The results of President Barack Obama's nuclear posture review are in: the US will not develop any new nuclear weapon designs, and the US will not target countries that sign and comply with the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT).Thus writes TIA Daily's Jack Wakeland.
This nuclear posture follows the START treaty the US just signed with Russia that contains the following limits on each country:
• limit the total number of nuclear warheads to 1550
• limit the number of ICBM launchers and SLBM launch tubes to 800
• limit the total number of ICBMs, SLBMs, and nuclear-armed bombers deployed to 700The vice president also affirms Obama's intention to pursue a comprehensive test ban treaty (CTBT) and to end programs to develop new anti-ballistic missile capabilities.
The problem with Obama's "nuclear posture review" is not that it is going to disarm America. Reducing the number of nuclear warheads from 2200 to 1550 does not significantly shrink the US nuclear weapons force. Declaring that the US will not develop any new nuclear weapons designs and pursuing the CTBT will not quickly render the aging and un-verified US nuclear weapons force obsolete and inoperative. It would take a few more decades of such purposeful neglect to complete the left's plan to sabotage our nation's nuclear force.
No, what Obama is trying to do is to create a set of international cultural-political commitments that will tend to lock in his vision of a post-American world. In this future, Barack Obama would like to see a world that is no longer led by the US. He would like to see America lose its dominant status and fade from center stage.
Despite the fact that ours is the first republic founded for the purpose of defending the rights of man; despite the fact that ours is the first nation to fight for liberty rather than for territorial plunder, and to do it on a global scale against all comers (Nazi, Communist, Islamo-fascist) for over 60 years—despite these obvious historical facts, President Barack Obama does not believe the US is an exception among nations.
(Remember that Obama attended a "liberation theology" church; a church in which the preacher fiercely objected to any pro-American feeling in the days after the 9/11 attacks in which 3000 Americans were killed. While people in Europe contemplated in horror America's defeat at the hands of Muslim terrorists, Obama's preacher was condemning those who spontaneously gathered to mourn that defeat and to sing "God Bless America." "God Bless America?!" Obama's preacher thundered in reply. "No!" "God Damn America!")
So—even though he could never be president long enough to assure that it will happen—Obama would like to see the US incrementally give up, promise not to use, and let fall into disrepair its exceptional arsenal of nuclear weapons. In Obama's determinist world view, America's exceptional weaponry does not belong in the hands of any nation. All men and all nations are driven deterministically by the material factors of their means of production and by the material factors of their "world-historical" and racial "power relationships." No man and no nation can claim to be a moral exception to that rule. Nuclear weapons give nations the capability to kill a large fraction of the human race. And unless that capability is removed, following the imperatives of their "world-historical" "power relationships," they will.
Removing nuclear weapons from the hands of free nations who have an exceptional history of using weapons only in defense of liberty will not, according to Obama, encourage dictatorships to become aggressive against their disarmed foes. No. It will encourage them to follow suit. Dictatorships will see that they will not lose their present standing in the "power relationships" among the nations of the world if they give up their nuclear weapons, too. They won't lose because the free nations of the world have given up theirs. Hell, given the qualitative and quantitative nuclear superiority of the US, Great Britain, France, and Israel, in a regime of worldwide nuclear disarmament the dictatorships would undoubtedly come out ahead.
Based on Obama's determinist nuclear posture review, for the next three years (at least), we're in for a foreign policy of arms control instead of dictator control:
• No more talk of the "forward strategy of freedom" (even though that Bush Administration policy will still be fully in operation in the Muslim World: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan...even Yemen)
• No more talk about the US being the guardian of law and order for the world (even though the US Navy and Marine Corps will continue to guard global free trade on the high seas).• Lots of talk about how the UN is the guardian of "world peace" (even though they will continue to do nothing about anything except to issue numerous resolutions against the US and Israel).
• No more talk about regime change for dangerous or aggressive dictatorships (but then again, the Bush administration stopped talking about that back in April of 2006).
• No more talk about modernizing the US nuclear weapons force to make it more relevant to the rogue nation threats we face today.
Characteristic of the foreign policy of the left, the substance of Obama's "big" shift in the US nuclear posture is thin. It is, for the most part, an empty gesture.
Only one president elected after the fall of the Berlin Wall has asked for Congress to fund new nuclear weapons designs. In 2007, George W. Bush asked for and Congress refused to fund a program to design miniature, low-yield, "bunker-buster" warheads. Mr. Bush also asked Congress and Congress also refused to fund a program to develop new thermo-nuclear weapons that would be more resistant to aging and would have more easily provable performance when they age. Obama's fellow party members already took new nuclear weapons design off the table three years ago.
Removing NPT signatories from our nuclear target lists is even less relevant.
Brazil never feared that we might be targeting Sao Palo or Rio de Janeiro. Although it would be nice to think that Hugo Chavez fears that we've got an MX missile aimed at his residence, what he really fears is the First Marine Expeditionary Force—a conventional amphibious force that could knock over his regime in one day.
The promise to not target NPT-compliant states is an empty gesture engineered to please the equally empty foreign policies of UN-centric, altruist-pacifist old Europe. Old Europe gave up its responsibility for national defense decades ago. They gave it up and dumped the responsibility onto the United States and have complained ever since that the US has usurped their independent foreign policies. But one can't have an independent foreign policy without having an independent capacity to defend oneself.
The foreign policy vision that drives Obama is that of an America that has faded away in the pattern of old Europe. His vision is for an America that has no independent national defense and no independent foreign policy; a territory that is a nation in name only; an America for a post-America world. Thus his policy is one of sabotage by inaction and neglect. This passive-aggressive stance against America's national interests must, however, be in place for decades before it pays its intended dividends.
In domestic policy, the Obama administration has given us the sabotage of America's semi-capitalist, semi-free economic and political order. When coupled with the Fed's policy of maintaining its "expanded" balance sheet indefinitely, Obama's ruinous spending spree promises to give us at least three years of "stagflation"—high unemployment and high inflation. So to complete the 1970s flashback, president Obama is going to give us a foreign policy of sabotage by inaction and neglect, just like Jimmy Carter's.
But Obama's vision of a post-American world will take more than three years to implement—much more. It will not get very far if we say "no" in 2012.
