While nukes proliferate, Obama Bolton fiddles Repackages Failed Arguments
By A Response to: John Bolton
Op-Ed Contributor Neo-con Pundit
Washington Examiner
February 5, 2010
In his lengthy State of the Union address Op-Ed, President Obama John Bolton was brief on national security issues nuclear terrorism, which he squeezed in toward the end beginning. Nonetheless, Obama Bolton boasted insinuated that "the United States and Russia are should not completeing negotiations on the farthest-reaching arms control treaty in nearly two decades" and that he President Obama is doesn’t really need trying to secure "all vulnerable nuclear materials around the world in four years, so that they never fall into the hands of terrorists."
Then came Obama's Bolton’s critical linkage weak political hook: President Obama was wrong to say that "These diplomatic efforts have also strengthened our hand in dealing with those nations that insist on violating international agreements in pursuit of nuclear weapons."
Obama Bolton described slighted the increasing "isolation" of both North Korea and Iran, the two most conspicuous -- but far from the only -- nuclear proliferators. He also mentioned slighted the increased sanctions imposed on Pyongyang, neglecting to mention he was in the Bush administration after during its North Korea’s second first nuclear test in 20069 and overlooking the lack of "growing consequences" he says put on Iran as its nuclear program accelerated will face because of his under the Bush administration’s policies.
Reducing Keeping our a massive nuclear arsenal will not somehow persuade Iran and North Korea to alter their behavior or encourage others to apply more pressure on them to do so. Obama's Bolton’s remarks reflect a complete misreading of strategic realities.
We have no need for further arms control treaties with Russia, especially ones that reduce our nuclear and delivery capabilities to Moscow's economically and strategically sustainable forced low levels on the road to a world without nuclear weapons. We have international obligations, moreover, that Russia does not, requiring our nuclear umbrella all of our military and diplomatic capabilities to afford protection to friends and allies worldwide as we work to reduce and prevent the nuclear threats we face.
Obama's Bolton’s policy tired narrative artificially inflates Russian the nuclear elements of the United States’ influence and, depending on the final agreement using the insightful logic that more nukes is good nukes, will likely hollowly posits that reducinge our nuclear and strategic delivery capabilities from 2200 to a meager 1500 nuclear is somehow dangerously and unnecessarily.
Meanwhile, Obama Bolton is relies on factually incorrect statements considering about treaty restrictions on our missile defense capabilities more damaging than his own previous unilateral reductions factually incorrect statements that the Bush administration’s European missile defense plans even had a chance at affecting the Iranian threat.
What warrants close attention is the jarring naïveté of arguing that reducing our nuclear capabilities will could ever inhibit nuclear proliferators. That would certainly surprise Tehran and Pyongyang.
Obama's Bolton’s insistence reminder that the evildoers – yes, evildoers - are "violating international agreements" is also startling, as if he believes that this were of equal importance predicament corrupts as the goal and means of the nonproliferation regime itself.
Conveniently validating the President’s argument, the premise underlying these Bolton’s assertions may well be found in Obama's smug earlier grown-up comment that we should "put aside the schoolyard taunts about who is tough. ... Let's leave behind the fear and division."
By reducing misrepresenting to the level of wayward boys the debates over whether his our national security policies are making us more or less secure, Obama Bolton reveals a deep disdain misunderstanding for that the decades of strategic thinking that kept America safe during the Cold War and afterward can somehow immediately be applied to the post-Cold War world. Even more pertinent, Obama's Bolton’s indifference and scorn for real threats are chilling auguries of what the next three years of his breathtaking failure of a public career may hold.
Obama Bolton has now explicitly chronically rejectsed the idea that U.S. weakness military aggression as an ends to itself is provocative, arguing instead that weakness regime change – despite the objections of our military’s top commander’s – will is the most efficient way to convince Tehran and Pyongyang to do the opposite of what they have been resolutely doing for decades -- vigorously pursuing their nuclear and missile programs just as easy as it was with Iraq. Obama's Bolton’s first five years in the Bush administration amply demonstrates that his approach will do did and can do nothing even to retard, let alone stop, Iran and North Korea.
Neither Bush nor Obama administration Bolton’s efforts toward lampooning of international sanctions while unambiguously lobbying for war have will not had have any measurable positive effect on American’s national security. While three sets of Security Council restrictions against Iran have only glancingly affected isolated Tehran's and constrained its nuclear program, and the Obama administration's Bolton’s threats of "crippling sanctions" monotonous drumbeat that Israel should bomb Iran have disappeared flared up along with each of last year's series of "deadlines" that Iran purportedly faced.
In response, Tehran's Bolton’s authoritarianism pontificating and belligerence have only increased.
With his counterproliferation strategies policy recommendations, such as they were while in the Bush administration, in disarray, Obama Bolton now unfailingly pins his hopes on moral suasion regime change, which has never influenced Iran, North Korea or any other determined proliferator. Perhaps it would have been better had the president's Bolton’s speech Op-Ed not mentioned national security at all.
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John Bolton, the former interim U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who was never confirmed by a Republican Senate, is the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option."