Helms Blasts Clinton on ABM Treaty

Less than 24 hours after President Clinton personally launched a campaign to forge new arms control agreements with Russia, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) vowed Wednesday to block the effort.

In a speech deeply sarcastic in tone and reflecting the contempt with which many conservative Republicans view Clinton in the post-impeachment era, Helms left no doubt that he would make it a priority to kill any potential compromise the administration might work out with Moscow to amend the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty. The White House wants changes to allow deployment of a limited national missile-defense system.

“Any modified ABM treaty negotiated by this administration will be DOA--dead on arrival--at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” Helms said. “Any decision on missile defense will be for the next president of the United States to make, not this one.”

Like many other congressional Republicans, Helms has accused Clinton of timidity in his approach to missile defense and has urged a far more robust defense system against missiles launched toward the U.S. He sees the ABM treaty as obsolete and efforts to preserve it largely a waste of time.

Helms implied that Clinton has his eye more on how history will judge him than on the nation’s best interests. “So, Mr. Clinton is in search of a legacy. La-de-da--he already has one.”

While Helms’ opposition to the president’s arms control effort was known, the sheer vehemence of his attack Wednesday from the Senate floor would appear to further diminish the already dim prospects of any Clinton-era agreement between the United States and Russia winning congressional approval.

“The Russian government should not be under any illusion whatsoever that any commitments made by this lame-duck administration will be binding on the next administration,” Helms said.

He said that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, would give the Russians a chance to renegotiate the ABM treaty “to permit the defenses that America needs,” but that Bush would be prepared to go ahead with deployment even if the Russians refused.

Russia strongly opposes the deployment of any national anti-missile system by the United States and any ABM treaty changes, but U.S. arms control specialists believe that Moscow might be willing to accept minor amendments if it can win concessions from Washington for major mutual reductions in existing nuclear arsenals.

As Helms spoke, Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov was across town discussing these very issues with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Later, he delivered a speech at the National Press Club that sketched out Moscow’s view of a possible path toward a U.S.-Russian agreement.

Ivanov stressed Russia’s eagerness to conclude a new arms reduction treaty, known as START III, which would reduce the nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and Russia to a maximum of 1,500 warheads each, 1,000 fewer than the current American proposal. He also proposed U.S.-Russian cooperation in developing short-range missile defenses and in assessing the global missile threat.

But Ivanov warned that U.S. deployment of a national missile defense shield “would inevitably undermine the whole architecture in the area of disarmament, which our countries have been building together with the world community for the last 30 years.”

“There is still some time left to avoid this fatal mistake,” he said.

While White House and State Department officials insisted that they will press forward with the negotiations, the Helms speech--as much in tone as in content--underscored just how little political capital Clinton has concerning foreign policy issues with Congress as he moves into his final months in office.

Although it is usual for a president’s power to diminish as the end of his time in office nears, the lingering bitterness from the impeachment battle has further reduced Clinton’s ability to lobby the Republican-controlled Congress, especially about security issues such as arms control. Last fall, Senate Republicans joined forces to defeat Clinton administration efforts to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in a vote that stunned America’s allies and adversaries alike because it seemed motivated more by a desire to punish Clinton than to reject a flawed treaty.

In the wake of Helms’ attack, some arms control specialists worried about a similar confrontation over the ABM Treaty.

“There is a real need for better cooperation and leadership from the [political] middle in the Senate,” said Daryl Kimball, director of the Washington-based Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers. “Otherwise, we’ll see Helms and Clinton collide at the end of the year just as they did on CTBT, only with greater consequences because the entire framework of arms control could collapse.

“People need to understand the ramifications of this kind of approach.”