Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has appeared prominently in the news lately for a number of bellicose statements, including grave warnings to fellow Republicans over their reluctance to join him in advocating military force to defend American ideals around the globe.

Senator McCain has identified a dangerous “isolation strain” stemming from “the Pat Buchanan wing” of the Republican party – the same tendency, he claims, that during the 1930’s led the United States to stand idly by as Germany disregarded its Versailles treaty obligations and prepared to conquer Europe.

If the threats we face today are as overt and credible as the rise of Nazism in Germany, then the implications of the Republican “isolation strain” are truly dangerous to American security.

Of course, isolationism as an American ideology has historically been espoused by policymakers for widely varying reasons: from a continuation of President Washington’s warning against “entangling alliances,” to a rejection of Wilsonian idealism and the League of Nations at the end of World War I, to a repudiation of European balance-of-power politics, to outright xenophobia.

Senator McCain’s accusation recalls a harsh brand of isolationism wielded by public figures like Republican Senators Gerald P. Nye and Henry Cabot Lodge. This doctrine spurned not only military intervention on the side of Great Britain and France but also participation in international bodies and alliances with European nations It ignored an overt and credible German threat to the sovereignty of nations and the existence of an entire people. As a result, American foreign policy undermined the promise of collective security manifested in the League of Nations, and was one factor leading to the highly destructive Second World War where over 60 million people were killed.

Senator McCain’s comparison is problematic. The threats to American security posed by a military withdrawal from Libya or Afghanistan are neither overt nor credible. Analysts indicate that al-Qaeda in its newly decentralized and localized form is no longer able to operate substantially from an Afghani platform. Prior to the recent U.S. military intervention, a combination of sanctions and diplomacy had kept Colonel Qadaffi in his box and induced him to renounce the Libyan nuclear program.

Although Senator McCain sharply accused his colleague Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) of a “lack-of-knowledge-of-history attitude” that “seems to be on the rise in America,” he nevertheless does not hesitate to conjure gross historical inaccuracies to support his own position.

Withdrawal from Libya and Afghanistan may very well diverge from our willingness “to stand up for freedom for people all over the world.” Nevertheless, to categorize his opponents as 1930s-style “isolationists”  constitutes a flagrant exaggeration that presupposes an overt and credible threat to the sovereignty of nations. As conservative columnist George Will noted,

“Between wishing success to people fighting for freedom and sending in the Marines (or the drones), there is as much middle ground for temperate people as there is between Buchanan, a sort of come-home-America conservative, and McCain, a promiscuous interventionist.”

Senator McCain subscribes loudly to the neo-conservative doctrine that “our interests are our values.” To carry this doctrine to its logical conclusion, the United States should send its military not only to Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Yemen, but to Bahrain, Syria, Iran, and elsewhere where freedom and democracy threaten to upset the old order.

It is ironic that the politician who once considered himself a proud maverick now finds himself in a corner with a narrow group of neoconservative holdouts. Senator McCain has a right to his own opinion, but deliberately distorting history misinforms the American people and diminishes the human cost that we pay to defend our “interests” around the globe.

By Kingston Reif and Trish Morris

Last summer, Mitt Romney unintentionally proved in a Washington Post Op-Ed attacking the New START treaty that his national security GPS is less effective than a broken compass.

His argument was promptly devastated by critics wielding facts.  

Slate’s Fred Kaplan noted that he had “never seen anything quite as shabby, misleading and—let’s not mince words—thoroughly ignorant.”  Senator John Kerry (D-MA) used words like “uninformed” and “baloney” to describe Romney’s attack on the treaty.  Most devastatingly for Romney, fellow Republican Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) publically excoriated the former Massachusetts Governor for defying the advice of U.S. military leaders and raising “discredited objections.”

Despite these stinging rebukes, Romney held firm in his opposition to New START, which was approved by the U.S. Senate on December 22, 2010, by a vote of 71-26.  

With the race for the 2012 Republican nomination for President now in full swing, Romney is revisiting his opposition to the treaty in an attempt to score political points.

In a June 15 post on his blog titled “The Price of Inexperience,” Romney stated that because Russia is already below New START’s limits on deployed warheads and delivery vehicles, “we’re the ones who now have to give, while Russia gets.”  Both Keith Payne and Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) have made the same argument.

Like Payne and Kyl, what Romney fails to recognize is that without the treaty there would be no verifiable limits on the size of Russia’s nuclear arsenal.  Whether some Russian reductions might have happened with or without the treaty is beside the point, as former STRATCOM Commander Gen. Kevin Chilton argued last April:

One thing I was pleased to see in the treaty were these limits because as you look to the future though Russia may be close to or slightly below them already, when you look to the future we certainly don’t want them to grow and they would have been unrestricted otherwise without these types of limits articulated in the treaty…

Romney also criticizes New START for failing to tackle Russia’s numerical advantage in tactical nuclear weapons.  However, ratification of New START was a necessary precursor to deal with these weapons, as explained here on our website.  

