Obama, just back from rough G20 meetings in Asia, was traveling to a delicate NATO summit in Portugal Thursday, leaving domestic foes, emboldened by a mid-term election triumph, apparently smelling blood over his foreign policy.

In just a few days, the mood over the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which makes deep cuts in superpower nuclear arsenals, has soured dramatically, prompting a sudden and high-powered White House counter-attack.

Obama warned on Thursday that comments by a key Republican, Jon Kyl, that the treaty may not be ratified this year in a "lame duck" session of the old Senate, posed a grave risk to US national and nuclear security.

"It is a national security imperative that the United States ratify the new START treaty this year," Obama said, after calling in Republican Cold War negotiators Henry Kissinger, James Baker and other luminaries as back-up.

"This is not about politics, this is about national security," he added.

Kyl's comments appeared to have sparked deep alarm in the administration over national security, possible damage to improved Russia-US relations and fears that Obama's already eroded political capital could be further depleted.

In a hastily-plotted counter-attack, Obama dispatched Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to her old stomping grounds where she is remembered as a persuasive ex-senator who once charmed Republicans.

On Thursday, Obama deployed a storied line-up of former secretaries of state and defense, alongside Kissinger and Baker, who his spokesman Robert Gibbs said were hardly "wild-eyed liberals."

The words Ronald Reagan meanwhile were never far from the lips of Obama spokesmen, as they deployed memories of a conservative hero to bolster what they say is a deal in an established tradition of arms control orthodoxy.

Obama will meet Russian President Dmitry Medvedev for the second time in as many weekends after the NATO summit in Portugal, which will take place with world leaders seeking to assess the impact of the American leader's domestic woes on his global leverage.

Officials argue that delaying the treaty, which could then slip into a new Congress and face further waits or even see its support crumble, will mean Russian nuclear stocks will fester unwatched by US inspectors.

They say it could also imperil political backing in Russia for the "reset" which has yielded Russian support of tough sanctions on Iran and Medvedev's decision not to supply S-300 air defense missiles to Tehran.

Stephen Flanagan, of the Center of Strategic and International Studies, said that if the treaty was eventually lost, it would "take away one of the most important foreign policy achievements that (Obama) has, so it would be damaging."

"It makes you question whether in fact that is what some of the Republicans are trying to do."

As well as demonstrating the capacity of the Senate to be tied in knots by just a few lawmakers, the row also raises the possibility that triumphant Republicans may be eyeing Obama's powers over foreign policy.

Gibbs declined to be drawn into billing Kyl's tactics as a partisan effort to hurt a weakened president.

"I don't know what their motives are, but delaying bringing this treaty up imperils our national security," Gibbs said, adding that ratification was a "no-brainer."

However, officials have said in private that the only possible motive for the exhaustive scrutiny of the treaty in Senate committees and through administration engagement must be to wound Obama.

Less than a week ago, the fruits of Obama's "reset" policy were on show, as he met Medvedev in a hotel towering over the Japanese port city of Yokohama, on the sidelines of a Pacific Rim summit.

Now the White House is scrambling to get the 67 votes needed to pass the measure in the Senate -- after already offering Kyl a 4.1 billion dollar concession to modernize US nuclear stocks.

The uncertainty will loom over the meeting of the NATO-Russia Council after the Lisbon summit, which is meant to expand the US-Russia reset into better ties between Moscow and the western alliance.

Last week, Obama promised to work with Moscow on its entry into the World Trade Organization next year.

Here again, opposition in Congress could be a problem, as lawmakers would be required to remove a Jackson Vanik waiver, a restriction dating to the Soviet era -- and may decide to make trouble for Obama again.

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