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Next, Bush officials called a halt to negotiations with North Korea and withdrew from attempts to negotiate peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Both decisions have had consequences somewhere between serious and disastrous. Continuing the go-it-alone policy, the administration blocked a series of international arms-control treaties and decided to scrap the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The United States promised to make cuts in its own nuclear arsenal but initially refused to make an agreement with Russia on mutual reductions, which seemed rather an odd course.

The decision to go ahead with Star Wars, now called National Missile Defense (NMD) or the nuclear umbrella, further upset allies and enemies alike. NMD is not only notoriously expensive, but many scientists believe it is barely plausible, the equivalent of trying to hit a bullet with a bullet. Theoretically, if we stay at it long enough and spend enough money, it may work, but this is one project that was never submitted to the cost-benefit analysis of White House efficiency expert John D. Graham.

The drawback, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, is that NMD appears to be not a defensive weapon but instead a way to let the United States use nuclear weapons in a first strike without fear of retaliation. The balance of terror (appropriately called MAD, for “mutual assured destruction”) may be perfectly loony, but it did stave off nuclear war for fifty years. The administration’s 2002 talk of using “tactical nuclear weapons” in Iraq further appalled at least European public opinion. Bush also withdrew from the START II Treaty, which required both the United States and Russia to reduce strategic nuclear weapons from 6,000 to a range between 3,000 and 5,000 by 2007. The Senate had actually ratified the treaty, but the Russian Duma conditioned its ratification on Senate approval of minor changes. Bush decided not to seek approval of the changes.

Bush also backed out of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to ban all nuclear tests. The White House decided not to submit the treaty to the Senate for ratification, saying it would “limit U.S. research.”

In one week in August 2001 Bush backed out of the 1995 draft accord on a Biological Weapons Convention to rid the world of biological weapons and then moved to weaken the Small Arms Control Treaty. The enforcement protocol on biological weapons had been developed over ten years of negotiation. Bush refused to sign it, saying that the spot checks on medical-research facilities authorized by the convention would be “too intrusive” and would “expose American companies to industrial espionage.” The Small Arms Control Treaty was to stem the illegal flow of small arms; the United States rejected two key provisions that called for regulation of civilian ownership of military weapons and for restrictions on trade to rebel movements. That same week, the United States became the lone holdout, as 178 other nations agreed to implement the Kyoto Treaty. Kind of a banner week for foreign policy there.

Bush actually followed Clinton’s lead in rejecting the land mine ban, which calls for the destruction of antipersonnel mines. So much for Princess Diana’s legacy.

In a little noted move, in the summer of 2001, the Bushies also dropped a Clinton initiative to go after international money laundering. This is the system of offshore banks used by Osama bin Laden and other terrorists, as well as by drug dealers, tax evaders, kleptomaniac dictators, nasty husbands, and American corporations. Clinton had committed us to working with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), thirty of the world’s strongest economies, to start putting pressure on the offshore banks. The Clinton administration pushed a tough bill that would have given law-enforcement authorities more legal tools to go after terrorist money, but Senator Phil Gramm of Texas killed it by refusing to let it come up for a vote in his committee. The Bushies then dropped the