When it comes to domestic policy, President Obama has been repeatedly and legitimately criticized for focusing on the wrong issues. Even as the financial industry has gone into a meltdown, threatening the entire economy, he has devoted most of his energy and political capital to programs, such as expanding health-care coverage, that have nothing to do with the crisis at hand. The same may now be said of foreign policy.
On Sunday, only hours after North Korea fired a long-range rocket and only months before Iran is likely to acquire a nuclear weapon, Obama gave a speech in Prague in which he laid out a nuclear arms-control agenda almost entirely disconnected from these urgent threats. In his speech, he promised to “reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy and urge others to do the same” and to “immediately and aggressively pursue U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty”– as if the U.S. nuclear arsenal were the problem, instead of the world’s greatest guarantor of peace since 1945. He went on to promise to negotiate “a new strategic arms reduction treaty with Russia this year,” which seems to be a return to the very kind of “Cold War thinking” that he denounced in this same speech.
Along with this reference, came vague promises to strengthen the existing anti-proliferation regime. “Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something,” Obama thundered. Yet at the same time North Korea’s violation of existing United Nations sanctions was being met with toothless debate at the UN, to be followed apparently by an announcement that the Department of Defense will cut funding for missile defense. Meanwhile, the administration has affirmed its willingness — nay, burning desire — to conduct one-on-one talks with Tehran and Pyongyang, thereby in effect legitimizing those criminal regimes regardless of all their provocations and violations of existing treaties.
This approach sends a dangerous message of American weakness in the face of growing nuclear threats. And it suggests a troubling trend of pursuing policy tangents that are not focused on the real problems we face.
