Posted by
Patrick Henry on Thursday, June 10, 2010 8:46:10 AM
"Imagine there's no countries. It's not so hard to do. Nothing to live or die for, and
no religion too. Imagine all the people, living life in peace. Oh, you may say that I'm
a dreamer. But I'm not the only one. I hope some day you'll join us, and the world
can live as one." Those are the words penned by John Lennon of the Beatles to an
iconic rock song. Some say they lift up an ideal. I say they elevate a fantasy. Barack
Obama seems to have canonized them as a foreign policy.
Envisioning a de-nuclearized world, Obama has signed onto a United Nations state-
ment aimed at stripping Israel of its nukes, negotiated a yet-to-be ratified nuclear
reduction traty with the Russians and published heretofore secret information about
the U.S. nuclear stockpile for all the world to see. His notion seems to be that if we
deactivate our nukes, the rest of the world will follow suit. That is not a silly song,
an ideal, or even a foreign policy. It is madness, and Obama has crossed the line
between fantasy and delusional lunacy.
Think about it. Nukes symbolize the greatest power known to man. After only two
historic detonations, the very threat of them has maintained an uneasy peace between
the superpowers since the end of World War II. Israel's nukes are all that stand
between them and annhilation by the Arab world. Iran wants them so that they can
threaten others and destroy Israel. Israel will never yield theirs as long as Iran and
Syria maintain clandestine weapons development programs, nor will congress ever
allow Obama to deactivate ours as long as Russia and China have theirs. That's
reality. That's actual history. That's the rubric of a nuclear world.
It would, perhaps, come as a rude reminder to Lennon, were he still around, that
there ARE, in fact, countries, and that their citizens ARE willing to die to protect
them. As much as the U.N., the one world left and Obama would like to change that,
Americans will NEVER let them do so. And as we are daily reminded by Islamic
jihadists, there ARE religions, and there will always be some religious extremists who
are willing to kill or die to preserve or expand them. It's been true throughout the
history of religions for thousands upon thousands of years. It's still true today, and
what is truly ironic is that The Chosen One who would denuclearize the world has
no qualms about killing religious fanatics and political extremists with missile strikes
from unmanned drones. WMD or Hellfire missiles make only a theoretical difference
to those killed by them. When you're dead, you're dead.
Lennon's song and Obama's policy are fantasies that will never come true. So let's
buy a one way ticket back from Disneyland and think the thinkable. Let's ditch the
fairy tales and think about how the ideals can be promoted. Limiting nukes is a good
start. But to do so means real time inspections and enforcement with teeth. Non-
proliferation is dandy, but wrist-slapping sanctions on rogue states that defy the
international consensus, if there is one, are bound to fail. The reality is that the
Russians and the Chinese don't give a rip if Iran gets nukes or North Korea already
has them. These rogue regimes are valued business partners and client states. Should
they turn on the Russians or the Chinese, the latter both know full well that they have
bigger weapons and a lot more of them. So who's afraid of the big bad wolf? They
don't see it as their job to police or protect the rest of the world, so it's no skin off
their nose if North Korea attacks the south or Iran nukes Israel. Of course, the
minute somebody gets crazy enough to actually use a nuke, then it becomes
everyone's problem, and Russia and China would rather deal with what they consider
that unlikely eventuality than jeopardize their current business dealings or historic
alliances.
So it looks like the closest approach to an ideal is to limit the spread of nukes as
much as possible, cement our alliances with other nuclear powers such as France
and the U.K., and resolve ourselves to the fact that should an Iran or North Korea
actually use a nuclear weapon, they must be punished immediately and in kind by
those with the capacity to inflict such punishment.
But let's understand that songs like "Imagine" are the ramblings of acid-popping
hippies, policies like Obama's are inherently dangerous to America and we are
a long, long way from thinking through a path to the ideal of nuclear disarmament.