Sen. Richard Lugar rebukes fellow Republicans over New START treaty

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The one Republican in Congress universally considered to be an expert on nuclear security policy is Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN). On Wednesday, Sen. Lugar had enough of Arizona's Senator Ostruction, Jon Kyl, putting partisan politics ahead of U.S. national security.

"In a stunning rebuke to members of his own caucus, Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking Republican Richard Lugar (R-IN) said on Wednesday that the GOP is intentionally trying to put off a vote on the New START treaty with Russia, and avoiding a serious discussion about the treaty within the caucus." Lugar rebukes own party for avoiding New START debate, wants to force vote now | The Cable (emphasis mine):

"At the moment, the Republican caucus is tied up in a situation where people don't want to make choices," Lugar told reporters in the hallway of the Capitol building Wednesday. "No one wants to be counted. No one wants to talk about it."

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[A]ccording to Lugar, the Republican leadership is preventing a debate on the treaty for the rest of the year because they don't want to force their rank-and-file members to take a position on the agreement.

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[Sen.] Kyl told The Cable that negotiations were going forward "in good faith," but Lugar suggested that's all a smoke screen and that the Republican leadership is committed to avoiding completion of the treaty for the foreseeable future.

"Every senator has an obligation in the national security interest to take a stand, to do his or her duty. Maybe people would prefer not to do his or her duty right now," he said. "Sometimes when you prefer not to vote, you attempt to find reasons not to vote."

Lugar argued that the intransigence within the Republican caucus is a result of the leadership's unwillingness to put current GOP senators in the crosshairs of the debate before the political terrain shifts in the Republicans' favor when the new Congress is sworn in.

"If you're a Republican, you anticipate that the lay of the land is going to be much more favorable in January and therefore would say, ‘If we do not have to make tough choices now, why make tough choices?'" Lugar explained.

Lugar wants the Democratic Senate leadership to cut off negotiations immediately and force a vote on New START now, to compel senators to get off the fence and to end the endless stalling coming from his own side of the aisle.

"I'm advising that the treaty should come on the floor so people will have to vote aye or nay [even if there's no deal]," he said. "I think when it finally comes down to it, we have sufficient number or senators who do have a sense of our national security. This is the time, this is the priority. Do it."

Delaying until next year is a worst case scenario that could delay the treaty's ratification for months or even years as new senators request additional time to study the issue, and the committee process begins all over again, he said.

"Endless hearings, markup, back to trying to get some time on the floor… It will be some time before the treaty is ever heard from again," Lugar said.

Lugar also warned that the failure to ratify the treaty could have drastic consequences for other facets of U.S.-Russia nuclear cooperation — especially the Nunn-Lugar effort to secure loose nuclear materials throughout the former Soviet Union.

If START fails, the cooperation between the United States and Russia on securing loose nukes could be imperiled, representing an even bigger risk for national security, Lugar said.

"There are still thousands of missiles out there. You better get that through your heads," he said, directing his comments to members of his own party.

If the New START treaty is not ratified, it imperils U.S. foreign policy as well. The Pause Button – By Dmitri Trenin | Foreign Policy:

If the Senate doesn't attempt a vote before the end of the year, the treaty's odds of passing will be even longer come January, with a thinner Democratic majority and a Republican minority that mostly agrees with Kyl; the prospect is now very real that New START will be consigned to the diplomatic scrap heap.

If this looks bad from Washington, it looks worse from Moscow. Kyl isn't just imperiling Obama's arms-reduction ambitions — he's also diminishing the American president's credibility abroad. And in the eyes of Russia's leaders, he's casting into doubt the United States' commitment to fixing its relationship with Russia.

To the Kremlin, New START's apparent demise may well mean the end of an arms-control agenda that seemed on the verge of resuscitation by Obama after suffering clinical death at the hands of George W. Bush… [It] came to an end in 2002, when Bush pulled out of the 30-year-old Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

That the Bush-era policy of zero arms control is suddenly poised to make a comeback is definitely bad news — not just for arms control, but for the entire U.S.-Russia relationship.

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Now the hard-liners in Russia who argued that Obama's charm offensive was but a brief interlude in an otherwise hegemonic U.S. foreign policy will see their views vindicated by the START debacle. Those who doubt the wisdom of cooperation with the United States and NATO on missile defense will speak with more confidence. Russian strategists will see U.S. missile defense efforts in more confrontational terms. Instead of thinking about coordinating defenses with the United States, they will resume thinking about how to defend Russia from the United States.

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For now, Russia — along with other countries watching the nuclear-treaty negotiations from the sidelines — has learned a valuable lesson about U.S. domestic politics. Partisanship in Washington has reached a new level, infecting not just longstanding domestic-policy disputes, but also foreign policy and national security issues. There was nothing anti-Russian in Kyl's move — it was purely anti-Obama. To that end, he succeeded: The United States' allies and enemies abroad will probably pay more attention to the foreign-policy players in Congress and hold the president in somewhat lesser esteem.