Author: Spencer Ackerman

Following up on this post about China’s role in Iran sanctions and nuclear security, President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao shared a phone call last night. Here’s the White House readout:

Tonight, President Obama spoke with President Hu of China for about an hour. President Obama welcomed the decision by President Hu to attend the upcoming Nuclear Security Summit which will be an important opportunity for them to address their shared interest in stopping nuclear proliferation and protecting against nuclear terrorism. They also discussed the importance of developing a positive bilateral relationship. President Obama underscored the importance of working together to ensure that Iran lives up to its international obligations. He also emphasized the importance of the United States and China along with other major economies implementing the G20 commitments designed to produce balanced and sustainable growth.

The New York Times has much more about China’s kinda-sorta-emerging pro-U.S. tilt, and focuses on whether the cost of its development will be Obama taking a soft line on alleged Chinese currency manipulation. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is alarmed. “It relates to American jobs, American wealth and the future of this country. This issue should not be traded for another.”

Ethnic profiling doesn’t have many open defenders — Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) is a notable exception —  so it was surprising that part of the Department of Homeland Security’s response to the near-detonation of Northwest flight 253 was to single out citizens of 14 mostly-Muslim countries for special scrutiny at airports. As a counterterrorism measure, it was dubious; as a diplomatic issue, it was counterproductive. But it’s also on its way out the door. Whether its replacement is an improvement remains to be seen.

Anonymous administration officials previewed a policy shift to The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times that will stop citizenry-based targeting and move to passengers whose travel patterns or identifying information matches even fragmentary intelligence reports about potential terrorist activity. Those officials describe the new extra-screening system as “much more intel-based.” The Los Angeles Times explains that the standards employed will not require fulsome or exacting matches between an air traveler and a pattern of suspicious behavior to kick in:

In many cases, the U.S. might learn of a possible attack by someone about whom it has only fragmentary information — a partial name, nationality, certain facial features or details about recent travel.

Such information will be forwarded to airlines and foreign governments by the Department of Homeland Security as it is received and will be used to guide them in deciding which travelers to subject to special screening, the official said.

That’s clearly intended to be responsive to the failure in stopping Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from boarding flight 253. There was a fair amount of fragmentary intelligence about both Abdulmutallab himself — including fragments of his name — as well as intelligence about the sort of person al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was considering for a terror attack. Part of the problem was that information about Abdulmutallab didn’t meet the standard of “specific derogatory information leading to reasonable suspicion” necessary for placing him on the prelude to the no-fly list. These measures wouldn’t require such specificity for singling out an air passenger for screening.

One issue worth considering: during the January wave of congressional hearings on what went wrong in the Abdulmutallab case, officials testified that there are still basic problems accessing the various government watchlists, including a persistent difficulty with actually performing basic search functions that Google can perform in microseconds. If that remains the case, how likely will it be that the DHS officials charged with performing the new airport scrutiny will possess the relevant intelligence necessary for determining who should qualify for special screening?

All of the Special Operations Forces action may concern Afghanistan (and, uh, Pakistan) right now, but Adm. Eric Olson, leader of U.S. Special Operations Command, said today that approximately 4,500 SOF troops are going to stay in Iraq while conventional forces complete their drawdown by Aug. 31.

“The special operations forces are not experiencing a drawdown in Iraq,” said Navy Adm. Eric Olson, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command. “Supporting them is a continuing mission of the rest of the force.”

It’s rather easy to imagine that brigade-sized SOF element remaining in Iraq until the 2011 withdrawal date. Candidate Barack Obama always emphasized counterterrorism as a mission in Iraq for a residual force.

As he attempts to take control of a crucial election-monitoring body ahead of this fall’s parliamentary contest, Afghan President Hamid Karzai gave a blustery statement accusing his longtime Western allies and sponsors of trying to prevent the vote by insisting it should be free and fair. Karzai said the West wants “parliament to be weakened and battered, and for me to be an ineffective president and for parliament to be ineffective.” And he got personal, saying former deputy United Nations representative Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador who was fired for urging his boss to take a firmer stand against fraud in last year’s presidential election, was himself a fraud (“the fraud of Galbraith,” as Karzai put it) who threatened the life of an election worker prepared to declare Karzai the outright victor. The poor, unnamed election monitor would be “digging himself an early grave” by reporting Karzai’s success, Karzai accused Galbraith of saying.

Reached for comment, Galbraith mischievously replied, “I sometimes wonder if Karzai is a little too enthusiastic about Afghanistan’s most popular export.”

More seriously, the ambassador denied the accusation flatly. “As to that comment, I don’t talk like that,” Galbraith said. “Second, when I first heard the news this morning I thought that obviously Mr. Karzai is pulling an April Fool’s joke, but then I reflected and realized we don’t have that kind of warm and fuzzy relationship. Needless to say, the U.N. fired me for wanting to do something about the [election] fraud, so it’s a big lie that I was the one who committed it.”

Karzai is trying to convince parliament to respect an edict he issued in February that reserved himself the right to appoint the members of  an independent election fraud watchdog, the Electoral Complaints Commission, that presently has the majority of its membership appointed by the United Nations. Parliament’s lower house has already rejected the move, but Karzai is trying to convince the upper house to support him. “We shouldn’t give a goddamn cent to the Afghanistan parliamentary election unless it’s run by Afghans who are nonpartisan and not one of whom is appointed by Karzai,” Galbraith said. “It is Karzai and his government that’s the fraud, not me.”

It’s not a whip count or anything like that, but as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton prepares to push for Senate ratification of the New START nuclear arms-reduction treaty with Russia in GOP leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) backyard, some early signals are looking positive for the Obama administration as it gears up for the difficult legislative push.

For one thing, most GOP senators appear to be holding their fire, at least until they get the text of the treaty after the spring recess ends. Skepticism has yet to cross over into out-and-out rejection. An informed source tells me the nuclear watchers in the caucus are more concerned about what next week’s Nuclear Posture Review from the administration will say about the future of nuke policy than New START. That’s admittedly relative and preliminary, but it’s something.

What’s more, Joel Rubin of the progressive National Security Network has been talking to Hill staffers about New START and he detects the same sanguine reception from Republicans. “I’ve come away with a strong impression that there’s broad bipartisan support for the treaty (or at least the concept of it, since it’s not officially up there yet),” Rubin emailed, “so while no one’s come out officially with a yea/nay (as they couldn’t have at this point), there’s a clear desire to get this through (maybe not by [Sen. Jon] Kyl, but even he hasn’t said yet that he’d vote against it).” His prediction? Half the Foreign Relations Committee Republicans — led by support Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) — vote the treaty out of committee.

That’s a shocking account about Steve Kappes, then the powerful associate deputy CIA director for operations, provided by The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein in a new Washingtonian profile of the powerful and widely respected deputy director:

According to an internal investigation, [Kappes] helped tailor the agency’s paper trail regarding the death of a detainee at a secret CIA interrogation facility in Afghanistan, known internally as the Salt Pit.

The detainee froze to death after being doused with water, stripped naked, and left alone overnight, according to reports in the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. He was secretly buried and his death kept “off-the-books,” the Post said.

According to two former officials who read a CIA inspector general’s report on the incident, Kappes coached the base chief—whose identity is being withheld at the request of the CIA—on how to respond to the agency’s investigators. They would report it as an accident.

A CIA spokesman vigorously denied all aspects of that account to Stein, whose sources stand by it. I am filing a Freedom of Information Act request this morning for the CIA inspector general’s report allegedly implicating Kappes in the Salt Pit death.

