This afternoon in a Pentagon press conference, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey chastised House Republicans for passing a measure to provide funding for an East Coast missile defense system. In what seems to be an attempt to reclaim the mantle of the party of national security this election season, House Republicans included the provision in a bill passed today aimed at boosting military spending at the expense of needed social programs for the poor.

During the DOD presser today, Dempsey said he doesn’t “see a need” for the East Coast missile defense:

Q: The House has added $100 million for missile defense into the budget. Do you think that the East Coast needs a missile defense system. Do they need to do this survey that will cost $100 million that the Pentagon didn’t request or is this politically motivated? [...]

DEMPSEY: On ballistic missile defense, as you know we went through a strategic review in the fall and we mapped our budget to it and what I can tell you Jennifer is in my military judgement the program of record for ballistic missile defense for the homeland as we’ve submitted it is adequate and sufficient to the task and that’s a suite of ground based and sea based interceptors. So I don’t see a need beyond what we’ve submitted in the last budget.

Watch it:

Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH,) who supported the East Coast missile defense measure, claims it’s needed “to lessen the threats from both Iran and North Korea.” But the AP reports that Lt. Gen. Patrick J. O’Reilly, the head of the U.S. missile defense program, told Congress recently that North Korea lacks the testing for a capable system and has made little progress in its spaceflight program. And former CIA Mideast analyst Paul Pillar has noted that “the intelligence community does not believe [the Iranians] are anywhere close to having an ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile].”

Moreover, as Dempsey hinted at in the press conference, Danger Room notes that existing systems already have the eastern sea board covered from ICBM threats.

“This is a political move,” said Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA) referring to the GOP’s missile defense scheme. “Every time the election comes around, the Republicans run out a national security agenda.”

GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney said this week that President Obama’s comment to Russian president Dimitry Medvedev that he would be more “flexible” on issues such as missile defense until after the election was “a cave to Russia.” Romney went on to attack the President’s plan in 2009 to scrap and replace President Bush’s European missile defense program. “The decision to withdrawal our missile defense sites from Poland put us in greater jeopardy in my view,” he said.

Except that’s not what happened. There weren’t any missile defense sites in Poland at that time. “The proposed interceptors for Poland have not even been built, much less tested. The Obama administration is killing an idea, not a program, and replacing it with a more technologically-promising system,” said chairman of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Lt. Gen. Robert Gard back in 2009.

And the Wall Street Journal reports today that European and NATO officials aren’t too concerned with Obama’s comments to Medvedev:

But broadly, officials and diplomats from across the region said they were inclined to take Mr. Obama’s remarks at face value. The U.S. and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have pledged to cooperate with Russia on the system, which is initially aimed at defending against missiles from Iran.

Diplomats haven’t expected advances on those talks in a U.S. election year.

Stefan Niesiolowski, a Polish lawmaker and chairman of the defense committee in the lower house of Parliament, blew off the hysteria over Obama’s remarks. “This is not surprising or new, and there’s no outrage in Poland,” he said, adding, “There’s no military threat, and we haven’t had a situation as secure as this in 300 years. The level of U.S. military engagement in Poland therefore isn’t of top importance.”

As for Romney’s attacks on Obama’s missile defense posture, experts hailed Obama’s shift from the Bush plan. “The decision to revamp the missile defense plan in Europe is based on technological reality rather than rigid ideology,” said John Isaacs, executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. “The Obama administration’s proposal is a better choice for U.S. and European security.”

Even the Polish foreign minister said at the time of the announcement: “When President Obama announced the new configuration of the system, we did say that we liked the new configuration better, but I think you didn’t believe us.”

And as then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, Obama’s missile defense plan has “unanimous support” of the U.S. military’s senior leadership.

So what does Obama mean when he says he will be more “flexible”? The Journal reported that Ian Kearns, chief executive of the London-based European Leadership Network, “said allies could agree to provide more transparency about the system and address Russian worries that when the system ramps up at the end of this decade, it could be big enough to blunt Moscow’s nuclear deterrent.”

