Laura Rozen in the Politico has written an interesting article on the Nuclear Posture Review. In it, an anonymous US official described the Nuclear Posture Review as “seminal.”
I would have picked a different bodily discharge.
But, this is the new Arms Control Wonk.com. So you won’t see any references to excrement or suggestions that a seminal document is precisely what one would expect from a circle jerk like the NPR.
Really, we’re above all that.
Rozen depicts a very conventional document that will fall far short of the President’s rhetoric in Prague:
Disarmament hands say the review draft originally headed by the Defense Department’s Brad Roberts was too status quo on the policy issues from the administration’s perspective, and is being reworked at the senior inter-agency level by Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Jim Miller, officials from the office of State’s Under Secretary of State for Arms Control Ellen Tauscher, and White House and OVP nonproliferation advisors before heading to the president’s desk.
[snip]
Non-proliferation hands in and out of the administration question why the Obama team would have expected any differently since it put career civil servants with more traditional views on arms control, including the DoD’s Roberts, and NSC Senior Directors Barry Pavel and George Look, in key roles on the NPR.
“If you want a transformational document, you don’t ask two men who have spent a combined forty years in the bureaucracy to do this job,” another non-proliferation hand who asked for anonymity said.
I think the “anonymous nonproliferation hand” is mistaken to lay the blame on specific individuals like Roberts, Pavel or Look. This is about the structure of the process, not the people.
I fully expect the Nuclear Posture Review to be disappointing — the structure of such a review is designed to produce a status quo document. I have previously recommended Janne Nolan’s “An Elusive Consensus.” Heck I even invited her to give a talk on the prospects for the NPR at the New America Foundation. (She was great, by the way.)
It has long been clear, as both Joe Cirincione and I wrote this fall, that the Nuclear Posture Review was shaping up as a very status quo document. For participants to suddenly be shocked leads me to ask “What rock have you been living under for the past year?”
(In other news: Michael Jackson is dead, the New Orleans Saints are Superbowl champions and the junior senator from Massachusetts is a Republican. It’s been an odd year.)
The danger from a Nuclear Posture Review has always been, and continues to be, that the President will not get real options. Guess who is to blame for that? You may recall this sign on Harry Truman’s desk.
One of the under-reported stories in Washington is the dominance of Robert Gates on national security issues (with Elizabeth Rubin’s profile in Time magazine is a notable exception.) Gates openly discussed the likely conclusions of the NPR back in September, with nary a public peep from the President. The NPR, of course, is supposed to provide options to the President, not conclusions.
Gates has been boxing in Obama for about a year now. Which is what powerful cabinet secretaries do. Hate the game, not the player.
In form, the NPR will contain nominal options for the President to chose among. Yet the question continues to be whether those options will reflect real differences in policy, or just three articulations of the same Cold War dogma on the role of nuclear weapons. A draft of the NPR is going around and, from everything I hear, there is no reason for me to change this passage I wrote in August:
If the Nuclear Posture Review is truly going, as the President has promised, “to put an end to Cold War thinking” on nuclear weapons, throw out the f’ing reports. The Strategic Posture Commission is not the Bible. No need to turn Pentagon offices into monasteries where scholars perform exegesis on the sacred text. Most the Commissioners don’t remember what they had for breakfast, let along the arcane compromises they agreed to a couple of months ago. (If you’ve actually run such a project you know how ephemeral such agreements can be.)
Instead, give the President three or four real options. Not three flavors of vanilla. Not a couple of flavors like “dirt” and “cat urine” intended to make a scoop of vanilla comparatively appetizing.
That, by the way, is the core of what Joe [Cirincione] had to say in the meeting I described: There is every reason to doubt, at this stage, that the Nuclear Posture Review will give the President real options. A set of real options would reflect, rather than obscure, the very different views about how much the details matter [to the stability of deterrence].