In years to come – assuming, for the purposes of argument, there are any years to come – scholars will look back at President Barack Obama's Nuclear Security Summit and marvel. For once, the cheap comparisons with 1930s appeasement barely suffice: To be sure, in 1933, the great powers were meeting in Geneva and holding utopian arms-control talks even as Hitler was taking office in Berlin. But it's difficult to imagine Neville Chamberlain in 1938 hosting a conference on the dangers of rearmament, and inviting America, France, Brazil, Liberia and Thailand ...but not even mentioning Germany.
Yet that's what Obama just did: He held a nuclear gabfest in 2010, the biggest meeting of world leaders on American soil since the founding of the United Nations 65 years ago – and Iran wasn't on the agenda.
Granted that almost all of Obama's exciting innovative "change we can believe in" turns out to have been exhumed direct from the sclerotic Seventies to stagger around like a rotting zombie in polyester bell-bottoms from some straight-to-video sequel, there's still something almost touchingly quaint in the notion of an international summit on nuclear "nonproliferation" in the 21st century. Five years ago, when there was still a chance the world might prevent a nuclear Iran rather than pretending to "contain" it, I remember the bewildered look from a "nonproliferation expert" on a panel I was on after I suggested non-proliferation was a laughably obsolescent frame for this discussion. You could just about enforce nonproliferation back in the Cold War when the only official nuclear powers were the Big Five at the U.N. Security Council and the entry level for the nuclear club was extremely expensive and technologically sophisticated. Now it's not. If Pakistan and North Korea can be nuclear powers, who can't? North Korea's population is starving. Its GDP per capita is lower than Ghana, lower than Zimbabwe, lower than Mongolia. Which is to say its GDP is all but undetectable.
That's what anachronistic nonproliferation mumbo-jumbo gets you. If you read in the paper that New Zealand had decided to go nuclear, would you lose a moment's sleep over it? Personally, I'd be rather heartened. It would be a sign that a pampered and somnolent developed world had woken up and concluded that betting your future on the kindness of strangers is a helluva gamble. What Obama and his empty showboaters failed even to acknowledge in their "security" summit is the reality of the Post-Big Five nuclear age: We're on the brink of a world in which the wealthiest nations, from Canada to Norway to Japan, can barely project meaningful force to their own borders while the nickel 'n' dime basket-cases go nuclear.
How long do you think that arrangement will last? Iran has already offered to share its nuclear technology with Sudan. Sudan? Ring a vague bell? Remember that "Save Darfur" interpretative-dance fundraiser you went to, where someone read out a press release from George Clooney, and you all had a simply marvelous time? Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed – with machetes. That's pretty labor-intensive. In the Congo, five and a half million have been slaughtered – and, again, in impressively primitive ways.
But a nuclear Sudan would be a model of self-restraint?
By the way, that's another example of the self-indulgent irrelevance of Obama. The mound of corpses being piled up around the world today is not from high-tech nuclear states but from low-tech psycho states. It's not that Britain has nukes, and poor old Sudan has to make do with machetes. It's that the machete crowd are willing to kill on an industrial scale, and the high-tech guys can't figure out a way to stop them. Perhaps for his next pointless yakfest the president might consider a machete nonproliferation initiative.
Nuclear technology cannot be uninvented. All you can do, as President Ronald Reagan understood when few others did, is invent something that will render it, if not yet obsolete, at least less lethal. Until that moment, what makes the difference is not the technology but the regime. The Obama Happy Fairyland Security Summit was posited on the principle that there's no difference between a Swiss nuke and a Syrian nuke. If you believe that, you'll be thrilled by the big breakthrough agreement of the summit: Canada, Chile, Mexico and Ukraine have agreed to reduce their stocks of enriched uranium. Peace in our time! I have here a piece of paper from the prime minister of Canada!
