From Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, presidents of both parties saw American security as resting in significant part on collective arrangements, defined in treaties. Thus we abandoned the isolationism of the prewar years and joined the United Nations. Then came the North Atlantic Treaty and its institutional offspring, NATO, its members pledged to defend each other.

The risks of nuclear war led successive presidents, again of both parties, to conclude arms control treaties with the Soviet Union. In the words of the New York Times expert on the subject, Michael Gordon, military competition was regulated by "detailed, binding treaties that spelled out carefully negotiated limits and verification measures."

That fundamental policy of security through treaties is anathema to President Bush's secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. And it informs the president's main initiative in national security policy.

The Bush proposal for a national missile defense is incompatible with the Antiballistic Missile Treaty of 1972. Administration officials say that antimissile tests will conflict with the treaty within the next six months or so. Mr. Bush proposes to negotiate a new nuclear framework with Russia before then, but he will not accept any that limits missile defenses. And if no new plan is agreed in that time, the U.S. will withdraw from the ABM treaty.

The timetable is so short that it has almost no chance of working. The Bush people know that perfectly well, so their real objective must be to break the ABM treaty.

The consequences would be menacing. Weapons competition between the two largest nuclear powers would be without what for decades has been a crucial element: predictability. Russia could respond by exceeding all kinds of limits, as President Vladimir Putin has already said he would do. China, seeing such a system as a threat to its small nuclear deterrent, could respond by enlarging it. But the zeal of the administration to break the ABM treaty is so great that it brushes aside the possible dangerous consequences.

The ABM treaty is by no means the only target. Administration officials have suggested that we may resume nuclear testing. That would violate the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which the Senate has refused to ratify but which we have nevertheless observed. It is critical to the fight against proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The other day the under secretary of state for arms control and international security affairs, John R. Bolton, made a scornful speech at the United Nations about a proposed treaty to limit trafficking in small arms. He said Americans would not give up their constitutional right to bear arms — a right, if it exists, that is not at all involved in the proposed treaty. The speech sounded like a tract for the National Rifle Association. (Did Secretary of State Colin Powell approve it?)

Even NATO, the rock of our national security, is treated with some disregard by the administration. Facing difficult problems in the Balkans, it seems to have taken the view that we can pick and choose which NATO missions we will join, or on what terms. The founding principle of the North Atlantic Treaty was one for all and all for one. The Bush people are making it sound more like me for me and all for me.

The dislike of treaties reflects an attitude that the United States must be free to do what it wants in the world. Call it unilateralism or whatever, it is a sharp break from our postwar premise that if wisely negotiated, treaties enhance our security.

The curious thing is that some of the leading figures in what until now has been the consensus have not spoken out against the radical change in outlook. Brent Scowcroft was national security adviser to the first President Bush. What can he think of a policy that paints China as a potential enemy in order to justify missile defense? Or for that matter, what does the elder Bush think? He can hardly speak out, but does he privately express unease?

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

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