Security: A push to ratify a flawed and dangerous arms limitation treaty to give the president a foreign policy legacy may only succeed in writing our epitaph, leaving our defenses neutered and our enemies emboldened.

Winston Churchill said in 1946 that he did “not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power.” The lame-duck session of Congress may leave us dead ducks by giving it to them in a bloodless surrender.

The New START Treaty is based on the liberal mantra that weapons, not tyrants, are the root cause of war and that nuclear weapons are the worst of the bunch. Never mind that nuclear powers such as Britain, France and President Obama’s newest getaway, India, do not threaten us. Just as guns cause crime in their view, weapons cause war.

Our friends who found shelter under the U.S. nuclear umbrella may feel compelled to go nuclear in their own self-interest. Would the world be a kinder and gentler place if Japan and Germany developed nuclear weapons? Iran soon will, and this treaty leaves us defenseless.

As the world’s only effective defender of freedom and democracy, the U.S. has a slightly different mission statement and military needs from the Russians. To morally equate us with them is to say there’s no difference between cops and criminals because they both carry guns, so let’s put restrictions on the guns.

We note that Moscow has shown no willingness to restrain budding nuclear powers like Iran and North Korea from developing nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. Russia provides nuclear assistance to Iran and is even pushing Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela to become a nuclear threat in our own backyard.

Russia has unilaterally asserted that any qualitative or quantitative improvement in U.S. missile defenses would be grounds for withdrawal from the treaty. The treaty explicitly bans, for example, conversion of U.S. missile silos into ballistic missile defense sites. This administration has already gutted U.S. missile defense, scrapping additional ground-based interceptors here and giving up missile sites in Europe to defend against Iranian launches.

The treaty limits each side to 700 deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles and heavy bombers. It limits the number of nuclear warheads to 1,550 each. But there again it’s no problem, since the administration has already abandoned testing of our existing aging arsenal or the development of a replacement warhead.

This hurts our conventional deterrent as well, and the Russians know it. They know our bombers, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles are also delivery systems for the precision-guided munitions that strike terror into our foes. The treaty counts each heavy bomber as a warhead itself, even if it carries only conventional weapons.

The treaty does not ban tactical nuclear weapons, because they cannot reach the U.S. from Russian soil. The 10,000 tactical nuclear warheads Russia possesses can reach our allies, now watching us fold and put away the nuclear umbrella that protected them.

It takes 67 senators to ratify the treaty, a prospect made less certain by the November election results. Democrats are eager to ratify it before the 112th Congress convenes, hoping that enough senators on both sides of the aisle see it as their legacy as well.

New START is really old appeasement. We would rather trust our security to the strength of American arms than to pieces of parchment and the good will of our enemies.