According to the German daily Die Welt, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has agreed to grant Iran a “military base manned by Iranian missile officers, soldiers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard [Corps] and Venezuelan missile officers.” The paper goes on to report that these troops will be equipped with not only relatively short-range Scud B and C ballistic missiles – well suited for threatening Venezuela’s neighbors. They will also get the Iranian Shahab-3 missiles – weapons that have sufficient range (1300-1500 km) to reach the United States.

The Shahab 3 was also the missile tested by the Iranian regime in a manner that appears suited to conducting a strategic electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) attack by lofting a nuclear weapon into space and detonating it at several hundred miles altitude. According to a blue-ribbon congressional commission, such an attack on this country would be “catastrophic.” By damaging or destroying our electrical grid and electronic devices, the nation would be swiftly reduced to a pre-industrial society. The commission’s chairman, President Reagan’s Science Advisor Dr. William Graham, estimates that, within a year of such an EMP strike, nine out of ten Americans would be dead.

Anna Mahjar-Barducci writes at Hudson Institute in New York website that Vladimir Putin’s Russia is also poised to transfer to Venezuela advanced S-300 surface-to-air missiles that the Kremlin had previously sold and promised to deliver to Iran. The Obama administration has made much of Moscow’s decision to forego that delivery after the latest round of sanctions were adopted by the United Nations Security Council, citing it as a prime example of the “reset” of bilateral relations.

Ms. Balducci caustically observes: “If Iran, therefore, cannot get the S-300 missiles directly from Russia, it can still have them through its proxy, Venezuela, and deploy them against its staunchest enemy, the U.S.”

In short, the United States faces yet another “axis of evil” – Russia, Iran and Venezuela – whose collaboration will make the world, including our immediate part of it, vastly more dangerous. Think of it as a potential Cuban Missile Crisis on steroids.

This is no time for the Obama administration to be granting Russia a veto over our defenses against the sorts of missiles that its proxies/clients, Iran and Venezuela, are arraying against us. It is certainly no time for the United States Senate to be rubber-stamping a New START Treaty that would – among myriad other defects – do just that.

Last week, the Center for Security Policy released an interactive video, “Disarmed and Dangerous: Stop the New START Treaty.” It allowed the viewer to click five threats to America’s national security; each threat (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela) opened up a short video explaining how our enemies benefit from New START. Here’s the Venezuela clip: