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Fail. Obama will turn into Dr. Manhattan by his 2nd term
Obama launches new nuclear strategy that limits the use of these weapons by the United States
The President said yesterday that Barack Obama will change the U.S. nuclear strategy to substantially reduce the conditions under which his country could use such weapons, even if in self defense.
But screed followed the President said in an interview with The New York Times who is studying an exception for cases like Iran and North Korea, which have violated or waived the main treaty limiting nuclear proliferation.
http://www.dailyfreshnews.info/314/o...united-states/
Fail. Obama will turn into Dr. Manhattan by his 2nd term
The Radical Status Quo Strikes Again
Posted on April 6th, 2010 by Daniel Larison
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Will over at the League has picked up on two completely contradictory NRO responses to Obama’s nuclear posture review announcement. The first response from Giuliani is suitably hysterical and preposterous, which is what we would expect from him, and the second from Henry Sokolski is appropriately sober and credible. Giuliani proclaims the announcement a disaster, and Sokolski acknowledges that there has been no real change in policy. Only one of the two can be right, and it isn’t hard to determine which one that is. One need only read the relevant passage carefully to see that Obama has not so much removed ambiguity as he has stated the obvious:
For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty [bold mine-DL], even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons or launched a crippling cyberattack.In other words, Obama has committed to not escalate any future conflict to nuclear war in the improbable event that Brazil or South Africa or Japan decides to attack us with other unconventional weapons or cyber-warfare. Oh, the wretched appeaser! How will we ever survive the long night of Brazilian domination? Ahem.
Will’s contrast of the two also helps to set the stage for discussing Roger Kimball’s rather silly post on the same subject. Naturally, Kimball falls into the Giuliani camp of hysterical over-reaction:
The posture in question, though, is self-abasement. Nuclear weapons are fearsome things. We wish they didn’t exist. Therefore we will take steps to reduce our threatening posture in order to appear more emollient. Has no one in Obama’s inner clique heard of the Roman military historian Vegetius: “Si vis pacem, para bellum“: “if you want peace, prepare for war.” The possession of weapons facilitates war: no doubt. But history demonstrates that pacifism and signs of weakness precipitate war. The choice, in other words, is between rhetoric that celebrates peace and comity, and policies that actually achieve it. Obama has once again plumped for the former.The frustrating thing about all of this is that there is a reasonable conservative reaction to this announcement, which is basically to shrug one’s shoulders, but it is inevitably drowned out and overwhelmed by the cacophony of foolishness that passes for foreign policy commentary on much of the right. I could even understand the criticism that there is no need to make an announcement when nothing has actually changed, but that isn’t flashy and provocative enough when responding to a dull, reasonable Obama decision.
Coming back to Kimball, it isn’t at all clear how more or less preserving the status quo in this case sends a sign of weakness to anyone. Unless the North Koreans are under the mistaken impression that they are in compliance with a treaty they withdrew from years ago, this announcement will make absolutely no difference to North Korea. The administration is still promising overwhelming retaliation against any state that would attempt this, which will certainly keep the Ukrainians on their toes, and the threat of a massive conventional response should manage to keep the Kazakhs and Belarussians in check. In fact, pretty much every state to which this statement applies is either a client, a purchaser of U.S. arms, or a member of some treaty or partnership organization to which the United States belongs, so it seems unlikely that there would ever be a conflict with any of them that would require a future administration to have to follow through on this commitment.
we're doomed.
oh the humanity!!!
FIFY...oh the Hannity!!!
The posture in question, though, is self-abasement. Nuclear weapons are fearsome things. We wish they didn’t exist. Therefore we will take steps to reduce our threatening posture in order to appear more emollient. Has no one in Obama’s inner clique heard of the Roman military historian Vegetius: “Si vis pacem, para bellum“: “if you want peace, prepare for war.” The possession of weapons facilitates war: no doubt. But history demonstrates that pacifism and signs of weakness precipitate war. The choice, in other words, is between rhetoric that celebrates peace and comity, and policies that actually achieve it. Obama has once again plumped for the former.
Yes, because without it's nukes, America would have no military power whatsoever...
Wars sucks these days.
I miss when you could use a sword and ride a horse to cut down your enemies. All this Jetsons button pushing nonsense is for weaklings!
I'm sure we'll be fine.
Hawks Are Just Embarrassing Themselves
Posted on April 7th, 2010 by Daniel Larison
I despair of this latest episode of gestural theater designed to make the U.S. look exquisitely reasonable (should we call it “Jimmy-Cartesian”?), but which in truth results in the U.S. looking flaccid, or worse, complacent. After all, who gains from a presidential posture that has, in effect, stigmatized our most potent deterrent?Shorter Varadarajan: The substance of Obama’s positions is unchanged from the previous administration, but it is imperative that I make him appear as a weak buffoon, so I will simply invent a complaint about entirely superficial appearances that mean nothing.
In terms of foreign policy—or, better put, foreign clout—the U.S. is going through a startling period of auto-emasculation. Barack Obama has discarded his predecessor’s big stick—the wielding of which should have confirmed the flaws not of big sticks but of his predecessor—and replaced it with a mission of almost messianic outreach to our foes and most adamant compe ors (while, at the same time, snubbing allies like Britain, Israel and India…~Tunku Varadarajan
Varadarajan is just one among many conservatives thrown into apoplexy by basically nothing. He is different from most in that he acknowledges up front that he has no substantive disagreement with what Obama has done with respect to the Nuclear Posture Review, but proceeds to complain about “auto-emasculation” nonetheless. Obviously, some of this is just partisan and ideological opportunism. Republicans and mainstream conservatives destroyed their credibility on foreign policy and national security, they have done nothing to improve on the bad ideas and policies that helped destroy that credibility, and so they have to try to position themselves as opponents of a new Carter. They do this even though they have few grounds for any serious objections to what the administration has done, because it is crucial for them to re-establish the link in the minds of the public between Democratic Presidents and perceived or real weakness abroad. This will allow them to posture as the nationalist defenders of the country, which might be enough to make people forget their remarkable failures in the past.
These critics are laboring under the false impression that by constantly emphasizing their hawkishness and imputing to Obama a dovishness he does not possess that they will turn the public against him. Because Obama continues to be consistently “centrist” and relatively hawkish in his foreign policy, which is mostly a bad thing, he does not provide any real openings for legitimate hawkish criticism. So they are reduced to inventing the “apology tour,” simply lying about the “appeasement of Russia,” hallucinating a “soft” approach towards Iran, constructing a ludicrous narrative of hostility to allies and accommodation with enemies, and topping it off with the silly claim that Obama does not believe in American exceptionalism. Given enough time, I’m sure they will declare that Obama was somehow responsible for Bakiyev’s downfall in Kyrgyzstan and will accuse him of “undermining a critical ally in the war on Afghanistan.” Like all of these other things, this will be rubbish, but it is rubbish they can use.
Criticism of the administration’s clumsy, needless provocation of Britain over the Falklands would carry far more weight if the same people had not already concluded that Obama had been “snubbing” the British by returning Churchill’s bust. Perfectly reasonable criticism of the mishandling of the Honduras crisis is lost in all the caterwauling about the “betrayal” of Poland and Czech Republic on the missile defense decision. Real administration mistakes are drowned out and pushed to the background by the endless yelping about policy decisions that are correct, or boringly conventional or in line with what the critics themselves claim to want. If these people had had any credibility left after the Bush years, they would have already squandered it all in the last 14 months of frivolous, hyperbolic, contradictory complaints about every single thing Obama has done.
