Missile Defense: ABM, R.I.P.

President Bush's decision to withdraw from the ABM Treaty is a brave and extraordinary thing. It means not just the end of the treaty, but probably the end of the treaty as a political issue. Vladimir Putin said on the day that Bush announced his decision that the withdrawal would not represent a threat to Russian security (ho-hum)-which is only what the U.S. has been telling the Russians for at least ten months. The Russian intransigence on the treaty was not a warning of a new Cold War, as so many in the opinion elite had it, but what the Russians specialize in: a negotiating position. Now that the matter is decided, the U.S. and the Russians can move on to more fruitful areas of cooperation (working to developing a free market in Russia) and more important areas of contention (Moscow's missile and weapons proliferation to rogue states).

But before the ABM Treaty fades away to a fevered corner of Carl Levin's or Joe Biden's brain, it's worth celebrating a signal intellectual and political accomplishment for the Right. The withdrawal from the treaty, coupled with the administration's recent stiffing of a new protocol to the resolutely unverifiable Biological Weapons Convention and the Senate's rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty two years ago, represents a paradigm shift in international relations as drastic as the one signaled by welfare reform in domestic politics. The age of the parchment gods, when U.S. interests would bend to the legalistic imperatives of agreements reached with hostile, indifferent, or defunct governments, is over.

Now the task of defending the U.S. against possible missile attack becomes less an intellectual challenge and more an engineering and budgetary one. Within days of the U.S. withdrawal, the Pentagon had canceled a Navy sea-based theater anti-missile program plagued by cost overruns. Efforts should certainly be made to keep defense contractors from running amok, but slipping budgetary targets are an inevitable part of developing new weapons systems. More disturbing than the cancellation of the Navy program were congressional efforts to trim funding for, and consequently push back by years, the development of a sophisticated satellite network that would be essential to almost any conceivable missile-defense system. The letters that missile-defense supporters have to fear now are not ABM, but OMB.