The Two Faces of Bush on Defense

President Bush reportedly will announce today his intention to push ahead with plans for a national missile defense.

Opponents question the wisdom of going forward with a system that has already cost billions of dollar and yet failed most of its tests. They also doubt whether it makes sense to pay stiff political costs up front--encouraging an arms race with China, damaging U.S.-Russia relations--for a system that may never work.

There is another issue, however, that has received far less attention.

To build political support for the missile defense initiative, Bush has suggested that he will share this advanced technology with Japan, our NATO allies, South Korea, Israel and until recently, Taiwan. In short, the president proposes that the U.S. become a major proliferator of missile technology.

Make no mistake about it. Despite its clever name, missile defense is more missile than defense. It does not depend on some space-age force field to provide a shield. It is simply one missile fired at another missile, one weapon meant to shoot down another.

Bush’s plans to share missile technology is deeply ironic. The U.S. frequently has criticized other nations, including Russia and North Korea, for selling missile technology. U.S. interest in halting the spread of missile technology was so great that we pushed a multilateral agreement to prevent it.

But who’s the rogue proliferator now? The technology transfers proposed for our friends in Asia, Europe and the Middle East do not involve some primitive SCUD-like rocket, but rather some of the most sophisticated missile and radar systems yet devised. Such transfers clearly violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the agreement. Yet the real crime here is not the double standard but that such a policy is likely to undermine American security.

To begin with, such a two-faced policy is likely to compromise our nonproliferation efforts. It is hard to argue there is an international norm against missile transfers while we simultaneously disregard it. More important, it sets a new standard for what is considered “permissible” proliferation. The U.S. might start out by giving the system to “only” our most trusted allies, but such distinctions soon become politically unsustainable. Our other friends will want to know why they are being excluded. Soon, transfer of the technology will take on a symbolic meaning-- whether a particular country is in “the club.” U.S. policy should be about setting new standards for nonproliferation, not new standards of proliferation.

A second problem with spreading sophisticated weapons technologies is that there are often unintended consequences. The U.S. gave the Afghan rebels Stinger antiaircraft missiles when they battled the old Soviet Union. Today, Afghanistan is a hotbed for anti-American terrorism. The U.S. also armed its good friend Iraq and looked the other way on nuclear transfers during the Iran-Iraq war, a policy it deeply regretted later. More recently, there have been reports that American missile technologies provided to Israel have ended up in the Chinese arsenal.

The near misses also are telling. In the 1950s, President Eisenhower decided that he wanted to provide our allies with their own nuclear weapons. “Nuclear sharing,” as it was called, was never implemented. Had it been, the result would surely have been a world brimming with nuclear weapons states.

Today, it might seem like a good idea to give missile technology to Japan and South Korea. Will it seem equally wise in another decade if these two friends renew old hostilities? Can we say with certainty that the technology we give to one country will not end up in the hands of another? History suggests not.

More than any “shield,” the best way to protect the U.S. is maintaining a strong system for preventing proliferation. Washington joining the ranks of rogue proliferators will not help that cause.