A leading defense analyst said the United States and its nonproliferation community should focus more on results than process.
Brad Roberts, a senior researcher at the Institute for Defense Analyses,
said that for a decade, "processes vis-a-vis Iraq, North Korea, and Iran seem not
to have gotten us closer to a solution."
"Indeed, the problem has gotten worse, not better."
"Frankly, the shortcoming extends also to the nonproliferation
community," Roberts said. "This community has exhibited far greater interest
in building institutions and regimes than in the even more tedious job of
making them work."
Roberts told the Carnegie International Nonproliferation Conference last month that the the treaty mechanisms of nonproliferation regimes have
worked well. The failure has been those who were supposed to guarantee the
treaties Ñ the United Nations Security Council. Council members have failed
to agree on compliance.
"This underperformance by the regime has helped to brew a crisis of confidence in the treaty regimes. That
crisis is most pronounced in the small-and medium-sized countries, which
depend so heavily on regimes because they lack the power to shape the
international system to their ends. But that crisis is also pronounced in
the country most likely to be the target of the weapons procured or produced
illicitly Ñ the United States."
Raising a debate about noncompliance has been seen
by-and-large as an act of bad faith by the NGO community. It also seems
particularly squeamish about the term 'counterproliferation,' seemingly
without regard for just what is required in military terms to ensure that
proliferating weapons are not in fact proven useful as tools for inflicting
operational defeat on U.S. power projection forces."
Roberts said the United States has failed to provide leadership to halt
WMD proliferation and failed to give nonproliferation regimes sufficient
fiscal and political capital to ensure their effectiveness. He said the
trend has continued for the last decade since the end of the Cold War.
"Neither the Bush nor the Clinton administrations nor the Congress has
had a clear notion of how to lead these institutions and accordingly they
have suffered," Roberts said.
