Global Policy Forum

By Jim Hoagland

Washington - The escalating foreign policy conflicts between a narrow, mean-spirited Congress and an inept, breathtakingly partisan White House now becloud U.S. strategy on nuclear deterrence. Strategic splintering threatens to replace strategic consensus in Washington, and undermine U.S. leadership abroad.

The question of endangered leadership lies at the heart of a prophetic private letter written in September to President Bill Clinton by President Jacques Chirac, who has seen his worst fears confirmed in the five weeks that have passed without any reply from Mr. Clinton to the French leader. In that time, Senate Republicans rejected U.S. participation in a global ban on nuclear testing. The administration accelerated its search for modification to the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. And the White House launched a politically driven effort to brand all Republicans as ''new isolationists,'' reducing even more the chances for bipartisanship on deterrence, a policy that depends on unity and clarity of purpose for its effectiveness.

Perhaps the big news in all this is that 10 years after the Cold War began to end, nuclear arsenals and the strategies that govern them still occupy a central place in global and American politics. The Berlin Wall went quickly and quietly into history's long night. But Dr. Strangelove is alive and flitting - stirring ambitions and concerns on Capitol Hill, at the Kremlin, in drab think tanks in New Delhi, in gilded salons at the Elysée Palace and elsewhere.

Congress and the White House must now look at the cumulative and schizophrenic impact that their political sparring and piecemeal decision-making on strategy have. The result is increasingly to isolate the powers in opposition to U.S. unilateralism. America is becoming a far more menacing figure abroad than most Americans can comprehend. Congress requires the Pentagon to keep 6,000 warheads deployed and available for launch on intercontinental missiles, bombers and submarines, even though the Pentagon says it does not need more than 5,000 to destroy any and all possible adversaries. It could in fact live with many fewer warheads. At the same time, the Senate insists on keeping the option to increase U.S. strike dominance by new testing, and the administration and Congress both demand that Russia agree to ABM treaty changes to permit the building of a U.S. national missile defense system that no other nation can match on its own.

There are strong arguments for each of these steps on its own merits. But U.S. policymakers and legislators are missing the cumulative impact of their deeds and words on cooperative international efforts to limit the spread, and importance, of nuclear weapons as the 21st century begins. China, Russia and France now form a united front in strongly opposing the U.S. efforts to change the ABM treaty. Even in Britain there is strong unease in official circles with the direction of U.S. strategy, although Prime Minister Tony Blair is too close to President Clinton to permit any expression of the disquiet at a political level.

President Chirac is not so inhibited. He wrote a prophetic private letter to Mr. Clinton in September, warning of the risks of strategic incoherence. The pressure to change the ABM treaty had to be seen in the light of U.S. failure or reticence to ratify a string of other international arms control accords, Mr. Chirac counseled. A Clinton response to the Chirac letter is finally in the pipeline, I am told. But Mr. Chirac has gone public in the meantime. Standing beside Chinese President Jiang Zemin at the Elysée, he described their common view that "any calling into question of the ABM treaty would bring danger and destabilization'' for the rest of the world. France, Russia and particularly China have their own axes to grind on this score. But Mr. Chirac touches on a genuine problem. The United States needs to show that it is not embarked on a selfish, self-protective policy of deterrence that disregards everyone else.

A first step would be an immediate unilateral reduction of 1,000 strategic warheads in the U.S. arsenal, with more cuts related to progress on a more verifiable test ban treaty, modest changes in the ABM regime and greater cooperation from other countries on containing the arsenals of rogue states. America can go it alone if it must. But Congress and the White House must not let that be the only option available to Americans. Like economics, security is a global matter now.