Following up on yesterday’s post about China’s disinclination to cross the U.S. and Russia at the United Nations Security Council on Iran sanctions, it looks like Chinese President Hu Jintao will attend President Obama’s big Washington summit in the middle of the month on nuclear security. Iran has to view that as a setback, and probably even a signal of Chinese disinterest in opposing economic sanctions at the Security Council. Indeed, via Laura Rozen, the AP is reporting that the five permanent members of the Security Council have all agreed to take up a resolution on sanctioning Iran for its nuclear enrichment activity.

This is big for Obama. Ever since Friday’s announcement of the New START arms-reduction treaty with the Russians, the administration has painted a picture of cascading and compounding action over the next couple of months on Obama’s anti-nuclear agenda: the treaty; the Prague signing of the treaty next week; next week’s (almost certain) release of the administration’s Nuclear Posture Review; the Washington nuclear-security conference; action on Iran’s dubiously-legal enrichment at the Security Council; a May conference on strengthening the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

No one expects, as Obama said last year in Prague, to get to a world without nuclear weapons in the next several decades, let alone one year. But the next several months are about creating and entrenching what a world that at least embraces that ultimate objective would look like.

As first reported by Firedoglake’s Marcy Wheeler, a federal judge has ruled that the Bush administration illegally wiretapped the defunct Islamic charity al-Haramain, a major legal step in a years’-long battle to determine whether Bush’s constellation of warrantless surveillance programs begun after the 9/11 attacks broke the law. The New York Times:

Judge Walker did not directly address the legal arguments made by the Bush administration in defense of the N.S.A. program after The New York Times disclosed its existence in December 2005: that the president’s wartime powers enabled him to override the FISA statute. But lawyers for Al Haramain were quick to argue that the ruling undermined the legal underpinnings of the war against terrorism.

One of them, Jon Eisenberg, said Judge Walker’s ruling was an “implicit repudiation of the Bush-Cheney theory of executive power.”

“Judge Walker is saying that FISA and federal statutes like it are not optional,” Mr. Eisenberg said. “The president, just like any other citizen of the United States, is bound by the law. Obeying Congressional legislation shouldn’t be optional with the president of the U.S.”

Marcy thinks the Justice Department will decline to appeal, thereby letting Judge Vaughn Walker’s determination of illegality stand, but will also keep “details of how and what it did secret” and forestall a challenge on the limits of the government’s authority to determine whether certain disclosures jeopardize national security. (The so-called ‘State Secrets’ doctrine.) Her argument has the virtue of providing the administration with a political setback for its resurgent adversaries from the Bush era — who are fighting to stop the closure of Guantanamo Bay or link it to the abandonment of civilian trials for terrorists — while preserving its own legal authority.

Save the date: Attorney General Eric Holder will interrupt his bureaucratic battle to keep Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 conspirators tried in federal court on the evening of April 15 to deliver an address to the civil liberties group the Constitution Project at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. That’s the day after Holder’s long-awaited (and rescheduled) testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Accordingly, Holder’s address will be a weather vane for the internal struggle over the trial, which is shaping up to be the defining feature of his tenure atop the Justice Department. It’ll be hard to avoid the subject of the KSM trial in front of an audience of hardcore civil libertarians. If he does, he runs the risk of dispiriting the crowd. (Which would be too bad for the Constitution Project, since the dinner is a fundraiser.) Whatever Holder says — or doesn’t say — will be closely parsed, scrutinized and examined for clues to the future of KSM and the legal implications of the Obama administration’s ultimate decision as to his fate. I’m not above saying I’ll be an active participant in the analysis (or over-analysis).

It’s been a tough road to refurbishing the Air Force’s refueling tanker fleet. The Pentagon’s KC-X tanker bid has seen Northrup Grumman drop out in frustration. European defense giant EADS has been playing coy about bidding on the multi-billion-dollar contract. EADS said earlier this month it’s considering submitting its own bid, alongside Boeing, but it wants the Pentagon to extend its May 10 deadline by 90 days. Meanwhile, the Air Force keeps its decades-old tanker fleet. But today the Pentagon put the onus back on EADS.

