Obama seeks to rid the world of nuclear weapons

[Siege]

What if Israel joined the Arab League?

What a marvelous idea.

[Hansmeister]

Commentary magazine has a good article on this:

Missile defense is the only hope for neutralizing the threats of other nuclear powers. Whether it is an infallible system already or not, it is our best hope for the future. Not only does it have the potential to stop an oncoming nuclear armed missile, but it has the deterrent effect of reducing an enemy nation's confidence in obtaining an advantage by striking first. With the exponential advances in technology in the digital age, it strikes me as strange that leftists consistently argue that these systems could never work and, that, if they don't work already, they are not worth pursuing. Nuclear disarmament is nice in theory, but it is far from feasible or practical. In fact, continued nuclear proliferation seems logically to be the much more likely scenario, as coutries like N. Korea and Iran set the example that nuclear arms are useful for protecting criminal regimes from any and all punishment. Since that precedent is currently being set by the weakness of the international community, we can expect more of this behavior in the future. Meanwhile, multilateral nuclear disarmament will be a long, arduous, and uncertain process (to the point of utter impracticality). We would be forced to trust regimes that have never proven themselves to be reliable, and would end up putting ourselves, voluntarily, on an equal plane of vulnerability with our potential enemies. We would prostrate ourselves before the international community in seeking its approval, while sacrificing a defensive advantage and not ensuring any extra security.


If the left cares at all about national security, it would seem logical for them to approve of defensive weaponry, if they cannot approve of nuclear arms, as the safest and most moral means to ensure the safety of our homeland and the soverignty of our allies. But since they consider preparing for self-defense to be a provocative act, we might as well just sit back and hope that no one figures out how defenseless to a first-strike we really are. Frankly, since we might feel required to respond to an aggressive act in-kind, having a missile defense system in place might allow us to take the moral high ground, since our ability to stop a nuclear attack would make it easier to justify a non-nuclear retaliation, should such an attack occur. We could, thereby, prevent a nuclear holocaust on the homeland and retaliate using our precision guided weaponry that would allow us to eliminate the regime with as few innocent casualties as possible. But should a nuclear attack succeed on US soil, it is unlikely that cooler heads would prevail in preventing the demand for an immediate nuclear retaliation. In this scenario, we not only suffer nuclear devastation, but we lose the moral high ground that the left regards as the primary goal of foreign policy. So it makes no sense from both the rational and moral perspectives to not promote missile defense and to not provide it all the funding necessary to make the technology viable as soon as possible.

The left has never understood that weakness is provocative. The Russians make a big fuss about missile defense because it would damage their ability to leverage their nuclear arsenal against their neighbors. A viable missile defense system would make them less, not more, likely to attack the US or its allies. They may not like us as much as a result, but it's only because we would have effectively prevented them from running roughshod over Europe. Our government's number one priority is to assure the safety of its citizens. In geopolitical terms, one of our key strategic interests is to prevent the rise of aggressive regional hegemons. Nuclear arms, especially with successful proliferation in Iran, could only ensure that minor aggressions against our allies will go unpunished, and major aggressions against the US would result in a variant of mutually assured destruction for all parties. Missile defense, however, would eliminate the certainty of an aspiring regional hegemon that they could avoid punishment or use their arsenal to gain a strategic advantage against us.

Such an irrational approach to foreign policy as the one Obama has begun to pursue can only originate from a willfully blind ideology. We are seeking to sacrifice our advantages and rights as an individual nation in order to gain the acceptance of and inclusion in the international community. However, if we continue to deteriorate our capacity to fully defend ourselves and continue to denigrate the values that helped us achieve that capacity, we will find ourselves just one of many nations, no stronger or weaker. At that point, we will quickly learn that the international community has no guarantors of freedom, no natural peaceful order. We had long been freedom's de facto guarantor. Just because we want to give up that role doesn't mean we won't still be the main target of freedom's enemies.