This is the nuclear version of Janet Incompetano's initial reaction to the Pantybomber – when she banned passengers from having paperback books on their laps for the last 45 minutes of the flight. In an age of freelance nukes, we shouldn't be banning items but profiling threats. For 30 years, Iran has acted with extraterritorial impunity and without even the minimal courtesies of international relations – seizing embassies, taking out mob contracts on British novelists, seeding terrorist proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, blowing up community centers in Latin America. Washington's pathetic fallback of "containment" is intended to prevent Tehran using a nuke, in the Middle East, Europe or anywhere else within range. There is no strategy for "containing" Iran's leverage of its nuclear status to advance its interests more discreetly, and no strategy for "containing" the mullahs' generosity to states and groups more inclined to use the technology.
In a characteristic display of his now-famous modesty, President Obama reacted to the hostility of the Tax Day tea parties by saying, "You would think they should be saying 'thank you'" – for all he's done for them. Right now, the fellows saying "thank you" are the mullahs, the Politburo, Czar Putin and others hostile to U.S. interests who've figured out they now have the run of the planet.
As for Obama's pledge to set a good example by reducing America's nuclear arsenal, there's no correlation between peace and the number of weapons – except insofar as states with only a few nukes are more likely to use them than states with gazillions: If you've only got a dozen, you're under more pressure to let 'em fly before they're taken out by incoming. So the principle underpinning Obama's Seventies retro-nuke summit – that the size of a civilized state's stockpile adds to the global threat – is not just false but dangerously delusional. Likewise, the urge to forswear nuclear innovation. It would be greatly to the advantage of civilization if responsible powers were to develop new forms of limited, highly target, bunker-busting nukes. As is well understood by our enemies, the modern West has no stomach for large-scale casualties: On the morning of September 11th, for example, Mullah Omar had no fear that Washington would nuke even remote and lightly inhabited parts of the Hindu Kush. As we learned the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan, stupid, ill-trained illiterates with primitive explosives who don't care who they kill can inflict quite a lot of damage on the technologically advanced highly trained warriors of civilized states. That's the "asymmetric warfare" that matters. So virtuously proclaiming oneself opposed to nuclear modernization ensures a planet divided into civilized states with unusable weapons and barbarous regimes happy to kill with whatever's to hand.
So another grand week's work for a president pressing full steam ahead into the post-American global order. The good news is that at least you don't have to worry about a nuclear blitzkrieg from Winnipeg. Sleep easy.
When Obama administration officials discuss their foreign-policy approach, they often use the term "regular order." It sounds like a military expression, but it actually refers to the normal rules of the House and Senate, where so many of them worked before.
A top aide explains what would happen if a senior official just tried to walk into the Oval Office and brief the president on a pet policy initiative. President Obama would send the petitioner away, telling him that his pitch hadn't been reviewed by the staff and was "not regular order," explains the aide.
Regular order means "proper procedure" for this group, in other words. It's a mundane but characteristically Obamian vision of how government is supposed to work: orderly, systematic, no surprises.
White House officials think they are finally hitting this bureaucratic cruising speed, well into the second year of Obama's presidency. They have created a system that is framing and launching national security initiatives — pop, pop, pop — across a range of global topics.
That confident process was on display last week at a 47-nation summit on nuclear terrorism — one of the issues that have worked their way up the Obama policy chain. It was regular order on steroids, with limousines racing around town carrying policymakers to multilateral conferences and bilateral meetings with the president — all with sirens blaring and cops shooing ordinary mortals away.
Honk, honk! If it was Monday, it must be President Viktor Yanukovych agreeing to accept Obama's proposal to safeguard Ukraine's highly enriched uranium. Or maybe it was Chinese President Hu Jintao discussing with Obama new sanctions against Iran.
Behind all the commotion, a big strategic initiative has been rumbling down the policy pike: The idea is to move away from the old paradigm about nuclear danger — the image of warheads atop missiles — to the new threat of nuclear terrorism. Even with rogue states such as Iran and North Korea, most strategists view the big danger as a leak of fissile material into terrorist hands, not the old version of nuclear Armageddon.