In a press briefing that just concluded, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said that if it receives “formal notification” from EADS as well as Boeing that they intend to bid, then the Defense Department will keep the bid open until July 10. That’s 30 days short of what EADS wants. Morrell called it a “reasonable period of time,” and sweetened the pot, adding that the Pentagon would compress its schedule for a decision on awarding the KC-X contract, keeping to a deadline of “early this fall.”

Asked if international politics played a role in the decision — EADS is the parent of French aerospace giant Airbus and French President Nicholas Sarkozy said that if the process was fair, “EADS will bid” during a White House appearance yesterday that was largely about cooperation on Iran — Morrell firmly denied any such thing. “Politics are not a part of this process,” he said, “Never have been, never will be.”

Legislators have an expectation that EADS, should it win, will build the KC-X in Mobile, Ala. A group of eight bipartisan friends of Boeing in the Senate wrote to President Obama today urging the Pentagon to side with the American company.

If Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Friday statement that nuclear arms-reduction treaties typically command large bipartisan majorities was a first nudge to get the Senate to ratify the New START accord with Russia, late next week will showcase a second and more direct push. Clinton’s aides are planning for her to make a speech urging ratification in Kentucky, the home state of the GOP Senate leader, Mitch McConnell.

The details are still up in the air, but administration sources said Clinton would probably speak on Friday, April 9. That’s an auspicious day for arms control: the day before, Presidents Obama and Medvedev will sign the accord to reduce their nuclear stockpiles by 30 percent, and the following week will feature a 43- or 44-nation conference on nuclear security in Washington. The venue will probably the University of Louisville, but that hasn’t been completely nailed down.

It marks the first sign of an aggressive push for Clinton to get the treaty the seven GOP votes needed for ratification. (Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana has already lent New START his vote.) McConnell is an unusual case: He didn’t cast a vote for or against the last nuclear weapons treaty in 2003. And he’s already sounded sour notes about New START over its linkage to missile defense and verification — the administration is adamant that the treaty doesn’t impact missile defense and its verification procedures are way tougher than those in the last couple treaties with the Russians — subsequently raising questions about whether McConnell’s legislative strategy of omnibus obstruction doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. If McConnell ends up siding against the treaty, then he’ll be bucking history. At least the last two arms-reduction accords with Russia have passed with the support of the Senate minority leader, whether it was Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) in 2003 or Bob Dole (R-Kans.) a decade earlier.

Administration officials have expressed confidence that they’ll get New START through the Senate once they start making the case for it on the merits. Clinton’s speech next week effectively represents the beginnings of that effort.

Sarah Palin may think an Iran sanctions package is off the Obama administration’s agenda, but — quelle surprise — it appears that the opposite is occurring. Both before and after yesterday’s Obama-Sarkozy meeting at the White House, sources close to the diplomatic effort indicated that President Obama wants to see robust multilateral agreement on economic sanctions targeting the Iranian regime leadership by next month. Whether that will take the administration’s preferred course of approval by the United Nations Security Council is unclear. But the current thinking is that the Russians will acquiesce to a sanctions package, and when that happens, the Chinese will not veto it.

With the three other veto-holding Security Council powers behind sanctions, the U.S., U.K. and France don’t need Russia or China to bless the sanctions — they need them not to stand in the way. The current thinking, bolstered by some firmer words yesterday from a Chinese official spokesman on the undesirability of a nuclear Iran, is that when Russia signals that it won’t object — which appears to be a safe assumption — China will not want to be the sticking point obstructing a sanctions package. Forestalling that outcome is why Iranian nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili is heading for Beijing.

While the Obama administration views economic sanctions as an obstacle to any military action against Iran, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser to the Carter White House, views them as a prelude to it. In an interview to air later this afternoon on al-Jazeera, Brzezinski said:

“I don’t think the sanctions by themselves are going to resolve the nuclear problem. But I think there is an attempt ongoing in the United States and from outside the United States to push the United States towards a more antagonistic policy towards Iran, not excluding the threats of force, which in my view are counterproductive and which perhaps are designed on the part of some, to precipitate a direct collision between the United States and Iran.”