These days such critics don’t even attempt to explain how Obama has “snubbed” India, whose prime minister was the guest of honor at the first Obama state dinner. Instead, they just rattle off a list of allied states and simply declare that they are offended. Apparently, India does feel somewhat neglected by the administration. Granting that India feels neglected, does the Indian government have good reason to complain? We should remember that this is also the administration that confirmed the nuclear deal negotiated under the previous one, and it effectively gave up on any idea of mediating in Kashmir after New Delhi protested. Aside from some early, unnecessary public quarreling over climate change regulation and the odd blunder by Holbrooke, there isn’t much that should displease India. As for Ganguly’s claim that Obama is “backpedaling” on the nuclear deal, that isn’t what Bhadrakumar was saying just last week:
The relationship between the United States and India, which lately showed signs of stress, was revamped on Monday with the announcement that the two countries have completed the “arrangements and procedures” for US-origin spent nuclear fuel to be reprocessed in India.Bhadrakumar went on to say that there might be an agreement ready for signing as early as this week when PM Singh is in Washington for the non-proliferation summit. He added, “Without doubt, Obama is putting his personal stamp on the US-India strategic partnership.”
No contribution to the “Obama is dragging America down” genre would be complete without the completely loopy claim that Obama intends to slash military spending. Varadarajan even drags out Charles Hill, who happens to be a former Giuliani campaign advisor, and quotes him at length as he embarrasses himself by describing Obama’s “solution”:
Close out the wars, disengage, and distance ourselves in order to carry out the real objective: the achievement of a European-style welfare state. Just as Reagan downsized government by starving it through budget cuts, Obama will downsize the military-industrial complex [bold mine-DL] by directing so much money into health care, environ-o-care, etc., that we, like the Europeans, will have no funds available to maintain world power. This will gain the confidence of those regimes adversarial to us as they recognize we will no longer be a threat to them and that we will acquiesce in their maintenance of power over their people.This is so far removed from reality that I don’t really know what to say. Once upon a time, even Robert Kagan affirmed that Obama embraced the “arrogant interventionism” Varadarajan claims that Obama opposes. Apparently, that is just one more thing that movement conservatism requires be sent down the memory hole.
Deterrence and Disarmament
Posted on April 8th, 2010 by Daniel Larison
We can now expect an innovative surge in global production of chemical and bioweapons–which have effectively just become a cheaper way to attack the U.S. (and its allies). ~Claudia RosettSometimes I don’t know why I bother. Reasonably well-informed people already know that Rosett’s “preemptive disarmament” argument is silly, and everyone else will react to it along partisan and ideological lines regardless of what anyone else says, but there’s something about the irrationality and alarmism in the reactions to Obama’s foreign policy and national security decisions that demands a more thorough response. The number of states exempted from nuclear retaliation and both willing and able to launch biological or chemical weapons attacks on the United States and our allies is zero. If there are any states capable of doing this, the massive conventional retaliation they would inevitably face would be more than enough to prevent them from making the attempt. All that the review does is commit the U.S. to not nuking non-nuclear states we are most likely never going to fight in the highly unlikely event that one of them launches an unconventional attack on us.
Daniel McGroarty points out something important:
As for disarmament, leave it to one of the scientists to note: “Ironically, it’s possible that the retirement of 4,000 or more U.S. warheads under the Moscow Treaty [of 2002] and other retirements ordered by George W. Bush may exceed anything Obama does in terms of disarmament.”An important point to emphasize is that if Bush or a President McCain or any Republican President had issued the same nuclear review, most Republican hawks would point to it proudly and cite it as evidence that America was a wise, benevolent world power that would only unleash nuclear devastation in the most extreme cir stances. They would laud it as another example of the fine Reaganite tradition of “peace through strength,” and so on. For that matter, the utterly unremarkable, status quo nature of the review and the Prague START signed today is just what most Republicans would normally applaud if the President were not a member of the other party. Indeed, as McGroarty writes:
If the version being backgrounded now reflects a shift left from a Bush Era orientation, the first draft must have been written by Donald Rumsfeld.As usual, Obama governs in a rather dull, “centrist” fashion where continuity with the Bush years is far more noticeable than any change and he is accused of the worst perfidies of left-wing extremism. Obama’s “centrism” often isn’t a good thing, and with respect to extraordinary executive power grabs, state secrets, indefinite detention, illegal surveillance and the uncons utional treatment of U.S. citizens (including assassination orders!) Obama has matched or even outdone Bush in illegal excesses, but it doesn’t really make much sense to oppose an administration for doing things one doesn’t actually oppose and attacking it for things that it will never do.