Mitt Romney has been attacking President Obama for a comment he made to Russian President Dimitry Medvedev that he’d be more “flexible” on issues like missile defense after this year’s presidential election. Romney called the comments “very, very troubling,” because Russia is “our number one geopolitical foe.” While some of Obama’s political opponents are piling on, House Speaker John Boehner tried to rein in the attacks. “While the president is overseas I think it’s appropriate that people not be critical of him or our country,” he said.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) — who attacked then-senator Obama for political gain while he was abroad during the 2008 presidential campaign — is choosing to ignore the Republican House Speaker on national security grounds. “I respectfully disagree with Speaker Boehner,” McCain said on Fox News this morning, because, he said, “this is a very serious issue.” And when asked if he thinks, as Romney does, that Russia is America’s “number one foe,” the Arizona senator wouldn’t go that far: “I think in many respects”:

MCCAIN: I understand John Boehner’s point and I respect that but this is a very serious issue. No matter where the president is, if he makes a statement that I think could endanger the United States national security interests, I have to respond no matter where the president of the United States is. [...] All I can say is I respectfully disagree with Speaker Boehner. [...]

KILMEADE: Do you think they [Russia] are our geopolitical foe?

MCCAIN: I think in many respects, look at what they’re doing in Syria right now, they’re supplying arms and equipment to Bashar Assad while he slaughters and massacres his own people. Look at — they continue to prop up North Korea…and obviously now there is a president for life.

Watch the clip:

This isn’t the first time McCain has differed with Romney on a foreign policy issue. The former Massachusetts governor said that under no condition should the United States negotiate with the Taliban to end the war in Afghanistan. However, McCain recently disagreed. “I think it’s important to have talks wherever you can,” he said.

Medvedev also criticized Romney yesterday. “I always get very cautious when I see a country resort to phrasings such as ‘No. 1 enemy.’ It is very reminiscent of Hollywood in a certain period of history,” the Russian president said, adding, “My other advice is to check their clocks from time to time. It is 2012, not the mid-1970s.”

McCain saw Medvedev’s comment as meaning that Russia is in the tank for Obama. “They obviously want president Obama reelected, that’s pretty clear,” McCain told the Hill newspaper.

GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney is trying to make hay about a comment President Obama made to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev this week that he needs some “space” on the missile defense issue until after the election this year. Russia “is without question our number one geopolitical foe,” Romney said, calling Obama’s comment “very, very troubling.”

Politico reports that Medvedev shot back at Romney today at a press conference in Seoul, South Korea:

“I always get very cautious when I see a country resort to phrasings such as ‘No. 1 enemy.’ It is very reminiscent of Hollywood in a certain period of history,” Medvedev said, through a translator, at the nuclear security summit in Seoul, South Korea. [...]

“My other advice is to check their clocks from time to time,” Medvedev said Tuesday. “It is 2012, not the mid-1970s. No matter what party a candidate represents, he has to take the current state of affairs into account.”

Obama also adressed the issue today, saying that what he told Medvedev wasn’t anything new. “I think everybody understands — if they don’t, they haven’t been listening to my speeches — that I want to reduce nuclear stockpiles,” Obama said, adding, “And one of the barriers to doing that is building trust and cooperation around missile defense issues. And so this is not a matter of hiding the ball.”

Nevertheless, it seems Romney — who could use a distraction from his own issues — isn’t going to let the matter die. “I don’t think he can recover from it, to tell you the truth,” he said on a radio show yesterday.

The winner of the next presidential election will face a struggling world economy and a Middle East in the process of dramatic political transition, but GOP presidential hopefuls Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain appear intent on scaring the public about fanciful dangers of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack.

The threat of a rogue state or terrorist launching an EMP attack — the detonation of a nuclear warhead at a high altitude, shutting down electrical power across large portions of the U.S. — has become the nightmare scenario cited by defense hawks as justification for costly missile defense systems. But the likelihood of terrorists acquiring a nuclear weapon, which they would then affix to a ballistic missile, remains remarkably small.