Romney ends his post by accusing the President of abandoning the George W. Bush administration’s Europe-based missile-defense program as part of his “reset” policy with Russia, “leaving Poland and the Czech Republic in the lurch.”

The same day that Romney filed his post, outgoing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had the following to say about the Bush administration’s plans for missile defense in Europe at a hearing of the Defense Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee:

And let’s be blunt: The third site in Europe was not going to happen, because the Czech government wouldn’t approve the radar….And so if it was going to happen at all, it would’ve taken years longer [than the Phased Adaptive Approach] and we still hadn’t negotiated the required agreements with the Poles in terms of the interceptors.

In other words, if Mitt Romney were President instead of Barack Obama, there would be no verifiable limits on the size of Russia’s still enormous nuclear arsenal and no credible plan (at least relative to the Bush plan) for dealing with the Iranian ballistic missile threat.  Talk about the price of inexperience.

Speculation is running high in the international media that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il may sit down with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Japan’s Kyodo News expects the summit to take place on Thursday, June 30th in the Far East city of Vladivostok while other reports say July 1st.  Media reports have also quoted Russian officials as saying preparations are underway for a summit, though Medvedev’s counterpart was not disclosed. President Medvedev is reportedly set to be in Vladivostok to check on preparations for the 2012 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting.

If realized, it would be the first time in nine years the North Korean leader traveled to Russia for a summit with its Cold War ally with whom relations have frayed over the years.

Korea watchers are closely following Kim’s reported travel plans because the expected summit would come on the heels of a meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and South Korean Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan on June 24th during which the allies reaffirmed that inter-Korea relations must be improved before the resumption of Six Party Talks. Seoul officials say that since the envisioned inter-Korean denuclearization discussion has been delinked from seeking an apology for the sinking of the Cheonan and shelling of Yeongpyeong Island, it is now Pyongyang’s turn to come forward.

It is highly anticipated that economic issues would top the expected Pyongyang-Moscow summit, but would still have implications on the Six Party diplomatic front.

The group Global Zero recently released a report assessing nuclear weapons spending worldwide. Their findings indicate that over the next decade, governments will significantly increase their nuclear weapons spending, eventually surpassing $1 trillion over the next decade.

While this figure is significant, it must also be taken with a grain of salt. First, the trillion dollar figure is what Global Zero calls the “full cost” of nuclear weapons, as opposed to the “core cost.” Core costs refer to “researching, developing, procuring, testing, operating, maintaining and upgrading the nuclear arsenal.” Full costs are derived from a more holistic approach, including “unpaid/deferred environmental and health costs, missile defenses assigned to defend nuclear weapons, nuclear threat reduction, and incident management”. The report’s figure for the core cost of nuclear weapons over the next decade rests at about $670 million, therefore falling short of the $1 trillion dollar figure.

Another concern is that the report’s figures have a wide margin of error. Quantifying even broad defense spending for countries like Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea is problematic, and as such, speculating about their total nuclear spending is near impossible. Global Zero admits this, but fairly argues that these programs are “small enough that inaccuracies in estimates would have negligible effect on the general conclusion.” At current levels, “the nine nuclear weapons countries are spending approximately one trillion dollars per decade.”

Methodological concerns aside, what the report succinctly expresses is that world-wide investment in nuclear weapons is greater than ever.

It seems that every piece of Cold-War era nuclear technology is reaching its expiration date simultaneously. Cash-strapped nations are being forced to decide whether to undertake costly modernization programs for their nuclear ballistic missile submarines, dual-capable aircraft, warheads, and nuclear facilities.

Even as the Obama administration proposes to trim defense spending by $400 billion over the next decade and the Pentagon is undertaking a review of U.S. nuclear deterrence requirements, it plans to spend approximately $213 billion on the modernization of nuclear weapons and their supporting infrastructure over the next decade. This price tag includes, among other things, refurbishing and extending the life of the B61 nuclear bomb, construction of new nuclear facilities at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, and a new nuclear ballistic missile submarine (known as the SSBN(X).  

As the Global Zero report states, the United States accounts for more than half of the world’s nuclear defense spending in both the full and core cost categories. Meanwhile, Russia plans to spend $70 billion on new strategic arms through 2020, a figure which makes up 10% of its overall defense budget. According to Global Zero founder Bruce Blair, “modernization is progressing at such a pace we are seeing more spending on nuclear weapons than at any time since the Cold War.”

With most of the world mired in an unprecedented period of financial strain, Global Zero included a telling graphic in their report on what just 1 nuke, out of the roughly 25,000 world wide, could buy: 400 college scholarships, 78 jobs for firefighters, health coverage for 36,000 low income Americans, or 99,000ft of solar panels.

Global Zero’s report compels us to reconsider the cost-effectiveness of these weapons, and re-chart the current trillion dollar path in a safer and more fiscally responsible direction.