What the G.O.P. Missed

If you did not spend last weekend tuned in to news from the NATO summit meeting in Lisbon, you probably missed the breakthrough on European missile defense.

NATO leaders agreed to jointly develop a shield intended to intercept short- and medium-range missiles. And Russia agreed to cooperate, sharing intelligence and radar. Iran was not mentioned as the most immediate threat, but there was no doubt in anyone’s mind. Iran’s Shahab-3 can already reach European targets, mercifully not yet with nuclear warheads. Tehran needs to know that the world is running out of patience.

Republican senators who are now resisting ratifying the New Start arms treaty should certainly have been paying more attention to the Lisbon meeting. They have been so busy claiming, inaccurately, that the treaty would constrain future missile defense systems that they apparently failed to notice real progress toward the only effective system that current technology permits.

Unlike the troubled missile defense program here, the European shield can be built at a modest cost with already-tested systems. Claims that President Obama is shortchanging America’s nuclear arsenal are also off-base. The administration backs spending more than $85 billion on maintaining and modernizing nuclear weapons over the next decade, far more than we think is needed.

The Republican leadership also apparently missed the parade of East European leaders — so recently darlings of the G.O.P. — declaring that prompt ratification would make Europe more secure. As Hungary’s foreign minister, Janos Martonyi put it, ratification “is in the interest of my nation, of Europe, and most importantly,” of the trans-Atlantic alliance. He is right. The treaty would modestly reduce deployed American and Russian strategic warheads and restore on-site verification. (Whatever happened to “Trust, but verify”?) Failure to ratify would undermine American credibility as it tries to curb the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea.

It is probably too much to ask the Republicans to congratulate President Obama on moving European missile defense forward. But their indifference to all that happened in Lisbon is further proof that their opposition to New Start is nothing more than petty obstructionism.

via nytimes.com