EMP alarmism generally remains on the fringe circles of the Republican party — the Center for Security Policy‘s Frank Gaffney issued a dire warning that an EMP attack could kill “nine out of ten Americans” — but comments from Gingrich and Cain have brought the “pulsers” agenda into the Republican primary race.

Cain’s “Foreign Policy & National Security Pillars” [PDF] includes:

COUNTER URGENT THREATS
• Stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons
• Fix border security – for real
• Shield us against Cyber and
• Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) attacks

And Gingrich, listing the greatest threats to the U.S. at the Nov. 22, CNN National Security Debate, said:

The greatest threat to the United States was the weapon of mass in an American city, probably from a terrorist… [is] one of the three great threats. The second is an electromagnetic pulse attack which would literally destroy the country’s capacity to function.

Gingrich and Cain’s outspoken concern about the threat of a terrorist or rogue state’s EMP attack might appear to be simple paranoia, but the EMP campaign has been a go-to argument for proponents of costly missile defense shields and preventive war against North Korea and Iran.

While EMP rhetoric might be largely overlooked or ridiculed, EMP enthusiasts do little to hide the ulterior motives of pushing for dramatic increases in defense spending and leading the U.S. into preemptive wars with suspected nuclear proliferators.

When news broke of an alleged plot by Iran to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the U.S., the field of Republican contenders were asked how they would respond if they were president. Perhaps the most unusual response came from Herman Cain, who said he would’ve thwarted the plot by stationing ballistic missile defense systems on Aegis naval warships in international waters off Iran’s coast. It’s a plan Cain repeatedly has hawked.

But on Fox News Channel yesterday, neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer pressed Cain on just how exactly missile defense systems would have stopped Iran from launching the alleged assassination plot. Cain admitted that it wouldn’t:

KRAUTHAMMER: How does placing Aegis cruisers affect Iran’s determination to use terrorism against the United States?

CAIN: It won’t deter their intent to use terrorism, but what it would do is it would let them know we are serious if they fire a ballistic missile toward us. … And what I would do also is double our fleet. We could double it and not only put them strategically in that part of the world but also protect our shores to defer them from feeling like they really want to fire a ballistic missile.

KRAUTHAMMER: But the Aegis is a defensive weapon. It intercepts a missile in flight. Iran doesn’t have any they could actually hit the United States now. And moreover, a defensive weapon in no way deters an aggressive action. It could deter a launch of a missile. But it is not going to deter a terrorist campaign.

CAIN: No, it’s not. It wasn’t intended to mean that it’s going to deter a terrorist campaign, not in the least. The point I was trying to make was I’m concerned about their march toward having a nuclear weapon, a march toward having more ballistic weapon capability.

KRAUTHAMMER: I don’t see how Aegis affects even that at all.

Watch the video:

On a separate interview on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox show last night, Cain said that while he did not want to see a military confrontation with Iran, it “would be perfectly alright” if Iran attacked the naval ships bearing the missile defense systems “because [he] believe(s) that we have a superior capability.” He also said placing naval ships in Iran’s neighborhood was not a provocation, and that the real provocation was Iran’s blustering (and unlikely) plan to place ships off the U.S.’s East Coast.

Years after the end of World War II there were cases of Japanese troops scattered around the Pacific that were unaware or refused to believe that the great war had ended. Well it seems that in the United States there are an isolated group at the Heritage Foundation and in the Senate GOP that seem to have no idea that the Cold War ended 20 years ago.

