A Salesman On The Road

Tony Blair was doing his loyal best to stick up for a new American President. George W. Bush sat with the British Prime Minister at his country house last Thursday afternoon, chewing over Bush’s determination to build a U.S. missile shield. The President was pressing to take the Atlantic alliance and the world in a brave new direction, moving from an era of treaties and verification to one of…well, Blair didn’t know what. He wanted a few details to play against the angst felt by his European confreres. “What do you want me to support?” he asked. “What are you proposing?” Speaking to the press just after the meeting, Bush hunched his shoulders and zeroed in on his dilemma. “It’s hard,” he acknowledged, “for any country to commit to vague notions.”

Exactly. Nevertheless, the Bush Administration was loudly warning last week that national missile defense is virtually a fait accompli. It’s coming, whatever it is.

But what’s the rush? Of all the priorities the President could be spending his political capital and the country’s resources on, exactly why has he chosen to make missile defense so urgent? There’s no public clamor for it; no one knows if it works; most of America’s friends and rivals hate it; and the incoming rogue ICBMs it is supposed to obliterate don’t yet exist. But Bush’s insistence on deploying a Son of Star Wars a.s.a.p. formed the edgy subtext of his meetings with European leaders in Genoa and the top talking point for his second sitdown with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Bush is in love with the idea. Installing a missile shield–making it the keystone of a visionary strategic architecture–is his greatest faith-based initiative. The Administration intends to “explain” its plan over and over until it comes true. That worked with tax cuts.

So Bush was stung last week when Senate majority leader Tom Daschle undercut his campaign by suggesting that the President’s foreign policy imperatives are “isolating” and “minimizing” America. When Bush heard about the remarks, he snapped, “Check that. That can’t be right.” After a very “chilly” call from National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Daschle apologized for his timing–but not for his point.

Missile defense is a far tougher sell than tax cuts, with a mountain of technical, political and diplomatic obstacles. The killer missile last week that destroyed a dummy warhead was only the second success in four tries. Defense-shield boosters hailed it as a significant victory, even if it was more important politically than technologically. And the Pentagon knows that, which is why advocates used the afterglow to roll out an array of planned “boost phase,” “midcourse” and “terminal phase” experiments from land, sea, air and space bases.

The basic theory is so appealing: to replace cold war reliance on mutual suicide with 21st century security beneath a defensive umbrella. Though Russia and China possess by far the most nukes that could incinerate the U.S., the Administration says its shield isn’t so much for protection from them but to defend against the possibility that a nasty regime in North Korea or Iraq or Iran will soon be able to loft a missile at America. A nuke is more likely to come in a suitcase than on a warhead, but the hurry-up argument doesn’t deal with that fact. “We’re already too late,” says an aide.

You have to believe that premise for the rest to follow. It’s very Reaganesque. Where the former President saw a Russian lurking behind every bedpost, Bush sees rogue nations holding America hostage. Where Reagan liked simple story lines, Bush likes executive summaries. A missile shield is a succinct solution to a complex problem. Like Reagan, Bush prides himself on cowboy toughness–on being a man who knows what he believes and charges fearlessly ahead.

Like Reagan too, Bush was unschooled in foreign policy when he ran for President. Along the way, he absorbed the passion of his briefers, Star Wars true believers from the Reagan days brought together by Rice to tutor him in the canons of their strategic religion. Those voices evidently captured his imagination, and now in his Administration, led vigorously by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, they urge him on.

The radical decision Bush has recently made is to move full speed on a defense system that runs afoul of the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which limits testing and deployment of new defensive systems. Critics say the rapid-fire tests that could bust the treaty are designed to do so; for some Bush advisers, getting rid of ABM is an end in itself.

Standing in the way is Putin. Russia, like China–with whom Putin last week signed a treaty of “friendship forever” that aligns them politically against missile defense–charges that the U.S. shield will wreck nuclear stability and spark a new arms race. More practically, Russia is the other party to the ABM treaty. The tests the Pentagon has in mind will violate its terms “within months, not years,” says a freshly circulated State Department memo. Officials talk of deployment as early as 2004. That schedule turns the screws on Putin to modify the treaty to suit Washington right away–or the U.S. will simply pull out.

Candidate Bush chastised Bill Clinton for turning Russian-American relations into a game of personal chemistry. That was forgotten when Bush first met Putin last month and gushed that he had looked into the former KGB man’s eyes “to get a sense of his soul.” Bush believes his charm and persuasiveness will move his pal Putin to let the U.S. do what it wants. As an adviser puts it, the Administration is going to “work it and work it and work it and work it” until Putin gives way.

But the Russian leader has been saying no, no, no. He probably cares less about the sanctity of the ABM treaty than the harm its demise might do to Russia’s standing in the world and his image at home. Analysts in most capitals, including Moscow, think he’s bargaining for everything he can get before he says O.K. He needs the veneer of equal dialogue, and the sweeteners could be costly–no NATO expansion; keeping quiet as Russia continues economic ties to Iraq and Iran.

Meanwhile, Putin continues to mix his signals. He has laid out a modest framework for “modernizing” ABM, and ladled on some soft soap before setting off for Genoa last week, calling Dubya “a little bit sentimental.” But Putin has also demonstrated why he won’t be easy to roll. Besides inking the treaty with China, he has repeatedly warned that Russia will cram more warheads atop its missiles if Bush abandons the ABM treaty.

Bush’s aides say they’re confident Putin will eventually do a deal. Their aim now is to hurry him up. The rapid timetable is governed by political arithmetic: to lock in missile defense before Bush’s first term ends. In fact, the President can just bulldoze ahead. Russia can cooperate and get something or sulk and get nothing. European objections don’t count if Russia concedes. The Democrat-led Senate can’t stop Bush from breaking the ABM treaty, though it can tighten the purse strings.

Yet Daschle’s warning might give Bush pause. Among friends and foes alike, the perception is taking hold that Bush’s America intends to go its own way. “Nobody’s putting ABM on a pedestal,” says Jacques Beltran, a researcher at the French Institute for International Relations. “But they’re hostile to the U.S. pulling out of it unilaterally. This is all about style.” To create a lasting new world order, transactions between the sole superpower and the rest of the globe need the appearance of give and take, not diktat.

–Reported by Jay Branegan and Mark Thompson/Washington, John F. Dickerson with Bush, J.F.O. McAllister/London and Paul Quinn-Judge/Moscow