Didi Remez translates an interview IDF Radio did with Likud Knesset member and Israeli National Security Council chief Uzi Dayan. Dayan basically tells the Obama administration Israel won’t do business with it on Jerusalem, no matter what the consequences to the U.S.-Israel relationship:

Narrator Razi Barkai:  We wish to discuss these issues with Uzi Dayan, a major general in the reserves, former [IDF] deputy chief of staff, and current head of the National Security Council (NSC) and, I must say, No. 42 on the Likud Knesset list.  Good morning, Mr. Dayan.  We should not have been surprised.  At the conclusion of the Taba talks of 2002, we had the Clinton paper in which he said something that all the American presidents since adopted — whatever is Arab, is Palestinian; and whatever is Jewish, is Israeli — and he was referring to Jerusalem.  Why are we stunned when it suddenly happens again?

Dayan:  We are not stunned, but it is simply time for us to say, “no.”  Every nation has moments when it has to say “no” even to its friends, including strategic friends.  I think it is time for us to tell the USA and mainly its President, “no more.”

Barkai:  Listen, [Haaretz correspondent] Ari Shavit said — and this has not yet been stated publically, except if it were raised in meetings one-on-one — that if you say “no” to the Americans (and you will soon tell us what we say “no” to), the Americans can start taking very small, secret, and painful steps such as, for example, delaying all kinds of weapon shipment, start questioning the $3 billion in aid we receive every year, or start poking us with all kids of small knives on international arenas such as the United Nations.  Does this not bother you?

Dayan:  Of course it does.  The USA is not only our primary strategic ally, but it also has the power [to do these things].  That is correct.  Still, even among friends there are lines you do not cross, which we should say politely but clearly.  In our case, we should tell the US President, “no, we can’t” because you start addressing issues that do not only stand for Israeli interests and values, and we are not only right about them, but we are also wise because they do not benefit the issue at hand.

That’s Remez’s emphasis. Question: Who else does Remez count as a strategic ally for Israel with remotely the power or global influence of the U.S.?

No sooner did the Post speculate about the future of CIA asset/drug-deal facilitator/quasi-warlord/Kandahar official/presidential brother Ahmed Wali Karzai than Dexter Filkins of The New York Times reports that no one is really going to bother trying to oust an unmovable political object. And since that’s the case, Filkins collects a lot of look-on-the-bright-side quotes. Such as:

“I absolutely think he can help us with reintegration,” the NATO officer said, referring to the American-backed program to coax fighters away from the insurgency.

He knows who to talk to!

He is also one of the area’s biggest entrepreneurs, with business and real estate ventures across southern Afghanistan. “One thing, he is a successful businessman,” the senior NATO official said. “He can create jobs.”

I have to tip my hat to the cynicism of that one.

Just up on her Facebook page, this critique of the Obama administration’s approach to dealing with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:

The Obama administration has their priorities exactly backwards; we should be working with our friend and democratic ally to stop Iran’s nuclear program, not throwing in the towel on sanctions while treating Israel like an enemy.

Typical misleading invective on the U.S.-Israel relationship is one thing, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton confronted at AIPAC last week. But “throwing in the towel” on Iran sanctions? Hours after Obama gave a schedule for Iran sanctions in a joint statement with Nicholas Sarzoky of France?

My hope is that we are going to get this done this spring. So I’m not interested in waiting months for a sanctions regime to be in place; I’m interested in seeing that regime in place in weeks. And we are working diligently with our international partners, emphasizing to them that, as Nicolas said, this is not simply an issue of trying to isolate Iran; it has enormous implications for the safety and the security of the entire region. We don’t want to see a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

That’s from the transcript of yesterday afternoon’s joint appearance at the White House, emailed to reporters about six hours before Palin’s Facebook post. The New York Times even has a piece headlined “Obama Expects Iran Sanctions Soon.” I suppose Palin can always argue that whatever set of sanctions is ultimately placed on Iran by the U.S. and its allies aren’t “real” sanctions, since that’s the luxury an governor who quits has. But it’s impossible to say Obama threw in the towel on sanctions when the timetable for those sanctions accelerates.