It was revealed in this week’s hearing on the New START treaty that GOP Senators, as articulated by Senator Jim DeMint, are opposing START because they want to build a missile defense system that even George W. Bush opposed. DeMint at the hearing said that “obviously, we’re agreeing to keep our missile defense to the point where it does not render their weapons useless.” Peter Baker noted that:

If that is his concern with the treaty, then his argument is as much with former President George W. Bush as with Mr. Obama. After all, the missile defense program developed by Mr. Bush was not meant to render Russian weapons useless; it was to be a limited system to defend against nuclear missile attack by states like Iran. Although Mr. Obama reformulated the system last year, he kept Mr. Bush’s goal. The line of attack on the so-called New Start agreement with Russia is instructive, suggesting that some Senate Republicans may go after the pact on the grounds that it does not allow a missile defense against Russia, something neither Republican nor Democratic presidents have actually wanted… Mr. DeMint’s complaint about the treaty conflates the missile defense program begun by Mr. Bush and continued in different form by Mr. Obama with the original idea expressed during the cold war by President Ronald Reagan, who envisioned a much more robust program that actually was intended to neutralize the Russian nuclear arsenal.

See, the original idea as proposed by Reagan was when we were, you know, actually at war with the Soviet Union. Conservatives have myopically embraced this legacy of Reagan, while completely ignoring and dismissing his lasting arms-control legacy, as Reagan negotiated the first START treaty. After watching the Senate hearing, Fred Kaplan writes the “Cold War is over” but “you wouldn’t know it from some of the questions in today’s Senate hearing.” Kaplan adds, referring to the exchange between Jim DeMint and John Kerry:

Though they [Republican Senators] tried a few times this morning, the committee’s Republicans could find no substantive faults with this treaty… So the objections come down to missile defense—and one bit of today’s hearings raises the question of whether some of the most diehard Republicans understand this issue in the slightest… How many Republicans out there are like [Sen. Jim] DeMint, who seems to think the Cold War is still on? And how many Russian hawks watched that exchange and came away confirmed in their beliefs that the Americans are still after their hides?

In fact, it isn’t really that the Heritage Foundation doesn’t know that the Cold War is over. It is that they want a new Cold War. At a panel discussion in December, the central message was that the a new Cold War was on the way. In the Heritage Foundation’s missile defense propaganda film 33 minutes, the three evil leaders shown in the film as a reason for missile defense are Kim Jung Ill, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, and Vladimir Putin. The Soviets – er Russia – over at Heritage and amongst much of the Senate GOP, remains very much the enemy.

It is important to understand the implications of the approach that Heritage, Senator DeMint, and the GOP caucus is advocating. Pursuit of a comprehensive missile defense system that targets the Russians will lead unequivocally to a massive nuclear arms race and nuclear instability. The Russians (and the Chinese) would simply build more and more missiles to overwhelm any defense, would develop expanded and more innovative ways to deliver these nuclear weapons, would put them all on instant hair trigger alert, and would have a very very itchy trigger finger. As a result, as Senator Kerry points out this would put us back where we were during the Cold War when we had 50,000 nuclear weapons. We would spend hundreds of billions of dollars on nuclear weapons and a fantasy-based missile shield, that would only leave us and the world much less safe and much much poorer. This approach is so extreme that it is even to the far right of where the Bush administration was.

It is not every day that US Senators get worked up over nuclear deterrence theory. Toward the end of yesterday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing – which was the first hearing on the New START treaty since it was submitted to the Senate last week – Senator John Kerry (D-MA) and Secretary of Defense Gates got in an animated and exasperated exchange with Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) over the START treaty and missile defense.

What is clear to everyone is that the START treaty has NO limitations on our planned missile defense program. But what the far right is concerned about is they want to create a mythical missile defense system that goes far beyond current plans and that specifically targets Russia and renders their nuclear arsenal useless. In other words, far-right Republicans, led by the Heritage Foundation, which is the leading preacher of missile defense gospel, want to eliminate the days of “mutually assured destruction” by building a totally impregnable Jedi force field of freedom.

However, Senator Kerry points out the obvious: if you can build it – which is a huge huge if – the result would only be a massive nuclear arms race. The fact is that the Russians, as well as the Chinese would simply start building more nuclear weapons and missiles to overcome these defenses and then the US, seeing that all of a sudden the Russians are expanding their missile forces, would begin to do the same, leading quite easily to a new massive Cold War-style arms race, where the United States is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a useless missile defense system and on new nuclear weapons. This all because conservatives have some asinine faith in some magical sci-fi capability.

