Peter Baker provides some lay of the land on START in his New York Times write-up: 

With time running out for major votes before the November election, the White House is trying to reach an understanding with Senate Republicans to approve its new arms control treaty with Russia by committing to modernizing the nuclear arsenal and making additional guarantees about missile defense.

The White House pressed allies in Congress in recent days to approve billions of dollars for the nation’s current nuclear weapons and infrastructure even as administration and Congressional officials work on a ratification resolution intended to reaffirm that the treaty will not stop American missile defense plans....

The critical player is Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican whip, who has criticized the treaty but also signaled that his reservations could be assuaged. In particular, he has sought to modernize the nuclear force, and the administration has proposed spending more than $100 billion over 10 years to sustain and modernize some strategic systems.

“I’ve told the administration it would be much easier to do the treaty right than to do it fast if they want to get it ratified,” Mr. Kyl said Thursday in an interview. “It’s not a matter of delay,” he added, but “until I’m satisfied about some of these things, I will not be willing to allow the treaty to come up.”

Mr. Kyl sounded hopeful that he could reach agreement, ticking off three ways the White House could assure him that the proposed nuclear modernization program would be adequate: ensure enough first-year money in the next round of appropriations bills, include enough second-year money in a follow-up budget proposal and revise the long-range modernization plan to anticipate additional costs in later years.

“I’m not questioning the administration’s commitment to this,” he said, “but this is a big deal, and it needs to have everybody’s commitment to it at takeoff, and I really don’t see that the groundwork has really been laid.”

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has met with Mr. Kyl once and invited him and other senators to talk about the treaty again next week. Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, has likewise been talking with Mr. Kyl regularly and is trying to help resolve Republican demands to inspect at least some of the secret negotiating record.

For all the hand-wringing, this sounds like START is gonna get ratified.  Kyl has been very careful to avoid boxing himself into a situation where he has to vote no.  His asking price is not unreasonable, and it sounds like the Obama administration will meet it. 

This would be good - not because START is all of that and a bag of chips, but because it suggests some Very Useful Conclusions:

1)  Mitt Romney's Know-Nothing anti-START gambit failed to have any effect;

2)  Republicans are being reasonable and constructive on arms control (Kyl's requests make a good deal of sense to me);

3)  There can be bipartisan cooperation on important foreign policy questions.

4)  Spencer Ackerman was wrong and I was right.  Ha!!  [It's all about score-settling with you this week, isn't it?--ed.  It's the summer -- allow me my small, petty victories.]

Am I missing anything? 

Spencer Ackerman doesn't think the Senate will ratify the START treaty because the GOP wants revenge on health care: 

It would be a mistake to view the outcome of this vote as a function of the treaty’s merits. Look at it from the GOP’s political vantage. It’s an opportunity to deal Obama’s hippie aspiration for a nuke-free world an embarrassing setback, right after suffering a humiliating defeat on health care, the issue that fight most to their voters. Every Republican interest inclines them against voting for the bill, and the constitutional math of treaty ratification gives them the chance to give Obama a bloody nose in front of the world. If the Obama team starts arguing the merits of the bill as opposed to outlining a raw-politics strategy for passage, then the treaty is fucked. (emphasis added)

I agree that treaty ratification is not going to be easy -- but Ackerman's political acumen seems off, and his timetable is way off.  As Peter Baker and Ellen Barry reported for the New York Times, START won't be going up for a vote anytime soon: 

The two sides have begun preparing for a signing ceremony in Prague on April 8, timing it to mark the anniversary of Mr. Obama’s speech in the Czech capital outlining his vision for eventually ridding the world of nuclear weapons....

Mr. Obama met at the White House on Wednesday with Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, the senior Democrat and Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to brief them on the negotiations. Mr. Kerry later said he would hold hearings between Easter and Memorial Day on the history of arms control and promised action by year’s end. “I assured the president that we strongly support his efforts and that if the final negotiations and all that follows go smoothly, we will work to ensure that the Senate can act on the treaty this year,” Mr. Kerry said.

Lugar told FP's Josh Rogin that "he intends to support the agreement and hearings could begin in May."

So, we know two things.   First, by the time hearings and votes on START are taken, health care will have faded from view.  Second, at least one prominent Republican senator intends to vote in favor of the treaty. 

Does this mean START will sail through?  Hardly.  But it's also not going to fail because GOP Senators decided en masse to "give Obama a bloody nose in front of the world" because of health care.  

Put me down as "cautiously optimistic" that START will be ratified.  If the press reports are accurate, then opponents will have to argue that non-binding preamble language will somehow bind future U.S. presidents.  Maybe hardcore ideologues can spin that kind of tale, but this is not health care -- fewer activists are going to care about an arms control treaty with a fading great power.  Furthermore, if Obama's popularity has rebounded by the time the treaty comes up for a vote, some individual GOP senators will see a decided advantage to bipartisanship on foreign policy. 

UPDATE:  see Josh Rogin for more on this question -- though he's leaning more towards the Ackerman position.  Laura Rozen, on the other hand, thinks Lugar's endorsement will carry some weight. 

Bryan Bender had a long story in yesterday's Boston Globe about the Obama administration's aspirations for treaty ratification: 

Marking a major reversal from the Bush administration, which considered most treaties to be too restrictive of US sovereignty, the Obama administration says it will seek ratification of three major pacts aimed at reducing nuclear weapons. It also will seek approval of a set of regulations to manage use of the oceans and, by the end of the president’s first term, a new treaty to combat global climate change....

International treaties are signed by the president, but under the Constitution must be ratified by the Senate to become law. They need at least 67 votes to pass, not a simple majority of 51, typically requiring strong support from the president’s own party and a significant number of votes from the opposing party. Democrats now control 60 seats in the Senate, counting two independents who usually vote with the party.