It’s tax time. Palin might want to check how many billable hours her foreign policy aide Randy Scheunemann is charging her for this stuff.

Retired Marine Gen. Jack Sheehan embarrassed himself earlier this month by testifying, in the form of a 36-point-font comic sans email forward, that the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims occurred because of the poor order and discipline of the Dutch peacekeepers guarding them, a consequence of the Dutch military’s acceptance of open homosexual service. There is simply no evidence of any such connection, and the Dutch vigorously objected to Sheehan’s testimony. Sheehan only testified because the Republican minority on the Senate Armed Services Committee informed the Democratic majority that it wanted a witness to argue for the continuation of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” if the Dems wanted to bring forward two young officers cashiered for being gay. It ended up not being the best thought-out gambit.

Now the whole sorry episode has ended with Sheehan’s apology. The BBC reports:

[I]n an e-mail to Gen Breemen released by the Dutch defence ministry, Gen Sheehan said: “I am sorry that my recent public recollection of those discussions of 15 years ago inaccurately reflected your thinking on some specific social issues in the military.”

He added: “To be clear, the failure on the ground in Srebrenica was in no way the fault of the individual soldiers.”

The Washington Post has a great story that looks at the opening phases of the forthcoming U.S.-NATO-Afghan push to take the regions surrounding Kandahar city away from the Taliban, an operation expected to be militarily underway by June. But as Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said earlier this month, an operation with a fundamentally political objective — restore and strengthen Afghan governance over the city – really begins with a political build-up to win the support or acquiescence of local leadership. That’s already underway. And one of its main features is to go after Ahmed Wali Karzai, President Hamid Karzai’s brother, alleged CIA asset, drug trafficker/asset, militia quasi-commander and local elected official.

A rough sketch of the plan from the Post’s description goes as follows: Spend the next several months convening local shuras in and around Kandahar in order to build local allies for the June invasion; Convince locals in and around Kandahar, as well as President Karzai, to get Ahmed Wali Karzai to leave. Some of these efforts are more diplomatic than others.

One senior U.S. military official described a personal visit he said he made two weeks ago to [Ahmed Wali] Karzai in Kandahar to threaten him with arrest or worse. “I told him, ‘I’m going to be watching every step you take. If I catch you meeting an insurgent, I’m going to put you on the JPEL,’ ” the Joint Prioritized Engagement List, reserved for the most wanted insurgents. “That means,” the official said he told Karzai, “that I can capture or kill you.”

It would be surprising if Ahmed Wali Karzai leaves Kandahar after being threatened, or if Hamid Karzai, already embittered by what he considers unreasonable U.S. demands on his performance, sacrificed his brother to a U.S. political/military objective. “We’d rather not have him,” the military official who threatened Ahmed Wali Karzai told the Post, “but there’s nothing we can do unless we can link him to the insurgency.” To say the least, Ahmed Wali Karzai’s status is likely to be the subject of tension between McChrystal’s command and the CIA.

The certainty with which McChrystal’s command reportedly believes Ahmed Wali Karzai is a problem contrasts with its admitted lack ignorance of Kandahar.

As they constructed the operational timeline for the Kandahar offensive, officials said, they undertook a “deep dive” into the collected intelligence on the area and concluded that “it’s amazing what we don’t know,” a senior military official said. “Our knowledge of the enemy is pretty darn good.” But the key to success, he said, “is understanding the tribal nature of what’s going on in Kandahar, and we’re not there yet.”

