Obama Goes Soft On Nukes

We don't know exactly what Barack Obama is going to say about nuclear weapons today, but according to the NYT, which was given an approved leak of it, it'll go something like this:

I am announcing today that when I am President, I will set a goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons in the world. The United States should lead the way by greatly reducing its stockpiles, which will lower the threat of nuclear terrorism.

Let's forget about the fact that the Bush admin has tripled its nuke-dismantling rate and is on track to reduce our nuclear arsenal by about half, since we know it's just plain silly to let facts get in the way of politics.

Since there's no initiative in the first part of this brilliant-not new Obama foreign policy initiative, let's focus on the second part, Obama's belief that if the U.S. works toward dismantling its weapons, it will somehow convince the Iranians, North Koreans, al-Qaeda and others that, gee, maybe their nuclear ambitions have all been Just A Big Mistake.

When those words role off Obama's lips today at DePaul University, he will show us that his foreign policy principles are identical to those of the pacifistic disarmament activists of the 60s and 70s -- the ones that wanted to foil President's Reagan's efforts, which ultimately conquered the Soviets, ending the Cold War.

Like Obama, they believed that unilateral disarmament by the West would be perceived as so noble that the Soviets would happily follow suit. We can't predict futures that never happened and are now in the past, but my hunch is that the Soviets would have gotten a big kick out of the peaceniks.

As will L'il Kim Il Jong, the Tehraniacs, Obama's near-name-kin Osama, and the others who want to use nukes against us, either economically or much more personally.

It's a safe-enough call for Obama since Dems love idealistic presidents and have been looking for a second fair-haired Kennedy for 30 years now, and are putting a lot of money behind the nappy-haired Obama.

But it's not a safe-enough call for America, since it is predicated on the supposition that if we were just nicer, they would stop hating us so. If that's the slope Obama is leading us towards, we will see a return to a Carter approach to foreign policy: look the other way, befriend the terrorists, send money and cross fingers. It didn't work for Carter as this generation of Islamists birthed in the 1980s, and it won't work for Obama today.