January 19, 2012
In Georgetown and Manhattan, C-SPAN combatants,
laptop legionnaires, and talk-radio tough guys are aghast.
Barack Obama is messing with their plan for galactic greatness.
Mouthpieces for the military-industrial complex, as well as
neoconservative chest-thumpers, get scads of media attention -- and make
lucrative livings -- hyping chimerical “sellouts” and “appeasements.” The White
House’s recent declaration
that it will work with the European Union “to develop an International Code of
Conduct for Outer Space Activities” delivered a new talking point to the threat-inflation
racket.
Thoughtful people don’t see Obama’s announcement as particularly
dangerous -- codes of conduct, formal and informal, exist for all types of
international activities. (Globalization wouldn’t be possible without them.) Dispassionate
observers’ “whatever” quotient grows after learning that the president isn’t
willing to fully embrace the document that the EU has already drafted. In a
statement, Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton specified that Washington
“will not enter into a code of conduct that in any way constrains our national
security-related activities in space.”
It’s a caveat that can be counted on to be rampantly overlooked.
Predictably, before the administration
announced its aim, The Washington Times, a habitual conduit for warmongers,
trotted
out John Bolton to denounce participation in a code of conduct as “mindless.”
“U.S.
military activities in space are a key strategic advantage for the United States,”
added Thomas McInerney, a Fox
News Channel interviewee, birther, and retired Air Force general. “Any
agreements that limit or constrain military space activities must be approached
with extreme caution.”
The “don’t tie us down” argument is the core objection to a
rules-of-the-road compact for space. Yet such demagoguery would be absurd even if
Obama hadn’t inserted an exemption for self-defense as a prerequisite for treaty
talks with the EU. U.S.
warfighters should never be held back
in any way? As the Stimson Center’s Michael
Krepon notes, then “the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Outer Space
Treaty, President Ronald Reagan’s Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty and
President George Herbert Walker Bush’s Strategic Arms Reduction treaties were
all dreadful errors in judgment, since every one of these agreements limited
the U.S. military’s freedom of action in some key respects. Indeed, using this
reasoning, the Geneva Conventions were also unwise, as were codes of conduct
long in place for the United States
Army, Navy, and gravity-bound Air Force.”
Militarists maintain their slippery-slope challenge to a code of
conduct because they’ve always had ludicrously ambitious schemes for space. The
terms casually tossed around -- e.g., “ultimate high ground,” “space control,”
“space dominance” -- go back decades. Theorist Everett C.
Dolman, in a proposal adored by neoconservatives, favors “hegemonic control” of
the heavens. The professor recommends that the Pentagon impose “a police blockade
of all current spaceports, monitoring and controlling all traffic both in and
out.”
That kind of thuggish grandiosity scares the hell out of
foreigners, so it’s hardly surprising that many nations want to establish a few
reasonable standards for the space commons. While China and Russia pursue a ban on all weapons
in orbit -- nukes were barred back in the ‘60s -- the
EU’s draft code of conduct is more modest. (And refreshingly brief.) It
does include a prohibition on “any action which intends to bring about,
directly or indirectly, damage, or destruction, of outer space objects,” but is
primarily focused on transparency and situational awareness. A central goal is
“establishing and implementing … policies and procedures to minimise the
possibility of accidents in space, collisions between space objects or any form
of harmful interference with other States’
right to the peaceful exploration and use of outer space.” Signatories would
meet regularly to revise the code, and a database would be established to “collect
and disseminate notifications” and “serve as a mechanism to channel requests
for consultations.”
America’s
stake in space is vast. As of last summer, U.S.-based
entities owned/operated 429 of the planet’s 974 operating satellites.
That’s 44 percent, a share far in excess of our portion of global population (4
percent) and economic output (23 percent). GPS-enabled devices, Google Earth, and TV beamed from
space are part of everyday life. In 2010, the domestic satellite industry had
243,000 employees. And most of the exciting things being done in the “NewSpace” revolution are
occurring in The Land of the Free.
Obama Derangement Syndrome sufferers are sure to seize on the administration’s
openness to a code of conduct as evidence that the 44th president aspires to be
the Neville Chamberlain
of the Rocket Age. Ignore the accusation. U.S. participation in a prudent space
entente is overdue.
D. Dowd Muska (www.dowdmuska.com) writes about government, economics, and technology. Follow him on Twitter @dowdmuska.
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