The Obama Administration took office promising – on the White House website, no less – to pursue “a worldwide ban on weapons that interfere with military and commercial satellites.” It apparently had second thoughts, however, and soon pulled this reference. (This was neither the first nor the last campaign promise that Barack Obama let slip quietly away, but it caught my eye nonetheless.) In the late spring of 2009, however, it flip-flopped anew, and agreed to Chinese and Russian demands that the U.N. begin discussions on preventing an “arms race in outer space.” This is not technically the same thing as beginning “negotiations” on such an agreement, but the White House has reversed longstanding U.S. policy and allowed the U.N.’s Conference on Disarmament (CD) in Geneva to slip its leash and start bounding off in pursuit of this goal.
Does this necessarily mean that the Obama Administration will now embrace a “space weapons” ban? It is conceivable that the whole thing is a cynical diplomatic ploy of the sort that one might have expected – based upon his campaign rhetoric – our new president never to contemplate. Has the United States accepted “discussions” on space weaponry in order to break the CD’s long deadlock, while fully intending never to let any such agreement ever see the light of day? That’s certainly how any number of other governments approach CD negotiations. (Just look at the proposed Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty [FMCT], in the name of which Washington made its historic “space weapons” concession. If you think all the FMCT’s proclaimed “supporters” really support it, you haven’t been paying much attention. Sadly, the U.S. cave-in on actually requiring an “effectively verifiable” agreement will give the foot-draggers more options than ever.) Could American diplomats have finally learned from the self-inflicted diplomatic wounds of the Bush Administration’s compulsive honesty about the limitations of arms control, and figured out how to swim with the seasoned CD professionals in Geneva’s games of refined hypocrisy?
Maybe. But maybe not. On arms control issues, the new team in Washington seems to be more made up of True Believers than shrewd pragmatists skilled in the dark arts of dissimulation and conceptual jiu-jitsu. Moreover, in this season of multi-trillion-dollar federal deficits, calamitously paralyzed health care initiatives, continued operations at Guantanamo Bay and non-prosecution for CIA agents who followed Justice Department guidelines on harsh “enhanced interrogation techniques,” unspent “emergency” stimulus money, an ever-grimmer situation in the Afghanistan war to victory in which he pledged to devote himself, and sinking presidential approval ratings, the arms control arena remains one of the few where President Obama’s political base may still think he will transform the world. It is quite possible, therefore, that the new administration really means what it now (once again) says. A “space weapons ban” may be an incoherent and perhaps dangerous idea, but it is one whose time the new administration seems to think has come.
But why am I unhappy with this? What’s wrong with preventing an “arms race in outer space?” It sounds like a commendable goal, but arms control is full of pitfalls for the credulous or unwary. Unfortunately, this is one of them. Rather than getting bogged down in the fools’ errand of trying to define and prohibit space “weaponry,” we should refocus our efforts on ways to prevent risky and deter hostile conduct in space.