Method To The Mania
This change in nuclear strategy has been urged in a blizzard of bipartisan policy papers over the last few years, but it takes a disciplined National Security Council process to make the change happen. That's where Obama and regular order come in:
In a two-week rush, he has signed the New START treaty with Russia, cutting warheads by 30% and rehabilitating the arms-control process; he has boosted the rewards for signing the nonproliferation treaty by issuing a new "nuclear posture" statement promising no nuclear attacks on countries that adhere to the NPT; and now this week's summit on nuclear terrorism.
A lot of moving parts, but there has been a method to the manic schedule.
You could make a similar argument that Obama has been going through his foreign-policy checklist since taking office, to adjust policies that he thinks were badly out of date:
Improve U.S. image in the world, check; "reset" relations with Russia by dropping an ill-considered plan for missile defense, check; improve relations with Pakistan so the U.S. has a viable exit strategy from Afghanistan, check; encourage India-Pakistan dialogue, check; try to engage Iran so that we'll be credible in requesting tough sanctions later, check; create an American peace plan for the Middle East, half-check but still working on it.
Return Of Coherence
All these policies have moved through a well-managed NSC. There's the "adult" group of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Bob Gates and national security adviser Jim Jones; they see eye to eye on most issues. Beneath them are the policy processors, led by Tom Donilon, the deputy national security adviser, and his de-facto boss, Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff.
As he imposes regular order, Obama is trying to fix what he saw as President George W. Bush's disorderly process. During Bush's second term, he personalized policy, making secure videoconference calls with leaders in Kabul or in Baghdad, without always making sure the nuts and bolts were fastened.
Bush's first-term NSC was pure chaos, with Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld refusing to play in the interagency process, and Vice President Dick Cheney running what amounted to a parallel NSC staff. No wonder foreign policy got so messy.
Obama's danger is that he tries to do too much: He's an ambitious if also tidy man, who never saw an initiative he didn't like. But at least he has evolved a coherent, well-run NSC structure to keep most of — if not all — the balls in the air.
8 comments:
In years to come – assuming, for the purposes of argument, there are any years to come – scholars will look back at President Barack Obama's Nuclear Security Summit and marvel. For once, the cheap comparisons with 1930s appeasement barely suffice: To be sure, in 1933, the great powers were meeting in Geneva and holding utopian arms-control talks even as Hitler was taking office in Berlin. But it's difficult to imagine Neville Chamberlain in 1938 hosting a conference on the dangers of rearmament, and inviting America, France, Brazil, Liberia and Thailand ...but not even mentioning Germany.
Yet that's what Obama just did: He held a nuclear gabfest in 2010, the biggest meeting of world leaders on American soil since the founding of the United Nations 65 years ago – and Iran wasn't on the agenda.
Granted that almost all of Obama's exciting innovative "change we can believe in" turns out to have been exhumed direct from the sclerotic Seventies to stagger around like a rotting zombie in polyester bell-bottoms from some straight-to-video sequel, there's still something almost touchingly quaint in the notion of an international summit on nuclear "nonproliferation" in the 21st century. Five years ago, when there was still a chance the world might prevent a nuclear Iran rather than pretending to "contain" it, I remember the bewildered look from a "nonproliferation expert" on a panel I was on after I suggested non-proliferation was a laughably obsolescent frame for this discussion. You could just about enforce nonproliferation back in the Cold War when the only official nuclear powers were the Big Five at the U.N. Security Council and the entry level for the nuclear club was extremely expensive and technologically sophisticated. Now it's not. If Pakistan and North Korea can be nuclear powers, who can't? North Korea's population is starving. Its GDP per capita is lower than Ghana, lower than Zimbabwe, lower than Mongolia. Which is to say its GDP is all but undetectable.
Yet it's a nuclear power.
That's what anachronistic nonproliferation mumbo-jumbo gets you. If you read in the paper that New Zealand had decided to go nuclear, would you lose a moment's sleep over it? Personally, I'd be rather heartened. It would be a sign that a pampered and somnolent developed world had woken up and concluded that betting your future on the kindness of strangers is a helluva gamble. What Obama and his empty showboaters failed even to acknowledge in their "security" summit is the reality of the Post-Big Five nuclear age: We're on the brink of a world in which the wealthiest nations, from Canada to Norway to Japan, can barely project meaningful force to their own borders while the nickel 'n' dime basket-cases go nuclear.
