What are these guys smoking?Because just when you think that even the Obama administration can't come up with yet another harebrained scheme -- they do.
The latest was launched earlier this week when President Obama unveiled the “Nuclear Posture Review.” As the New York Times described the new policy, “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, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons or launched a crippling cyberattack.”
The "Nuclear Policy Review" demonstrates a most astonishing naivete about how the world runs and will certainly add fuel to the charge that Barack Obama is nothing but a puerile patsy whose embarrassment of America's strength and will is taking us into very dangerous waters.
Victor Davis Hanson who, among other achievements is a military historian of the first rank, examines President Obama's "Nuclear Policy Review" and finds it wanting in three critical areas. He outlines these in a superb City Journal article, "A Noble, Bad Idea."
Hanson suggests that context and appearances count for an awful lot. "[T]he president putting forth this comprehensive agenda is not an old hawk like Reagan or the Bushes, but rather one who has apologized, bowed, and backpedaled abroad in courting enemies like Syria and Iran while snubbing old friends such as Britain and Israel...Fairly or not, the world will see these latest pronouncements as more in line with the abstract idealism of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate than with the leader of the world’s sole superpower, on whom billions in the real world rely to keep the peace through deterrence."
Obama's once vaunted political instincts are souring. His petulance and ego and addiction to distorting the facts were on center stage in the fight for health care reform. Now, argues Hanson, his naivete towards America's strident, uncompromising enemies will increase the gap even more between the President and his countrymen.
"[T]he American people will not stand for any Commander-in-Chief ruling out, in advance, the use of nuclear weapons, even in the event that the nation is attacked with biological or chemical weapons. Just imagine: al Qaeda conducts a deadly anthrax attack in Manhattan that kills thousands, while the architects of such destruction retreat to underground sanctuaries along the Afghan-Pakistani border; or Hezbollah operatives release nerve gas in an American mall that is traced directly to a plant in the Iranian desert...
But enough of my summary. Just zip over and read Hanson's article at City Journal yourself and let him explain just why he concludes --- Obama's "well-meant gestures are both ill-timed and ill-conceived—all the more so in coming from someone who, in just 14 months in office, is attempting to overturn numerous bipartisan American foreign policies of a half-century, largely on the premise that the United States in some fashion has been in the wrong and needs to make amends to an array of belligerents."
