Leftists appear to believe that the only reason that criminals use guns is that the police set a bad example by doing so first. This seems to be the logic behind the Obama administration’s campaign to unilaterally disarm the U.S. of our nuclear deterrent. [h/t Instapundit]
Am I the only one who feels like our President has the foreign-policy sophistication of a romantic teenager?
The idea that the U.S. needs to set an example by disarming springs from the leftists’ egocentric concept of foreign policy in which all other nations and groups never act on their own but only react to what we do first. From this, it follows logically that other nations only have nukes because we made them first, and that if we get rid of ours, they will get rid of theirs.
In this school of it’s-all-about-me emotive reasoning, the entire world would have been better off if we’d decided never to build any more nuclear weapons after WWII. Surely, they reason, Joseph Stalin, being the paranoid, megacidal dictator bent on world domination that he was, would never have gone ahead and built nukes on his own. After all, what good would the unilateral possession of the greatest weapon in history do for a megacidal dictator bent on world domination? How could having the sole superweapon in the world have possibly advanced his project of spreading communism all over the world? These leftists believe that Joseph “what 10 million Ukrainians?” Stalin would not have obtained, much less used, nuclear weapons unless our evil military-industrial complex (whose members are much worse than Stalin ever was!) goaded him into it.
Poor Uncle Joe. Too bad he’s dead.
But, say the it’s-all-about-me emotive-reasoning leftists, even if we were wrong about Stalin he is dead and surely no one in the modern world would misuse nukes if they had unilateral possession of them. What would the Russian Federation, China, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, India, and frankly everyone else with an industrial base at all, have to gain from having unilateral position of nukes? How could it possibly hurt U.S. to live under the constant threat of extinction? Why, nothing teaches a needed dose of humility like being enslaved.
Nuclear weapons, like any other machine, degrade over time. Without testing of some kind, we will never know what works and does not work. If, by shear wild improbability, we have serious enemies in the future, they can make an educated guess about the reliability of our weapons. This is especially true if they create a testing program and we do not. We run a real risk of a future enemy guessing that we have no nuclear deterrent they have to worry about.
National security is the primary responsibility of the office of President of the United States. Obama kept Gates, Bush’s Secretary of Defense, as a signal that he cares enough about national security to be bothered to appoint one of his team to the position.
But Obama doesn’t really care about defense, because he really doesn’t believe we need defending. He believes we cause all our own foreign policy problems. Obama lives in a wonderland in which good people can control the actions of evil people just by setting a good example. They can’t. Evil people hurt others because they can profit by doing so. The only way to stop them is to make hurting people unprofitable.
Nukes are real good for that. Grow up, Obama.
This is the one thing about Obama that actually scares me.
I liked the Blogfather’s comment:
“If Obama were trying to wreck America as a superpower, what would he be doing differently?”
It’s like he put a big “Kick me” sign on America.
It is adolescent; the self-righteous teenager who thinks he speaks truth to power but actually has no idea of the constraints and responsibilities of power. I’ve often been that person objecting to figures of authority. The best cure for that sure as hell wasn’t grad school but rather having to live with the (often stupid) decisions I made running a small business. But I’m not sure that politicians actually learn about consequences the way I did – there are so many variables they can blame it on and so many people to make excuses.
It is also the self-righteousness of those idiots from SANE and SDS, etc. that populated the colleges of my youth – like the one who saw the Viet Cong as “his” guys and said he was happy whenever one of America’s – not his, of course – giys was shot down. (That was a guy from UChicago that put us up later when we were hitchhiking through Europe). The thing that most radicalized me and got me on this blog was that idiot who said the people in Kansas were voting against their interests – like they were stupid and he was brilliant. Of course his judgments had only to do with the most material of self-interests, but he also seemed unaware – as I’m not sure all those Kansas and Nebraska farmers were – that collectivizing farming hasn’t always worked out all that well.
Ginny..”But I’m not sure that politicians actually learn about consequences the way I did – there are so many variables they can blame it on and so many people to make excuses.”
This is particularly true of a politician whose experience is limited to the legislative branch…a mayor or a governor is a bit closer to actual responsibility.
Pakistan rearms
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30648446
while Obama disarms
OK, so you’re medium-small power in a dangerous neighborhood with a small but competent military and a decent technology base. You’ve depended on the US nuclear deterrent since 1945 and never seen any big need to develop your own nuclear weapons.
Are you starting to think “Gee, the US had a major trauma about losing 4000 volunteer professional military. Are they really going to risk losing several million civilians and taking trillions of dollars of economic damage to retaliate against an attack on us? Is Obama going to maintain a credible nuclear deterrent? Maybe — just maybe — we should look at getting some nukes of our own.”
How did this announcement affect those sorts of discussions which are quietly taking place right now in Seoul, Taipei, Tokyo, maybe Canberra? And who knows what other places.
Not Jerusalem, of course. They figured this one out long ago.
Even Carter took the nuclear deterrent seriously.
This is scary.
Jim, absolutely right.
1. America’s friends can no longer rely on the nuclear umbrella. Time for them to get their own nukes.
2. America’s enemies know that America is unwilling to maintain its nukes, signalling we are unwilling or unable to use them. Deterrence is weak, which invites attack. It also means that value of acquiring nukes goes up, since the USA has fewer of them, they are less reliable, and the leadership is signalling that it is unwilling to use them. Time for them to get their own nukes.
Without overwhelming American superiority, the incentives for everyone who can get nukes to do so goes way, way up.
Thanks, Barack. He is going to get a lot of people killed.
There are costs and benefits. Everyone might be better off if countries such as Taiwan, Japan and Australia had their own nuclear deterrents, even if we maintained our own. (It’s not as though our Asian diplomacy of the past fifteen years or so, which has relied excessively on Chinese goodwill and failed to stop NK nuclear proliferation, is an ideal.) OTOH, the costs of nuclear weapons in the hands of Axis of Evil countries seem likely to be very high. But if we’re not going to stop our enemies’ getting nukes we may as well encourage our friends to do so. If US voters can elect a govt that would consider disarming itself, it might be wise for us not to base our ideas about the free world’s security on the maintenance of centralized US power. I hate to say it but that’s where we are.
…but only react to what we do first.
Oh, they’ll react all right, just not in the manner that Obie thinks they will.
Actually, what is likely to happen is even worse. All of America’s friends will create a ‘surge’ capacity to build nukes within a few months, similar to Japan’s capability. Then they get nice new nukes of untested reliability and no mature home grown military doctrine coming on line right during a local geopolitical crisis.
Nice.