How long do you think that arrangement will last? Iran has already offered to share its nuclear technology with Sudan. Sudan? Ring a vague bell? Remember that "Save Darfur" interpretative-dance fundraiser you went to, where someone read out a press release from George Clooney, and you all had a simply marvelous time? Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed – with machetes. That's pretty labor-intensive. In the Congo, five and a half million have been slaughtered – and, again, in impressively primitive ways.
But a nuclear Sudan would be a model of self-restraint?
By the way, that's another example of the self-indulgent irrelevance of Obama. The mound of corpses being piled up around the world today is not from high-tech nuclear states but from low-tech psycho states. It's not that Britain has nukes, and poor old Sudan has to make do with machetes. It's that the machete crowd are willing to kill on an industrial scale, and the high-tech guys can't figure out a way to stop them. Perhaps for his next pointless yakfest the president might consider a machete nonproliferation initiative.
Nuclear technology cannot be uninvented. All you can do, as President Ronald Reagan understood when few others did, is invent something that will render it, if not yet obsolete, at least less lethal. Until that moment, what makes the difference is not the technology but the regime. The Obama Happy Fairyland Security Summit was posited on the principle that there's no difference between a Swiss nuke and a Syrian nuke. If you believe that, you'll be thrilled by the big breakthrough agreement of the summit: Canada, Chile, Mexico and Ukraine have agreed to reduce their stocks of enriched uranium. Peace in our time! I have here a piece of paper from the prime minister of Canada!
This is the nuclear version of Janet Incompetano's initial reaction to the Pantybomber – when she banned passengers from having paperback books on their laps for the last 45 minutes of the flight. In an age of freelance nukes, we shouldn't be banning items but profiling threats. For 30 years, Iran has acted with extraterritorial impunity and without even the minimal courtesies of international relations – seizing embassies, taking out mob contracts on British novelists, seeding terrorist proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, blowing up community centers in Latin America. Washington's pathetic fallback of "containment" is intended to prevent Tehran using a nuke, in the Middle East, Europe or anywhere else within range. There is no strategy for "containing" Iran's leverage of its nuclear status to advance its interests more discreetly, and no strategy for "containing" the mullahs' generosity to states and groups more inclined to use the technology.
In a characteristic display of his now-famous modesty, President Obama reacted to the hostility of the Tax Day tea parties by saying, "You would think they should be saying 'thank you'" – for all he's done for them. Right now, the fellows saying "thank you" are the mullahs, the Politburo, Czar Putin and others hostile to U.S. interests who've figured out they now have the run of the planet.
As for Obama's pledge to set a good example by reducing America's nuclear arsenal, there's no correlation between peace and the number of weapons – except insofar as states with only a few nukes are more likely to use them than states with gazillions: If you've only got a dozen, you're under more pressure to let 'em fly before they're taken out by incoming. So the principle underpinning Obama's Seventies retro-nuke summit – that the size of a civilized state's stockpile adds to the global threat – is not just false but dangerously delusional. Likewise, the urge to forswear nuclear innovation. It would be greatly to the advantage of civilization if responsible powers were to develop new forms of limited, highly target, bunker-busting nukes. As is well understood by our enemies, the modern West has no stomach for large-scale casualties: On the morning of September 11th, for example, Mullah Omar had no fear that Washington would nuke even remote and lightly inhabited parts of the Hindu Kush. As we learned the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan, stupid, ill-trained illiterates with primitive explosives who don't care who they kill can inflict quite a lot of damage on the technologically advanced highly trained warriors of civilized states. That's the "asymmetric warfare" that matters. So virtuously proclaiming oneself opposed to nuclear modernization ensures a planet divided into civilized states with unusable weapons and barbarous regimes happy to kill with whatever's to hand.
So another grand week's work for a president pressing full steam ahead into the post-American global order. The good news is that at least you don't have to worry about a nuclear blitzkrieg from Winnipeg. Sleep easy.
