Reno Hayek Symposium

Like a broadway scripted play Obama is into his foreign policy-defense act. (This, the act that follows Obamacare!) It is, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a policy “Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” (Act 5, Scene 5)

No, that is to naive but not too harsh. As I think Clifford May’s tax day NRO post, The Obama Doctrine, points out well, Obama has showcased his photo-op national security initiatives: the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (STARTT), new National Security Strategy (NSS) and his international Nuclear Security Summit with 40 heads of state.

• STARTT: Reduce US/Russian nukes by 30% for good example to others. “That’s a lovely vision, but which do you think is more likely: that rogue regimes will see these reductions as virtuous and emulate them? Or that they will see these reductions as an opportunity and exploit them?”
• NSS: We pledge not to use nukes against non-nuclear nations. But we fail to define our non-nation enemies. Obama strips terms like “islamic extremism” from the document for fear of offending! We’re back to “man-caused disasters” and “overseas contingency operations.” ” Imagine if President Roosevelt had decided not to speak about German Nazism, lest he offend Germans who were not Nazis, nor utter the words “Italian Fascism” since not all Italians were of the Fascist persuasion, and of course refrained from mentioning Japanese militarism . . . you get the idea.”
• Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit made little progress on cleaning up “loose nukes” and ignored Iran and North Korea.
• NPR: Obama will not modernize our nuclear weapons nor will he use nukes against enemy attacks against us with chemical or biological weapons. In other words, deterrence is a thing of the past. The policy will “actually provide our adversaries with an incentive to accelerate development of offensive capabilities. They clearly do nothing to strengthen deterrence.” Deterrence is what has kept us safe since 1945. The concept that attacks on us or our allies will not bring measured response but extreme, disproportionate devastation is what prevented such attacks. In this regard, Obama is the equivalent of the Russian in Dr. Strangelove who kept the doomsday machine secret, Obama wants to eliminate deterrence–really dumb!

Finally, our own Neville Chamberlain has decided to eliminate necessary missile-defense! “President Obama has scrapped a missile-defense system for eastern Europe, cut the number of planned deployed ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California from 44 to 30 (these provide the only protection to the U.S. homeland against long-range ballistic missiles), cut $1.5 billion from the missile-defense budget (then, curiously, restored about $600 million), and nominated a missile-defense opponent, Philip Coyle, as his top missile-defense adviser.”

In sum, the “Obama Doctrine” postures against non-existant threats, fails to treat real threats, and removes and reduces our defense capability. He’s an articulate empty-suit and a danger to our security.