Defending the Dollar as Well as the Nation: New Priorities?

American defense policy is at a crossroads. Events of the last month have only confirmed a growing consensus in recent years that the great threat of Soviet military power increasingly is in eclipse. The Soviet Union--the much-diminished central government as well as its many individual republics and its 291 million people--is searching for a new geopolitical identity and a new defense posture that holds the promise of being less hegemonic. At the same time, U.S. domestic budget pressures--especially the nearly overwhelming deficit--militate against increases in defense spending and indeed create new pressures for further trimming and downsizing.

President Bush has embraced much of the defense and foreign policy he inherited from Ronald Reagan, who oversaw a huge peacetime U.S. defense buildup. Nonetheless, the Bush Administration has proposed defense-expenditure budgets that would decrease the percentage of gross national product spending on defense over the next several years. In fact, the present five-year plan would reduce the size of U.S. forces to the lowest level since before the Korean War.

Without any doubt, the Bush Administration is hardly oblivious to the need for a review of U.S. defense policy in light of the much-reduced Soviet threat. With the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in Eastern Europe, Washington is now ready to discuss with its NATO allies the withdrawal of battlefield nuclear weapons from Western Europe. Such a historic--and until relatively recently almost unthinkable--possibility is a result of the recent favorable developments in the Soviet Union.

But for all this, the Bush Administration urges Americans to recognize that the Soviet Union may still be only one successful coup away from its former self. As Defense Secretary Dick Cheney has put it, “You cannot make those kind of fundamental decisions about long-term U.S. security requirements based on developments day to day or even week to week in the Soviet Union.” So immediate, large-scale cuts cannot yet be prudently undertaken.

That is a wise course. In an unstable world political environment, the United States needs to maintain a realistic but still wary defense stance. But it would be wrong to act as if nothing has changed and irresponsible to foreclose options that could lead to a further reduction in forces, military expenditures and international tensions.

THE ABM QUESTION: While the Bush Administration has all but abandoned Reagan’s Nintendo-esque “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative--too expensive, too technically uncertain, too controversial--it has embraced a repackaged SDI known as GPALS: global protection against limited strikes. Last month the Senate voted to spend $4.5 billion on GPALS and related programs, ordered the deployment of an antiballistic missile system by 1996, including 100 ground-based interceptors at one site as permitted by the 1972 ABM treaty, and urged the President to negotiate amendments to the treaty with Moscow. They would allow the two sides to deploy more missiles at additional sites, to string up an elaborate system of space-based detection and control and to accommodate new testing of advanced ABM programs. The issue now goes to the House.

The House should not follow the Senate’s lead and instead should vote against deployment for now. There is no urgent need for it. Because its ultimate cost is still highly uncertain, it would inevitably exert a downward pull on the Treasury, though it might not automatically violate the overall defense budget cap. It would, moreover, be an ill-advised step at a time when the Pentagon needs to have a more realistic sense of the threats now facing the nation.

Only a far more extensive--and expensive--antimissile defense would be adequate in the event of Soviet attack; clearly, 100 or even 200 missiles wouldn’t be nearly enough. But the risk of such a preemptive Soviet attack is lower now than at any time in memory. Only a so-called “renegade” attack from a few missiles--launched by a mad general somehow managing to escape the security of the Soviet command and control system--might be intercepted by the proposed deployment. And 100 missiles, which under the ABM treaty have to be bunched at a single site in Grand Forks, N.D., may not be able to intercept a Third World missile attack on the most likely target: a major population center.

THE BUDGET QUESTION: In an effort to hold down the federal budget deficit, Congress negotiated important constraints on its own behavior. In effect it agreed to cap expenditures on military and domestic spending and to erect a fire wall between the two categories so that money for domestic programs couldn’t be siphoned off for arms allocations and weapons systems or vice versa.

This is not the time to go back on that accord. Anything that constrains the growth of the deficit is not to be abandoned lightly.

But the collapse of the Soviet Union, if it proceeds apace, presents America with a tremendous opportunity to turn its attention to its many unsolved domestic problems. Perhaps not all of them can be solved by new federal spending. But surely reduction of the massive federal deficit will go a long way toward restoring America’s economic strength and providing more resources for an array of domestic concerns more pressing at present than the risk of Soviet aggression.

If now is not the time for reversing the accord, that time may not be all that far off. The two greatest threats to this nation’s security and well-being may soon come from a wickedly unbalanced federal budget and the multiplying and dangerous social and economic problems here at home.