Let’s remember that Rosett belongs to the crowd of hawks that believes deterrence is impossible against certain regimes, but now she leans very heavily on the importance of deterrence when she thinks she can get away with claiming that Obama has undermined it. According to the standard hawkish line on Iran, Iran cannot be deterred or contained because it is ruled by fanatics and lunatics, but a nuclear review that does not exempt Iran from potential targets of nuclear retaliation (even though Iran is far from becoming a nuclear-weapons state itself) has somehow badly undermined American deterrence vis-a-vis Iran.
One wonders where Republican hawks can possibly go from here. They have almost three more years of an Obama Presidency to endure, and already they have gone mad with alarmism, hysterics and overreaction to fairly ho-hum policy decisions. Obama needs a credible, sane opposition to keep him in check and challenge him when he is actually wrong. Right now, he doesn’t have that, and all of us will suffer for it. His own party will not hold him accountable, because a President’s party never does, but in any contest between an erring Obama and a mad GOP the latter will keep losing.
Nukes screwed up the entire game. Sucks man.
That's the very plausible argument Garry Wills puts forth in his new book:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n07/stephen-holmes/saluteSalute!
Stephen Holmes
- Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State by Garry Wills
Penguin Press, 278 pp, $27.95, January 2010, ISBN 978 1 59420 240 7
The president of the United States now for 50 years is followed at all times, 24 hours a day, by a military aide carrying a football that contains the nuclear codes that he would use, and be authorised to use, in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States. He could launch the kind of devastating attack the world has never seen. He doesn’t have to check with anybody, he doesn’t have to call the Congress, he doesn’t have to check with the courts.In passing the 1946 Atomic Energy Act, Congress granted the president unsupervised authority over the bomb, ‘for such use as he deems necessary in the interest of national defence’. The ‘nature of the presidency,’ Garry Wills writes, ‘was irrevocably altered by this grant of a unique power’. An uninhibited ‘crisis presidency’ was now ‘poised for hair-trigger response to nuclear threat’ and, by virtue of the president’s ‘sole authority to launch nation-destroying weapons’, imbued with a kind of superhuman aura.
Cheney, Fox News 21 December 2008
Wills calls this ‘Bomb Power’ and claims that it has excited fantasies of omnipotence in the White House and reduced Congress to a spectator. Among the public, it fosters a cult, elevating the president from commander in chief of the military to commander in chief of the nation, enjoining all American citizens to spring smartly to attention and salute.
Wills’s ruminations about ‘the great mystery’ of the president’s ‘power over the very continuance of the world’ may seem excessive, but he’s channelling, so he claims, Cheney, who appears to believe that the president, by virtue of his control of the nuclear bomb, is freed from all cons utional – and even ordinary ethical – restraints. The meaning of Cheney’s boast to Fox News is clear: the existence of the greater power – to kill hundreds of millions of civilians – implies that of the lesser power, to torture suspected terrorists. Wills startlingly concurs with this view: ‘Cheney was right to say that the real logic for all these things’ – torture, indefinite detention without trial and so forth – ‘is the president’s solitary control of the bomb.’ His backing of the use of torture, extraordinary rendition and black sites where torture was practised all serve to demonstrate, according to Wills, that the ‘monopoly on nuclear war that was given at the dawn of Bomb Power was now extended to all aspects of war’.
Wasn't that something he meant to do?
Seriously, we still have enough nukes to nuke the whole planet....even in space..
.... that, use the money to build high-tech body armor for combat troops instead..
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