George W. Bush's abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty on December 13 was a reckless act taken without regard for the consequences--it has dealt a severe blow to the idea of a world order grounded in collective security. Bush justified this act of hubristic contempt for the rest of the world as a measure to protect the American "homeland," but it actually will increase the danger of nuclear war and place this country at greater risk.

The abandonment of the ABM treaty represents a victory for Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department over Colin Powell's State Department. It's significant that the point man in the ABM negotiations was John Bolton, under secretary for arms control and international security, a Rumsfeld loyalist planted in the State Department over Powell's objections. At Bolton's confirmation hearing, Jesse Helms told him, "John, I want you to take that ABM treaty and dump it in the same place we dumped our ABM treaty co-signer, the Soviet Union, and that is to say, on the ash heap of history." Mission accomplished. Bolton divides US policy-makers into two opposing camps: the "Americanists" and the "globalists," the latter of which would entangle us in treaties. With the ABM pullout, the Bolton-engineered refusal to sign the biological warfare treaty, the opposition to the International Criminal Court and US subordination of multilateral relief and reconstruction projects in Afghanistan to pursuit of the war, the "Americanists" are now in the saddle--and with them the Rumsfeld/Paul Wolfowitz doctrine of a wider war on terrorism, which could embroil the United States in a cycle of bloody overseas interventions. Rumsfeld told NATO it should "prepare now for the next war."

Reacting to Bush's withdrawal, Vladimir Putin called it a "mistake" but indicated that the US-Russian relationship was strong enough to survive this setback. Yet Putin is surrounded by political elites who are deeply distrustful of Washington. They are already reminding Putin of the despised "Gorbachev-Yeltsin syndrome"--a pattern of far-reaching Russian concessions in the 1980s and 1990s that were met by broken Western promises. As Aleksei Arbatov, deputy chair of Parliament's defense committee and a leading pro-Western politician, put it, "After the tragedy of September 11, Russia extended its hand full length to meet the US in the spirit of cooperation and even mutual alliance.... Today, the US has spat into that extended hand."

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