President Ronald Reagan's maxim "trust, but verify" successfully guided negotiations of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in the 1980s. START, which expired in December, lowered both nations' nuclear arsenals while preparing for further reductions such as those proposed under the New START Treaty.
Former secretaries of state and defense, as well as former Democratic and Republican senators, have endorsed New START. Now, it has gathered bipartisan support from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which voted 14-4 to pass the treaty to the Senate floor.
It was encouraging to see the committee's bipartisanism rebuff attempts at hyperbolic intervention by opportunistic political figures like Mitt Romney, whose op-ed "Obama's Worst Foreign Policy Mistake" revealed Romney's willingness to politicize the one issue that must bind together both Democrats and Republicans: maintaining a strong U.S. national security.
Now it's time for Utah's senators to support the growing bipartisan consensus in favor of New START. Hatch and Bennett must decide whether they're going to join those who stand with Reagan's maxim of "trust, but verify" or whether they'll succumb to the self-serving and divisive trivialization of our national security as epitomized by Romney's political credo: "Trust, but politicize."
For the sake of our national security, I urge our senators to side with Reagan rather than err with Romney.
Robert DeBirk
Salt Lake City