Colin Powell on Missile Defense
Excerpts from “The World According to Colin Powell”
New York Times Magazine - November 25, 2001 - By BILL KELLER
That Powell now seems to be in tune with the president should not be so surprising. Apart from his more ideologically ardent handlers, Bush has always seemed to have an essentially optimistic temperament and an instinctive trust in personal relationships and in the ability of reasonable people to work things out. The issue on which Powell has worked hardest to close a gulf between himself and the president is Bush’s apparently devout belief in missile defense. Before the anti-terror campaign, the issue of missile defense was the single most important test of how the Bush administration would balance the new primacy of unfettered American self-interest against a pragmatic respect for the rest of the civilized world. The intramural debate on that issue continues, and it is as good a window as you can find into how Powell thinks and how he operates.
In the months of deliberations leading up to Vladimir Putin’s inconclusive visit to the president’s ranch in Crawford, Tex., Powell was the most forceful voice for a compromise on missile defense that would allow American testing to proceed without demolishing the scaffolding of arms control agreements. Like many career soldiers, Powell has always been a skeptic about wizard weapons that promise to make warfare antiseptic, simple and safe. He likes his advances in military technology incremental and tested. In his view, civilian leaders who put their faith in smart bombs and high altitude air power usually end up sending divisions of soldiers to die finishing the job.
Powell’s suspicion of missile defense was nourished at its genesis, President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, which the young Pentagon aide watched with a kind of amused horror.
“Reagan, God bless him, was forever talking about this shield and, you know, We’re just going to make all offensive weapons useless,” Powell recalled, rolling his eyes. Powell saw antimissile technology at the time not as a utopian dream but as a useful way of throwing a scare into the war planners of the Soviet Union. Once U.S. negotiators had placed missile defense on a back burner as part of a deal cutting nuclear arsenals on both sides, Powell was happy to let it revert to a low priority research project.
Fifteen years later, Powell says that the technology is more plausible and well worth advanced testing. What he has in mind is not a missile tight umbrella of defenses in space, but sea based rockets that might intercept a nuclear missile soon after launch and installations on American territory that might stop a missile as it descends. Powell invariably refers to “limited” missile defense, a phrase the president has now adopted. Powell is wary, though, of making missile defense the tail that wags the dog of foreign policy.
“One can argue whether you should give it this amount of attention, this amount of passion, and give it the foremost position on your agenda,” Powell told me in September. If the United States can calculate a way around the A.B.M. treaty, which prohibits advanced testing, then “it’s just another defense program that will go into a more routine level of development without the kind of attention it’s now getting.”
The argument within the administration has focused on exactly how to get around the A.B.M. treaty constraints. Rice and others at the Pentagon and in the White House wanted to drop the A.B.M. treaty altogether as a demonstration that America accepts no artificial limits on its national interest. They have argued that amending the treaty would entail a time consuming ratification battle in the Senate and that even something less than a formal amendment a Russian side letter promising not to challenge certain tests would give the Russians too much leverage.
Powell’s first preference is for an amendment to the treaty, which would assure the full blessing of Congress and avoid controversy he said the president didn’t need. Failing that, he said he would be content with a less formal understanding that certain specific tests were O.K. an agreement the Russians have so far balked at providing. The important thing, he said, was to avoid abandoning the treaty altogether, with the probable high price in Russian, European and Congressional good will. He argued that a concession to the Russians on the formalities of the A.B.M. treaty would be more than repaid in other ways their acquiescence in the expansion of NATO, the continued reform of their economy and, of course, their cooperation in the war against terror.
Powell is sympathetic to their anxieties.
“The one thing that scares them and I’d be scared if I were them, and we’ve got to figure out a way to deal with this: ‘Powell, we love you like a brother. We don’t care what the magazines in Washington say, we think you’re great. But you’ll be gone one day. Putin will be gone. Bush will be gone. Igor will be gone. And we will have made some kind of a deal now, and, great, it’s a limited defense. Well, one day another president comes in, and he decides: “I’ll replicate it. I’ll clone it. I’ll geneticize it.” And it goes from being a limited defense to: POW! Reagan’s back. How do you persuade us that’s not going to happen? We can’t do this on the basis of personal relations. It has to be on the basis of our national interest over time.”’ Which means, Powell said, “You codify it somehow.”
“A good argument you get on the other side, probably from Condi, is: ‘Let’s just do what we think is right. We really don’t have to be bound up in the legal documents like we used to be with the Soviet Union.’ We will see.”
Powell paused and pursed his lips in a grim smile.
Referring to the Russians, he said: “You could just say, ‘The heck with you.’ I would rather not.”
Won’t the Russians get over it if we decide to go it alone?
“They may get over it,” he replied. “But they also will be under no constraints as to what they might do in the future.”