On one hand, it’s refreshing to see a command admit that it doesn’t know everything about an area of operations, a frequent and very American occurrence that usually requires the forthrightness of lieutenants and captains for expression. On the other hand, that ignorance is probably a greater obstacle to a successful campaign than Ahmed Wali Karzai. How will U.S. and NATO forces know whom — and what institutions — to trust?

Just in from ABC:

An award-winning Iranian nuclear scientist, who disappeared last year under mysterious circumstances, has defected to the CIA and been resettled in the United States, according to people briefed on the operation by intelligence officials.

The officials were said to have termed the defection of the scientist, Shahram Amiri, “an intelligence coup” in the continuing CIA operation to spy on and undermine Iran’s nuclear program.

A spokesperson for the CIA declined to comment. In its declassified annual report to Congress, the CIA said, “Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons though we do not know whether Tehran eventually will decide to produce nuclear weapons.”

Pretty serious news if true. Expect a new National Intelligence Estimate on the Iranian nuclear program to rely significantly on Amiri.

In the spirit of self-criticism, something that I see my New START coverage has taken for granted is the support of Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the leading arms-control baron on the Republican side in the Senate and long a driving force behind the move to secure loose nuclear materials from the former Soviet Union. Lugar is firmly behind the Obama administration’s new treaty to reduce the U.S.-Russian nuclear stockpile and the deployed systems that can deliver those deadly payloads. So if you assume every Democratic senator will vote for the treaty when it comes up for ratification, Lugar’s vote brings the count to 60. The question is whether Lugar’s vote can bring along seven other Republicans.

Lugar’s brand of moderate internationalism is a dying one in an increasingly bellicose Senate GOP caucus. Take a look at the 2003 vote on the last nuclear reduction treaty with Moscow. Enough GOPers who voted for it are still in the Senate to provide for ratification — John McCain (R-Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), Pat Roberts (R-Kans.), I could go on — but Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), now the Senate GOP leader, didn’t even vote on a Bush administration priority. And enough of the newer, smaller class of GOP senators are either further to the right or disinterested in bipartisan foreign policy when cobbled together by a Democratic president as to raise questions about to who goes along with Lugar’s exhortations.

What’s more, that acrimonious tenor is likely to flip some of the 2003 yes votes to either no votes or abstentions, however striking the hypocrisy. McCain is seeking re-election and has said that the health care law ensures that all additional Obama agenda items won’t get any GOP support. Graham made similar noise in a Fox News interview last week, but gave himself wiggle room, especially as he tries to retain the White House’s good faith on immigration and terrorism detentions. But if the leadership decides to continue its wholesale rejection of the Obama agenda, then it’s unclear how much Lugar’s support will cash out into actual votes.

That said, it’s not worth nothing. Lugar’s backing will get the treaty out of the Foreign Relations Committee, something that was hardly certain as recently as last month. The administration also has the lever of Ronald Reagan’s fulsome quotes about seeking a nuke-free world to use against recalcitrant GOP senators. (“[M]y central arms control objective has been to reduce substantially, and ultimately to eliminate, nuclear weapons and rid the world of the nuclear threat” is just one example among many.) Perhaps that’ll be enough to get seven more votes. It’s just not clear yet. If not, it won’t just be an indictment of the Obama administration’s legislative acumen. It’ll be a statement about the collapse of what used to be a bipartisan international priority, most fervently advocated by the most sainted GOP president of all.

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton (Ron Lewis/San Mateo County Times/ZUMA Press)

In a potential preview of conservative arguments for rejecting the Obama administration’s new nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia in the Senate, John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush, said the treaty reflected “stunning naivete” and placed it in the context of threats to American sovereignty during a wide-ranging speech to the Heritage Foundation on Tuesday.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Bolton, an influential conservative foreign policy official for decades, accused the Obama administration of harboring “a very different view of American sovereignty than a long line of presidents, certainly since Franklin Roosevelt.” Relying on portions of quotes by senior officials and an undefined category of people he characterized as the “international left” and the “academic left,” Bolton said the administration attaches a “near theological significance” to the power of international institutions whose actions threaten the supremacy of the U.S. Constitution.