Or
When Obama administration officials discuss their foreign-policy approach, they often use the term "regular order." It sounds like a military expression, but it actually refers to the normal rules of the House and Senate, where so many of them worked before.
A top aide explains what would happen if a senior official just tried to walk into the Oval Office and brief the president on a pet policy initiative. President Obama would send the petitioner away, telling him that his pitch hadn't been reviewed by the staff and was "not regular order," explains the aide.
Regular order means "proper procedure" for this group, in other words. It's a mundane but characteristically Obamian vision of how government is supposed to work: orderly, systematic, no surprises.
White House officials think they are finally hitting this bureaucratic cruising speed, well into the second year of Obama's presidency. They have created a system that is framing and launching national security initiatives — pop, pop, pop — across a range of global topics.
That confident process was on display last week at a 47-nation summit on nuclear terrorism — one of the issues that have worked their way up the Obama policy chain. It was regular order on steroids, with limousines racing around town carrying policymakers to multilateral conferences and bilateral meetings with the president — all with sirens blaring and cops shooing ordinary mortals away.
Honk, honk! If it was Monday, it must be President Viktor Yanukovych agreeing to accept Obama's proposal to safeguard Ukraine's highly enriched uranium. Or maybe it was Chinese President Hu Jintao discussing with Obama new sanctions against Iran.
Behind all the commotion, a big strategic initiative has been rumbling down the policy pike: The idea is to move away from the old paradigm about nuclear danger — the image of warheads atop missiles — to the new threat of nuclear terrorism. Even with rogue states such as Iran and North Korea, most strategists view the big danger as a leak of fissile material into terrorist hands, not the old version of nuclear Armageddon.
Method To The Mania
This change in nuclear strategy has been urged in a blizzard of bipartisan policy papers over the last few years, but it takes a disciplined National Security Council process to make the change happen. That's where Obama and regular order come in:
In a two-week rush, he has signed the New START treaty with Russia, cutting warheads by 30% and rehabilitating the arms-control process; he has boosted the rewards for signing the nonproliferation treaty by issuing a new "nuclear posture" statement promising no nuclear attacks on countries that adhere to the NPT; and now this week's summit on nuclear terrorism.
A lot of moving parts, but there has been a method to the manic schedule.
You could make a similar argument that Obama has been going through his foreign-policy checklist since taking office, to adjust policies that he thinks were badly out of date:
Improve U.S. image in the world, check; "reset" relations with Russia by dropping an ill-considered plan for missile defense, check; improve relations with Pakistan so the U.S. has a viable exit strategy from Afghanistan, check; encourage India-Pakistan dialogue, check; try to engage Iran so that we'll be credible in requesting tough sanctions later, check; create an American peace plan for the Middle East, half-check but still working on it.
Return Of Coherence
All these policies have moved through a well-managed NSC. There's the "adult" group of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Bob Gates and national security adviser Jim Jones; they see eye to eye on most issues. Beneath them are the policy processors, led by Tom Donilon, the deputy national security adviser, and his de-facto boss, Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff.
As he imposes regular order, Obama is trying to fix what he saw as President George W. Bush's disorderly process. During Bush's second term, he personalized policy, making secure videoconference calls with leaders in Kabul or in Baghdad, without always making sure the nuts and bolts were fastened.
Bush's first-term NSC was pure chaos, with Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld refusing to play in the interagency process, and Vice President Dick Cheney running what amounted to a parallel NSC staff. No wonder foreign policy got so messy.
Obama's danger is that he tries to do too much: He's an ambitious if also tidy man, who never saw an initiative he didn't like. But at least he has evolved a coherent, well-run NSC structure to keep most of — if not all — the balls in the air.
The dumbest thing of the week.
In a two-week rush, he has signed the New START treaty with Russia, cutting warheads by 30% and rehabilitating the arms-control process.
Not...Not gonna happen, waist of time, won't pass the Senate.
You are reaching for stuff to complain about. If Bush had done his job over eight years, N Korea and Iran problems would already be resolved.
Obama is gathering up loose nuclear fuel over four years - again - something Bush should already have done.
it will pass the Senate -- after some hoopla.
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