Foreign Policy Obama Style : Speak Softly - But No Big Stick!

The Obama ideology will have the tendency of all nations to see us as weak and no longer leader of the free world.

Populations yearning for freedom will see their dreams of coming to America to find freedom dashed. The true seekers of freedom around the world will see the United States as just another country ruled by a socialist tyrant. Why then, the masses of the world will say, leave the hell hole they live in now for just another hell hole.

With America slipping it's anchor and going adrift in the sea of an aimless future, lost freedoms, a gnashing of teeth and tears, we may look back on these days and say, 'why didn't we do more to stop this insanity that stole our country and enslaved us to a bleak existence of lowered expectations. Why did we say ' it can't happen here'.

But still, after all the hand wring and head banging is done, the question that is tearing us all to pieces, we look in the mirror with a blank stair and decry our present situration, how can this be happening, of all places on God's green earth, in America.

New York Post

http://www.nypost.com/>

Updated: Wed., Apr. 7, 2010, 5:01 AM home

The bad-nukes myth
By RALPH PETERS

7, 2010 Nuclear weapons are /not/ evil. Terrifying, yes. But their horrific capabilities prevented a Third World War. It all depends on whose finger is on the button. Until yesterday's formal announcement of the administration's new Nuclear Posture Review, nukes also kept us safe from a range of threats short of a doomsday scenario: Our enemies risked going only so far. Nukes didn't prevent all wars -- but wars remained local.

Yesterday, we threw away a significant part of history's most successful deterrent. This looks like an act of reckless vanity on the part of the administration, but let's allow that this weakening of our national defense is the result of misguided idealism. The important thing isn't the politics, but the practical consequences.

Summarizing the changes in a Pentagon briefing yesterday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates looked weary and chastened. The new posture emerged only after months of bitter argument between realists and activists. Without Gates, it would have been even worse. Still, it must be painful to Gates -- a great American -- to accept that this policy went into effect on his watch. Of all its malignant provisions, from accomodating Russian demands to preventing overdue updates for our arsenal, the most worrisome is the public declaration that, if the US suffers a biological, chemical or massive cyber attack, we will /not/ respond with nukes.

This is a very real -- and unilateral -- weakening of our national security. In the past, our ambiguity made our enemies hesitate. The new policy /guarantees/ that they'll intensify their pursuit of bugs, gas and weaponized computers.

Intending to halt a nuclear arms race, we've fired the starter pistol for a rush to develop alternative weapons of mass destruction. Will this policy be the inspiration for an engineered plague that someday scythes through humankind? Chemical attacks are horrible, but local;

cyber attacks are /potentially/ devastating. But an innovative virus unleashed on the world could do what Cold War nuclear arsenals never did: Kill hundreds of millions.This change leaves us far less safe. If a thug has a knife, but knows you're packing a gun, he's considerably less likely to attack you. Why promise him that you won't use the gun -- and might not use your knife?

Idealism has devolved into madness.

The left has never been willing to accept that deterrence works. In the left's world-view, hostile foreign actors aren't the problem. /We/ are. If we disarm, surely they will . . .This no-nukes obsession dates back to the early Cold War, when the Soviets used every available means, from dollars to earnest dupes, to persuade Western leftists that /America's/ nuclear weapons were about to wipe out humanity. The USSR couldn't expand its European empire in the face of US nukes -- so the Soviets brilliantly portrayed us as the aggressors. (And the left praised Stalin as a man of peace.)

Massive ban-the-bomb demonstrations filled Western streets for decades (but not the streets behind the Iron Curtain). The left rejected deterrence as a security model.

The seeds sown by the deceased USSR put down durable roots. Pursuing a nuke-free world became a litmus test for the left. Now we have a president who's taken on that goal as his personal grail. He's absolutely right that nukes have horrifying power -- but the paradox of deterrence is that, the more monstrous the weapons you possess, the less likely you are to ever need to employ them. The new policy won't stop Iran and other rogue states from pursuing nukes (even though Iran and North Korea were singled out as policy exceptions). But it /will/ accelerate the proliferation of other weapons of mass destruction. And it certainly won't reduce the probability of war.

It will also ensure that our aging arsenal will have to be content with a few Band-Aids; that we won't develop new, safer nuclear weapons -- and that we'll increasingly have to rely on the kindness of strangers.

Idealists just invited the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to ride a little closer.

Ralph Peters' new book is "Endless War."//NEW YORK POST is a registered trademark of NYP Holdings, Inc.nypost.com , nypostonline.com , and newyorkpost.com are trademarks of NYP Holdings, Inc.Copyright 2010 NYP Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved. Privacy