Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, may I inquire, is there any time limitation on Senators at this point?

The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senate is operating postcloture, and each Senator has up to 1 hour.

Mr. CORNYN. I thank the Chair. I assure my colleagues, I will not use the full hour, which I am sure is good news.

Mr. President, I oppose the ratification of the New START treaty for the reasons many of my colleagues have articulated and to which I have previously spoken. The treaty requires unilateral reductions of the United States on strategic nuclear weapons. It fails to address tactical nuclear weapons--an area in which the Russian Federation has a 10-to-1 advantage. This is not an idle or incidental matter.

GEN Nikolai Patrusheb, Secretary of the Russian National Security Council, a body in charge of military doctrine, has declared that Russia may not only use nuclear weapons preemptively in local conflicts such as Georgia or Chechnya but may deliver a nuclear blow against the aggressor in a critical situation, based on intelligence evaluations of his intentions.

I submit also that the verification provisions of this treaty are weak, allowing only 18 inspections a year for an arsenal of more than 1,500 weapons. Obviously, the ability to get more than a sampling of Russian Federation compliance would be impossible given the relatively few number of inspections permitted under the treaty.

As we have discussed off and on over the last few days, the preamble of the treaty itself is ambiguous and has been construed by the Russians themselves as limiting the ability of the United States to expand its own missile defense system.

I realize the President of the United States has submitted a letter stating his unilateral opinion of what that treaty obligation means, but, of course, treaty obligations are not unilateral declarations, they are bilateral agreements. Of course, the consequence of a misunderstanding over this important issue of missile defense could allow either side to withdraw from the treaty and, indeed, the threat of withdrawal from the treaty because of this misunderstanding is something that could be avoided in the first instance if, in fact, some of the amendments addressing missile defense were allowed and the treaty modified to that extent. At that time, the Russians could then be asked: Will you agree with this modification, and we would know upfront, not on the back end, their sincere intentions.

But I would say that the New START treaty has flaws when you look at it, not only in its various provisions; that is, when you reason from the whole to its parts, but I would suggest the treaty also fails when you look at it the other way around, when you reason from the parts to the whole, when you see this treaty is another example, another symptom, of a foreign policy that sends a message of timidity, even ambivalence, not only about our own security but about America's leadership role in a very dangerous world.

This larger strategic context is what we need to keep in mind. We all know that President Obama has set incredibly high expectations for his Presidency in terms of how he would conduct American foreign policy. In an early Presidential debate, for example, he promised to meet with the leaders of five rogue nations--Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea--``without precondition during the first year of [his] administration.'' Well, we now know that never happened.

After he won the nomination, you will recall, in his famous speech he gave in the city of Berlin, while still a candidate for the Presidency, he declared he was a ``citizen of the world.'' Also, he said: ``This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet.''

President Obama was not the only one promoting a grandiose vision of his Presidency. Remember the Nobel Prize Committee received his nomination for the Peace Prize less than 6 weeks after President Obama took office. In the citation for the award last year, they said:

[President] Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. .....

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future.

You might ask, What relevance does this have to our consideration of the START treaty? The relevance is that a big part of this utopian dream of a ``new climate in international politics'' has been the elimination of all nuclear weapons.

In that Berlin speech, then-Senator Obama said that one of his priorities was to ``renew the goal of a world without nuclear weapons.''

The citation for the Nobel Peace Prize included this observation:

The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations.

Indeed, in an op-ed piece, authored by the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, dated April 7, 2010, in the Guardian, she argues that the START treaty is an important step toward a nuclear-free world.

So you might ask, what is wrong with a vision of the world without nuclear weapons? Can't we hope and dream? Of course, even without nuclear weapons, we know that in World War I and World War II tens of millions of people lost their lives in armed conflict. So it is not as if a world without nuclear weapons is a world without war and a world without danger for peace-loving nations such as ours and our allies.

We also know that any number of foreign policy experts have expressed serious reservations about indulging in this fantasy of a world without nuclear weapons.

George Kennan has said:

The evil of these utopian enthusiasms was not only or even primarily the wasted time, the misplaced emphasis, the encouragement of false hopes. The evil lay primarily in the fact that those enthusiasms distracted our gaze for the real things that were happening. .....The cultivation of these utopian schemes, flattering to our own image of ourselves, took place at the expense of our feeling for reality.

The President of the United States has not only mused about fantastic notions that have no basis in the real world, he has criticized his own country on foreign soil so often that some called that particular trip ``the world apology tour.''

