In today's WSJ, Iraq War architect Doug Feith has an op ed attacking the Obama administration's plans to extend the START Treaty, the binding agreement to reduce U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals.
Nothwithstandning the bitter irony to being lectured by Feith about the potential unintended security consequences of President Obama's nuclear weapons policies, nuclear weapons issues are something of a non-issue in the blogosphere. After the jump I'll explain why the blogosphere should be invested in turning back the neo-con attacks on President Obama's nuclear weapons policy.
In an April 5th speech in Prague, President Obama outlined his vision for preventing the spread and use of nuclear weapons. It was a vision based on what amounts to a sea change in the thinking of security experts about how to deal with the threat posed by nuclear weapons.
The dominant thinking during and after the Cold War was that nuclear weapons offered security. Led by former Cold Warriors like Henry Kissinger and former Reagan Secretary of State, George Shultz, the emerging bipartisan consensus holds that in the post-9/11 world, nuclear weapons represent a liability, not a strength, and that the only way to avoid uncontrolled proliferation that could end in terrorists obtaining such weapons is to aggressively pursue a step-by-step effort – starting with joint reductions in U.S. and Russian arsenals, the entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the securing of vulnerable nuclear material – aimed at the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons.
Critics like Feith and John Bolton and others have been all over the opinion pages attacking Obama's policies (see here, here, here, here and here).
Critics of the administration's policies, like Feith, try to cast Obama's efforts as outdated Cold War throwbacks, but the truth is that they are the ones who have failed to grasp the real security threats we face in the post-9/11 era. Indeed, their ideological opposition to diplomacy and binding arms control agreements makes them out of step with the emerging bipartisan consensus on how to deal with this threat.
What sometimes gets lost in this discussion is that the Iraq war was itself the centerpiece of the Bush administration's now-discredited policy for dealing with nuclear weapons.
The bottom line is that critics don't offer any alternative to the policies Obama is pursuing. Their answer seems to vacillate between maintaining a status quo that is unsustainable and bellicose rhetoric that, if pursued, would repeat the Iraq fiasco ad infinitum.
Feith encapsulates the current state of the debate over these issues. He has no credibility to attack the idea of controlling the spread of nuclear weapons through aggressive diplomacy and binding agreements given the disastrous consequences of the policies he helped author.