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July 2, 2009
Exclusive: ‘Advice to War Presidents—a Remedial Course in Statecraft’ by Angelo M. Codevilla
“Walter Lippman summed it up in 1941: ‘The disarmament movement’ had been ‘tragically successful in disarming the nations that believed in disarmament.’ ” – Angelo M. Codevilla
Professor Angelo Codevilla, in Advice to War Presidents, writes as an authority on statecraft with a unique and varied background as a former Foreign Service and U.S. naval officer, and professional staff member for the Senate Intelligence Committee who advised Senators during the Cold War era. His insights are timely, as the U.S. Government and the Russian Federation re-engage in arms control, as a guide to Russian behavior and exploitation of negotiations in pursuit of strategic military advantage.
Dr. Codevilla argues from a common sense/realist perspective, pointing out such basics as "the most important things about any weapon are the direction in which it is pointing and the intentions of the person wielding it.” Progressives or ideologues of Liberal Internationalism, he warns, have been bent on denying the relevance of human differences, eager to avoid placing blame but wishing rather to indict impersonal, value-free causes for the world’s troubles, they invented the notion that weapons themselves – inanimate objects though they be – are evil. Codevilla points out that trusting in the intrinsic power of words alone, and hence in the value of meetings and agreements, resulted in the international community shying away from concrete enforcement. For the State Department and many European Governments, convening a conference is the “school solution” to any problem. Treaties afford protection from dangerous enemies according to this logic; not weapons and military defenses.
Advice to War Presidents revisits ambiguities and “pseudotechnical complexities” of U.S. positions in a series of arms control negotiations that began with the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) and the Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 (ABM). Codevilla explains that the Soviets “invariably and successfully pursued strategic superiority, sometimes with the agreements’ studiously ambiguous provisions, sometimes by outright violations, with the Americans’ full knowledge and without the Americans’ serious objection.” Codevilla accuses the CIA of meddling in politics by leaking NIEs (National Intelligence Estimates) at optimum times to influence outcomes. From 1965 to 1977, a yearly NIE series was a "major hurdle" for those in Congress and the White House who wanted to counter the Soviet buildup of first-strike missiles. It argued first that the Soviets would not try to match the number of U.S. intercontinental missiles; when they matched it, that they would not exceed it substantially; when they exceeded it substantially, that they would not obtain the combination of yield and accuracy for a first strike; and when they attained it, that it did not matter.
Codevilla cites a document which acknowledges the scope of Soviet circumventions and violations of arms control pacts (National Security Decision Directive 192 of 1987), noting that more than two decades later, it remains classified TOP SECRET. Yet regardless of the extent of Soviet violations divulged in this secret NSDD, the U.S. committed to practicing “exemplary compliance” with the treaties. With the Obama Administration anxious to reach agreement on cuts in the strategic arsenal before the December expiration of START 1, it would seem logical that this document should be requested and examined by Senators who will be faced with evaluating verification and compliance with any new agreement reached with Moscow.
China, a robust nuclear power with growing conventional military prowess, and which benefited from Russian technical advice and weapons sales, is not at the table for U.S.-Russia arms control talks. Codevilla exposes the faulty reasoning of “progressives” (including those who write for newspapers) in trying to explain away military advances by adversarial or potentially adversarial nations. In January 2007 when China successfully tested an anti-satellite weapon, the New York Times argued China did not intend the weapon to serve its obvious military purpose – namely, in case of war to destroy satellites on which the U.S. is asymmetrically dependent – but rather that China was challenging America to join in a treaty to demilitarize orbital space. The editorial response to the ASAT test was to call for a conference, since armaments exist to be dealt with by arms control treaties, assuming China believes likewise.
Professor Codevilla cautions against previous utopian approaches to international conflict – examples being the hopelessly naïve Kellogg-Briand Pact that outlawed war in 1928, and US-Soviet arms control treaties between 1972 and 1987. His book appraises FDR’s Secretary of State Cordell Hull as “among the most pathetic figures in the history of diplomacy” because he “…threw words such as international law and morality and respect for treaties at Japanese tanks in China and German ones in Poland. Hull’s “war of words” and attempts to outlaw war are risible today, but Hull’s failed approach is exactly what is today being pursued by the Obama Administration with the Russian Federation (more arms control with Russia, despite past noncompliance); and with North Korea (dialogue, despite violations of past agreements).
Codevilla provides two current, telling examples of the failed "school" approach to arms control: Robert Gallucci, who negotiated the 1994 US-North Korean “Agreed Framework” for President Bill Clinton, designed to keep North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons and which the Koreans repeatedly violated—commented on George W Bush’s signing a similar agreement in 2007 – that a bad agreement is no reason to stop making agreements.
Similarly, George Perkovich who runs Carnegie Endowment’s Nonproliferation Programs (the current U.S. chief arms negotiator, Rose Gottemoeller, previously served in Carnegie’s Moscow office), added that although North Korean promises had not been worth much in the past, and there was no reason to believe it would fulfill new ones, “it was worth buying them anyway” because of the hope that talks might lead to broader exploration of steps to prevent instability in North East Asia.
The Progressives and liberal internationalists Codevilla describes are at the American helm of government once again, reviving an outmoded, bilateral arms control framework, which bestows new legitimacy and international peer stature to the former Soviet Union and heedless of at least two evident flaws (beyond a past history of cheating) in the new arms control framework – the failure to include tactical nuclear weapons (a category in which the Russians enjoy a 10:1 advantage, which in large part explains why tactical nukes are "off the table") and ignoring a rising nuclear China - since China refuses to discuss its nuclear intentions despite years of U.S.-China "military to military" exchanges.
It is not possible to do justice to this expansive and important work in a short book review. What offers hope to the “realist/common sense” minded in the national security arena is that visionaries like Codevilla were listened to by important men who changed history and made the United States and the FreeWorld more secure. This particular footnote about Codevilla is telling: “Reagan was so out of line with the prevailing view that the Soviet Union was eternal and to be propitiated as to render irrelevant the legal fact that, as President, he was the sole repository of the Constitution’s Article II power over foreign affairs, and the political fact that he had been elected in a landslide. So unusual even within the Reagan Administration was the view that US policy should aim to end the Soviet Union that when Secretary-of-State designate Alexander Haig read that recommendation in the report of the 1980 State Department transition team he fired its authors, Richard Pipes and Angelo Codevilla.”
Codevilla survived the firing to resurface in government, on Capitol Hill, to provide his sage counselto Senators who supported Reagan’s efforts to bring about the demise of the U.S.S.R. His book should be required reading for Senators and their staff as an essential primer to the arcane world of arms control.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Margaret Calhoun Hemenway spent fifteen years on Capitol Hill, in both the House and Senate, and five years as a White House appointee serving President Bush at both DoD and NASA.
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