So what should our competitors and would-be adversaries make of these statements of a fantasy world that is nuclear free and a President who travels abroad and apologizes for America's strength? Regretfully, I can only conclude it sends an impression of weakness and a lack of determination to maintain America's leadership in the world. We know there are dangerous consequences associated with an interpretation by others that America has lost its resolve to lead the world or to maintain its own security and to protect its allies.

President Reagan said famously:

We maintain the peace through our strength; weakness only invites aggression.

Experience has proven the truth of those words.

We should recall that the President of the United States conducted YouTube diplomacy by recording a video for Iran's leaders--but then withheld comment when those same leaders were brutally crushing a pro-democracy movement and their own people's hopes for freedom.

The President has treated several of our allies without the respect they deserve. Some have been, like Britain, slighted; others, like Israel, have been lectured; and other of our allies have been thrown under the bus on missile defense, like Poland and the Czech Republic.

He has been so idealistic and naive, you might say, about the subject of nuclear weapons that President Sarkozy of France remarked about it publicly at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council. He said:

We live in the real world, not in a virtual one. .....

President Obama himself has said that he dreams of a world without nuclear weapons.

Before our very eyes, two countries are doing exactly the opposite at this very moment.

President Sarkozy said:

Since 2005, Iran has violated five Security Council Resolutions. .....

He said:

I support America's ``extended hand.'' But what have these proposals for dialogue produced for the international community?

Nothing but more enriched uranium and more centrifuges.

And last but not least, it has resulted in a statement by Iranian leaders calling for wiping off the map a Member of the United Nations.

I fear the New START treaty will serve as another data point in the narrative of weakness, pursuing diplomacy for its own sake--or indulging in a utopian dream of a world without nuclear weapons, divorced from hard reality.

Last week, I mentioned that Doug Feith, formerly of the Defense Department, helped negotiate the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, known as the SORT treaty. Mr. Feith said that during the negotiations of the SORT treaty, the Russians were constantly trying to get the United States to negotiate away our right to defend ourselves from missile attacks through a robust missile defense program.

The Bush administration rightly rejected those Russian demands and--you know what--we got a good treaty anyway. The Obama administration, on the other hand, gave Russia what it wanted--or what it says it wanted--among other concessions. But that is not the only concession that was given under the New START treaty.

I would ask my colleagues, Where are the concessions that Russia made to us in this treaty? Where are the concessions that Russia made to us? And what in the treaty is a good deal for the United States?

But my colleagues may reply, So what. So what if the Obama administration's world view is a little bit naive. So what if the Russians negotiated a much better deal for themselves than the Obama administration got for the United States. Shouldn't we go ahead and approve the treaty anyway? What harm could it do? Couldn't it help build a better relationship with the Russian Federation and help transform America's reputation in the world?

Those are actually good questions. But the answers are sobering. The administration has long argued that its approach to diplomacy was not only good for its own sake, but it would strengthen relationships with nations all around the world. I would ask you, how has that worked out?

Charles Krauthammer reviewed the global response to President Obama's diplomatic overtures in this way. He said:

Unilateral American concessions and offers of unconditional engagement have moved neither Iran nor Russia nor North Korea to accommodate us.

Nor have the Arab states--or even the powerless Palestinian Authority--offered so much as a gesture of accommodation in response to heavy and gratuitous American pressure on Israel.

Nor have even our Europe allies responded: They have anted up essentially nothing in response to our pleas for more assistance in Afghanistan.

And, of course, we could look at the results of the New START treaty itself. Russian leaders have responded to American concessions with contempt. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said that the treaty ``cannot be opened up and become the subject of new negotiations.'' Prime Minister Putin has threatened a new arms race if Russia does not get its way with this version of the treaty. Russian leaders have the temerity to lecture and attempt to intimidate the Senate from discharging our constitutional responsibilities. We should not succumb.

In deciding whether to vote for the treaty, I would respectfully ask whether some Senators have been asking themselves the wrong question. Instead of asking ourselves the question, Why not ratify? What is the harm? I would suggest that the better question is, Why should we? I would urge my colleagues to vote against this treaty not because I do not care about the message it will send to Russia and other nations but because I do care about that message, and it is time we stop sending a message of weakness that only encourages our adversaries.

I urge my colleagues to vote no on this treaty, to require the administration to go back to the negotiating table with the Russians, to get a better deal for the United States, and to make clear that the era of unilateral American concessions is over.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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