But, and here is the rub, under the terms of the START treaty, we could still build this dangerous make-believe missile defense system – since the treaty does not constrain defensive systems. Now the Russians did say that if we pursue this capability, they would obviously withdraw from the treaty and start building nuclear weapons. But all this means is that should Jim DeMint’s conservative wing take over power and pursue their missile defense agenda a new nuclear arms-race is guaranteed. Secretary Gates also noted that DeMint’s desire to target missile defense against Russia is to the far right of where even the Bush administration was, as the system developed by the Bush administration was never intended to target Russia. Watch it:

DeMint is unable to refute the point that a comprehensive missile defense program will only prompt the Russians to produce more nuclear weapons. But following this exchange, DeMint tweeted and wrote on Heritage’s Blog that:

Senator Kerry proved why Americans have a hard time fully trusting the left to put American interests first in foreign affairs. While the goal of reducing global levels of nuclear weapons is noble, it cannot take priority over our duty to protect Americans. It seems the goal of this administration and liberals in Congress is to condition American security into parity with Russia, which makes no sense.

In reality, pursuing nuclear parity with the Russians is the way we create nuclear stability that prevents a massive arms race. The fact is that the only way to get beyond the concept of mutually assured destruction is not to build a destabilizing missile defense system, but to actually eliminate nuclear weapons. And this is what the Russians are most afraid of. If nuclear weapons are eliminated US conventional dominance becomes overwhelming, since Russian conventional forces are in such disrepair. Contrary to conservative assumptions, the existence of nuclear weapons actually make us weaker as the level the global power playing field.

Transcript: Read more

In conservatives rush to attack the New START treaty, many have overlooked a key clause in the preamble of the treaty. While much of the attention on the text of the preamble focused on the connection between offensive and defensive systems (missiles and missile defense), the treaty contains language in the preamble that gets Russia to importantly accept that current US missile defense plans have no impact on Russian security. The language reads:

current strategic defensive arms do not undermine the viability and effectiveness of the strategic offensive arms of the Parties.

Jeffrey Lewis of Arms Control Wonk dissects:

The New START Treaty would not last long if the United States developed extraordinarily capable defenses that would allow the United States to negate the Russian deterrent. That is precisely why even the Bush Administration sought to make clear that missile defense did not threaten Russia. On that score, I think missile defense advocates should welcome the preamble… That [language] is going to be useful at some point.

The Bush administration spent the last few years of its tenure desperately trying to convince Russia that US European missile defense plans had no impact on Russian security. These efforts failed. But, as Lewis notes, in this new START treaty the Obama negotiators were able to get the Russians to concede that US missile defense plans do not impact strategic stability. That is quite significant. Hence, far from constraining missile defense this treaty enables the US to proceed with development of its planned missile defense system.

Conservatives have complained that the Obama administration’s overhaul of the Bush administration’s European missile defense system plan last fall in favor of a new “phased adaptive approach” – which puts in place a system that is first directed at short and medium range missiles (the ones Iran actually has) and later develops a long range capability that could take out ICBMs – represented a concession to the Russians. The Russians may have thought that as well. But what became clear over the winter was that the Russians began to realize that the new US program is actually more capable than the old one. Hence, in December Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin tried to put the breaks on the treaty. This delayed an agreement, but in the end the Russians gave in. Phil Pan of the Washington Post reported on the Russian response to the START treaty, noting that many Russians felt they had conceded too much to the US, especially on missile defense:

A more obvious retreat by Moscow relates to missile defense, which Putin publicly insisted be included in the treaty as recently as December. Though the Kremlin applauded Obama’s decision to scrap the Bush version of the system, Russian officials have since voiced concerns about the regional shield Obama proposed instead, noting U.S. claims it would eventually use interceptors fast enough to strike a Russian intercontinental missile.

Nevertheless, in another case of the facts not getting in the way of partisanship, conservatives have not stopped trying to use missile defense as an argument against the treaty.