Tying ratification of the treaty, which cuts American and Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles by 30 percent, to the broader question of the survival of American sovereignty raises the stakes for a key Obama administration priority. In his announcement of the treaty on Friday, President Obama linked it to his vision of a world ultimately free of nuclear weapons, a priority conservatives have derided. Ratification, already an uncertain prospect in a fiercely partisan Senate, will require the votes of at least eight Republican senators, a task made more difficult by the influential Bolton’s portrayal of the treaty as commensurate with a broader assault by Obama on constitutional values.

Advances in arms control would have “a cumulative impact on our sovereignty,” Bolton argued. While he declined to address the merits of the treaty — whose text has not yet been released — Bolton said it reflected Obama’s “almost religious view in the obligations and implications of treaties.” He scoffed at the president’s statement that the U.S.-Russian reduction in their countries’ nuclear stockpiles, which represent over 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, would strengthen global arms control efforts, and suggested that it would spur rogue-state nuclear proliferation.

“I think the people in places like Teheran and Pyongyang say, ‘Fantastic — the United States is coming down, let’s ramp up our production efforts to get to the [nuclear] capability even more quickly,’” Bolton said. “The rhetoric of the arms control advocates often is very divorced from important and legitimate American security concerns.”

Beyond the so-called New START treaty itself, Bolton tied Obama’s foreign policy to what he called a “globalist” effort at replacing ultimate fidelity to the Constitution with fealty to international accords and institutions, a longtime conservative bogeyman, and contrasted it with his own “Americanist” perspective.

“I think if you ask most international law scholars, they’d say, ‘Of course international law trumps the Constitution,’” Bolton said, yoking Obama to that position and suggesting that the administration will never abandon it. “This is a decisive question that we ought to be asking politicians: In the priority, in the hierarchy of legal systems, where does the Constitution fit?”

At least one administration official, State Department legal counsel Harold Koh, came under attack last year for allegedly privileging international law above the Constitution, although Koh last week defended the administration’s legal right to launch drone strikes on al-Qaeda targets far from the battlefields of Afghanistan.

Bolton’s framing comes amid the growing influence of Tea Party activists who frequently question Obama’s devotion to the Constitution, and who are seething over the administration’s recent victory in passing health care reform. It also comes as Republicans in the Senate consider whether they ought to sign the New START treaty or to deal the administration’s agenda an embarrassing international setback.

Senate Republicans have yet to coalesce around a position on New START, especially as Congress enjoys a two-week recess. But the early signs from Senate GOP leaders have not been positive. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) wrote a letter to Obama the day the treaty was announced, warning that even preambular language remotely linking European missile defense to the treaty is unacceptable, despite public declarations from senior Obama officials flatly stating that the treaty will not hinder missile defense. The early strategy from multiple administration officials to pass the treaty is to remind Republicans, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton did Friday, that nuclear weapons treaties with the Russians historically sail through the Senate with over 90 votes.

Jamie Fly, the executive director of the Foreign Policy Initiative, a conservative foreign policy messaging and advocacy organization, said that while skepticism of the treaty’s verification mechanisms and relationship to missile defense is pronounced, he was unsure “anyone on the right is really ready to say [the treaty] shouldn’t be ratified.” Fly said his organization would await the actual text of New START before taking a position, though he added that FPI was “not huge fans of the Russia Reset,” the Obama administration’s effort to revitalize bilateral relations with Russia. “Everyone I’ve talked to on Capitol Hill and around town is in a wait-and-see mode,” he said.

Bolton, a fixture on Fox News, widened the aperture for criticism of New START, urging conservatives to press politicians on sovereignty issues. “We have to insist on getting clear answers from candidates for Congress, from incumbent members of Congress, from the presidential candidates as we get into the presidential season in the not-too-distant future,” Bolton said, “to make it clear that we view sovereignty and the preservation of American sovereignty as a high priority.”