President Obama has been pushing the U.S. Senate to ratify the START nuclear arms pact with Russia. Now comes Defense Secretary Robert Gates with an ominous warning: failure to sign the agreement might disrupt Russia’s cooperation in areas such as Iran and Afghanistan. Does this sound familiar? It should. We tried it repeatedly during the Cold War and it almost always ended in failure. Back then they called it linkage: we will give you the arms treaty you really want and in exchange we will hope for further cooperation in areas that matter to us. Nixon and Kissinger tried it during the Vietnam War and Moscow didn’t lift a finger to help us with Hanoi. Indeed, they continued supporting the North Vietnamese. Jimmy Carter tried to link arms control to human rights. The results–not so good.
The U.S. Senate should ratify treaties because they are good for this country—not because they will make a foreign power happy and supposedly encourage them to help us out. Moscow has an interest in preventing Tehran from developing a new weapons capability. If they can’t see that–no treaty with the U.S. is going to change their opinion.
The revival of linkage indicates one thing: desperation on the part of the Obama Administration.
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