Obtaining 67 votes has proved difficult under the best of circumstances and helps explain why fewer than 20 major security treaties have been ratified since the end of World War II, according to David Auerswald, a professor of strategy and policy at the National War College in Washington.

“The foreign policy consensus in this country has disappeared on many issues,’’ said Auerswald, a leading specialist on treaties. “Given that the Democrats only have 60 of the 67 votes necessary to approve a treaty, they have to hold their ranks and pick off seven Republicans. Yet moderate Republicans are a dying breed in the Senate, making the Democrats’ task that much harder.’’

At first glance, I'd share Auerswald's skepticism.  The Bush administration, for example, wanted the Senate to pass the Law of the Sea Treaty.  Despite Bush's support and the ardent backing of the U.S. Navy, ratification went nowhere -- there were a suficient number of "new sovereigntists" to kill the chances for a floor vote.     

Of course, that was a whole election cycle ago.  Looking at the U.S. Senate, let's do some arithmetic.  Assuming Obama has the backing of all 60 Democrat-ish Senators, who might offer support on the GOP side for, say, the Law of the Sea Treaty?  My tentative list: 

1. Olympia Snowe (ME)
2. Susan Collins (ME)
3. Richard Lugar (IN)
4. Orrin Hatch (UT)
5. Lisa Murkowski (AK)
6. George Voinovich (OH)
7. John McCain (AZ)

So it's possible... hmmm.... well, maybe not McCain.  It's a little unclear, actually. 

I suspect this is going to boil down to whether John McCain wants to be the Arthur Vandenberg of his era. 

Either way, however, I suspect the Obama administration would encounter difficulties getting these same seven senators to vote yea on a raft of international treaties.  Unless there are more GOP Senators available for the picking, I suspect Obama will have to pick only his favorites to push. 

David Brooks' column today looks at the lessons that the swine flu outbreak have for the future of global governance: 

So how do we deal with [transnational problems]? Do we build centralized global institutions that are strong enough to respond to transnational threats? Or do we rely on diverse and decentralized communities and nation-states?

A couple of years ago, G. John Ikenberry of Princeton wrote a superb paper making the case for the centralized response. He argued that America should help build a series of multinational institutions to address global problems. The great powers should construct an “infrastructure of international cooperation ... creating shared capacities to respond to a wide variety of contingencies.”

If you apply that logic to the swine flu, you could say that the world should beef up the World Health Organization to give it the power to analyze the spread of the disease, decide when and where quarantines are necessary and organize a single global response....

The response to swine flu suggests that a decentralized approach is best. This crisis is only days old, yet we’ve already seen a bottom-up, highly aggressive response....

If the response were coordinated by a global agency, those local officials would not be so empowered. Power would be wielded by officials from nations that are far away and emotionally aloof from ground zero. The institution would have to poll its members, negotiate internal differences and proceed, as all multinationals do, at the pace of the most recalcitrant stragglers.

Second, the decentralized approach is more credible. It is a fact of human nature that in times of crisis, people like to feel protected by one of their own. They will only trust people who share their historical experience, who understand their cultural assumptions about disease and the threat of outsiders and who have the legitimacy to make brutal choices. If some authority is going to restrict freedom, it should be somebody elected by the people, not a stranger.

Finally, the decentralized approach has coped reasonably well with uncertainty. It is clear from the response, so far, that there is an informal network of scientists who have met over the years and come to certain shared understandings about things like quarantining and rates of infection. It is also clear that there is a ton they don’t understand.

A single global response would produce a uniform approach. A decentralized response fosters experimentation.

Reading this, my first thought was, "wait a minute... Brooks' characterization of Ikenberry's poition ("Power would be wielded by officials from nations that are far away and emotionally aloof from ground zero.") doesn't sound like Ikenberry's stuff. 

If you look at the Ikenberry paper that Brooks cites, he proposes, "a strategy in which the United States leads the way in the creation and operation of a loose rule-based international order. The United States provides public goods and solves global collection action problems (emphasis added)."  That doesn't sound terribly centralized to me.  Indeed, my hunch would be that Ikenberry would find centralized and decentralized responses to complement rather than substitute for each other. 

Don't trust me on this, however.  I asked John Ikenberry this morning what he thought about Brooks' argument.  Here's his response in full: 

The problem with David’s analysis is that he thinks the two strategies – national and international – are alternatives. We need both. National governments need to strengthen their capacities to monitor and respond. International capacities – at least the sorts that I propose – are meant to reinforce and assist national governments. This international capacity is particularly important in cases where nations have weak capacities to respond on their own or where coordinated action is the only way to tackle the threat. When it comes to transnational threats like health pandemics everyone everywhere is vulnerable to the weakest link (i.e. weakest nation) in the system, and so no nation can be left behind.

This is not a new idea – it is the idea that underlay America’s strategy of order building after WWII. Jacob Viner, a leading international economist of that era, captured the logic in 1942 as it relates to global markets: "There is wide agreement today that major depressions, mass unemployment, are social evils, and that it is the obligation of governments. . . to prevent them." Moreover, he said, there is "wide agreement also that it is extraordinarily difficult, if not outright impossible, for any country to cope alone with the problems of cyclical booms and depressions. . . while there is good prospect that with international cooperation. . . the problem of the business cycle and of mass unemployment can be largely solved." What Viner says about economic cooperation in the 1940s is even more the case for the diffuse, shifting, and uncertain threats of our era. States need collective capacities to they can make good on their own national obligations to respond.

[You've been dreaming of this kind of Annie Hall/Marshall McLuhan moment for a while, haven't you?--ed.  Yes.  Yes I have.]

UPDATE:  Anne Applebaum offers a more focused critique of the World Health Organization -- and its critics -- in her column today.