeld Commission issued a report that details these developments (one version of which is unclassified). Obviously, Americans cannot entrust their future to arms-control efforts such as the Non-Proliferation Treaty, conceived in 1968.
The International Atomic Energy Agency is also of limited help. It has done commendable work, and UNSCOM — the U.N. inspection regime — has certainly made a valuable contribution in Iraq. But the IAEA has not only failed to prevent proliferation, it has — inadvertently but repeatedly — abetted several of the most lawless rogue states in their acquisition of nuclear reactors, intended for peaceful purposes but diverted to other uses. Iraq and Iran received such help in procuring reactors. Now Cuba is again being helped by Russia with its own reactor. China, too, has been the source of technology for weapons of mass destruction. The United States has failed to stop the flow of Russian and Chinese nuclear technology to Iran. The Missile Control Regime — whose purpose is to prevent missile-technology transfer — has done little to slow proliferation.
In short, the “arms control” approach has simply not solved the problem. It has been tried, diligently and even admirably; yet it has failed.
Small wonder, then, that Secretary of Defense William Cohen declared in late January, “We are affirming that there is a threat, and the threat is growing, and we expect it will pose a danger not only to our troops overseas but to Americans here at home.”
This admission was a clear departure from Clinton-administration policy. Cohen’s predecessor and other Pentagon officials had claimed repeatedly that there would be no threat to the United States for at least a decade. Yet Cohen, and Lt. Gen. Lester Lyles, director of the Defense Department’s Missile Defense Organization, appear to know better. Lyles avowed, following the Cohen statement, “The threat is here and now.” Both men acknowledge that current plans for a national missile defense will require modification of the ABM Treaty (1972).
This poses another problem for the administration. There are still influential persons in it who are more worried about preserving the treaty (or offending Russia) than about preserving our security and our freedom to act in the world.
It is hardly necessary to pursue today the hoary debate about whether the ABM treaty had any value for American security in the two-superpower days of the Cold War. I note only that the Soviet Union’s major violations of the treaty at Krasnoyarsk were confessed by Edouard Shevardnadze (the former Soviet foreign minister) soon after the Cold War ended; and I emphasize that whatever merit the treaty had then vanished with the Cold War — and in the face of nuclear proliferation and the ample demonstration of the possibilities for violating the treaty.
Today, it makes no sense at all to grant Russia a veto over our capacity to defend ourselves. We should give notice and withdraw from the treaty. Without a national and theater missile defense, we are without protection from weapons of mass destruction targeting our cities and blackmailing our policymakers and allies. No president has the right to ignore the common defense.
BLESSED LOCATION
Here is a basic truth: Good guys don’t always finish first. In this century, peaceful, democratic states have been the victims of aggressive dictatorships; most of the European continent succumbed half a century ago to the armies and ambitions of Hitler and Stalin. The superiority of our democratic allies’ morality and political system could not save them from conquest. Neither can our own superior morality and political system protect us from despots armed with the latest technology. Modern missilery has already significantly neutralized the advantages of what George Washington termed “our blessed location,” which through history has protected us behind two oceans — even as we participated in foreign wars that devastated the major cities of Europe and East Asia.
As in the past, we Americans can defend our freedom and our lives only if we are strong enough to deter or defeat an attack. Our defense must keep pace with developments in weapons, technology, and tactics. Devastation, defeat, and occupation were the price paid by France when it counted on blocking the Nazi onslaught with the Maginot Line and a strategy that had been effective in the previous war. The Maginot Line was of course useless against Hitler’s Blitzkrieg. He merely went around it.
Democratic governments have a special need for defense because modern democracies do not fight aggressive wars. Aggressive dictatorships, however, are frequently ready to undertake expansionist adventures for no cause but their own appetites. No objective reason was required to motivate Iraq to attack Kuwait. Or North Korea to advance against the South. Regimes that habitually use coercion against their own subjects find it natural to turn their aggression on others.
This tendency of expansionist dictatorships to start wars is the most powerful reason that the United States and other democratic governments need urgently to be able to defend themselves against today’s dictatorships, armed as they are with nearly complete weapons of mass destruction.
Our nation’s moral strength and intellectual clarity may be the foundation of our national security; but they are no substitute for an adequate defense. Rather, our moral strength should enable us to face squarely the dangers of proliferation. And that realism should lead us at last to build and deploy the defensive system begun — a full decade and a half ago — by Ronald Reagan.