ABSTRACT

The checkered history of chemical arms control in the United States has been a battle between realists and idealists in the US Players who saw the world through a lens heavily influenced by realist ideas argued with their more idealist colleagues over correct policy, prudent policy, and the right and wrong of chemical arms control. The supporters of the Geneva Protocol were mostly idealists, and the successful opponents of the protocol were realists. The idealists in the Senate in 1926 were not prepared to counter the military arguments of the realists. Although the Ford administration verbally excluded herbicides and tear gas from its interpretation of the treaty's provisions, it offered a compromise to the idealists in the Senate. Senate supporters of the Chemical Weapons Convention remained within the liberal internationalist theoretical framework shared by the earlier idealists in their insistence that the good for the United States is firmly set within the framework of the good of the world.