Bill Clinton: Brave Defender of... the Aleutians

OK, let's get this straight: The reason the U.S. is risking three decades of arms-control accords with Moscow — and driving everyone from Beijing to Berlin to the Russian side of the argument — is to protect a couple of thousand "Northern Exposure" types on Alaska's Aleutian Islands from a missile attack by North Korea? It would certainly appear that way, according a report in Friday's New York Times. The reason the proposed National Missile Defense system was moved from its original planned site at Grand Forks, N.D. — where the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty allows the U.S. to deploy a limited missile interceptor system — to a treaty-busting location on the Alaskan island of Shemya is because that part of the Aleutians couldn't fit under the umbrella from Grand Forks. But President Clinton, it appears, was happier to go toe-to-toe with the Russians, Chinese and Europeans than face the wrath of Alaska's powerful Republican senator Ted Stevens over leaving a handful of his constituents at the mercy of missiles that might someday be fired by "states of concern" (the states formerly known as "rogue"). Don't even think of asking why, as irrational as they may be, the dastardly North Koreans would attack the Aleutians when there are thousands more Americans on Okinawa and South Korea.

The race to shut the Aleutian missile window, though, is an illustration of the centrality of domestic politics in the missile-defense debate. Throughout the process, everything from intelligence assessments of the missile capabilities of the North Koreans to the questions and answers of tests to ascertain whether the proposed system can actually work have been revised to suit competing political agendas over whether the system should be deployed. Indeed, many observers believe the President's enthusiasm for the "Son of Star Wars" program that emerged in 1996 — after his administration had only three years earlier pronounced Ronald Reagan's original dead — was a product of Clinton's move to the center, under the tutelage of Dick Morris, in which he appropriated a number of Republican positions in order to neutralize their power to unseat him.

President Clinton had originally planned to decide on green-lighting the system after three tests, but with the third of those looming on July 7 and only one having arguably succeeded thus far — and with evidence mounting that its ability to detect and destroy enemy warheads remains somewhat hypothetical — the President may be increasingly inclined to simply hand off the decision to his successor. Whether he includes "Defender of the Aleutians" in his legacy title remains to be seen, but National Missile Defense may have already served a key purpose in shielding the Clinton administration from soft-on-security attacks by the GOP.