I like that President Obama isn’t just paying lip service to nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, but is actually thinking through ways to change the paradigm so that other nations can think anew about the role of nuclear weapons in their own defense systems. My only concern is that he make sure to have the support of some Republicans for the controversial moves he wants to make. I am hoping that he has at least the consent of Sen. Richard Lugar, the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee. But he needs more than Lugar. A lot more. If he want to ratify the new agreement with Russia, he’s going to need 67 votes in the U.S. Senate. And the announcements he’s making today go beyond re-upping on Strategic Arms Limitations.
President Obama said Monday that he was revamping American nuclear strategy to substantially narrow the conditions under which the United States would use nuclear weapons.
But the president said in an interview that he was carving out an exception for “outliers like Iran and North Korea” that have violated or renounced the main treaty to halt nuclear proliferation.
Discussing his approach to nuclear security the day before formally releasing his new strategy, Mr. Obama described his policy as part of a broader effort to edge the world toward making nuclear weapons obsolete, and to create incentives for countries to give up any nuclear ambitions. To set an example, the new strategy renounces the development of any new nuclear weapons, overruling the initial position of his own defense secretary.
Mr. Obama’s strategy is a sharp shift from those of his predecessors and seeks to revamp the nation’s nuclear posture for a new age in which rogue states and terrorist organizations are greater threats than traditional powers like Russia and China.
It eliminates much of the ambiguity that has deliberately existed in American nuclear policy since the opening days of the cold war. For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons or launched a crippling cyberattack.
If this is part of an overall strategy to get the UN Security Council to impose meaningful sanctions on Iran and reinvigorate a truly international commitment to non-proliferation, then I can understand the timing. But it does seem to put the cart before the horse. While these announcements may make it easier to get sanctions that will cool the march to war with Iran, they also would appear to make passage of a new treaty with Russia infinitely more difficult. Maybe there is no way to achieve both goals at once. If that is the case, the more important thing is to reset the paradigm. But I hope Obama doesn’t think that the right-wing wurlitzer isn’t going to spin this as unilateral disarmament. Because that is exactly what they’re going to do.
“carving out an exception for “outliers like Iran and North Korea” that have violated or renounced the main treaty to halt nuclear proliferation.”
Certainly no one would like to see more nuclearized nations, not Iran or North Korea, but the idea of carving out an exception to use nuclear weapons against these countries is totally bizarre, and cannot be serious. Suppose Israel decided in a fit of irrationality to bomb Iran, which then retaliated with a missile attack against major Israeli cities. Would the US then enter the fray with a nuclear attack against Iran, because of this exception?
Speak of the devil, this article just in:
Iran vows to strike Israel immediately if attacked
Reuters/Haaretz
Such bombastic language always comes off diplomatically as posturing. I doubt, for example, that Iran as a missile that can outrun any Israeli missile such that damage in Tel Aviv occurs before damage in Teheran. Just based on the way missiles work. Certainly within minutes of damage in Teheran. With early warning at launch, within seconds.
The only circumstance that would make the cleric’s statements credible is if Iran had a missile defense system much better that that of the US–such that the Israeli missile never reached Teheran. But then, over what intervening landscape would destruction of the missile and possible falling of debris occur?
It looks very much like a strategy of deterrence by assured mutual response. If I’m not mistaken, Israel by contrast operates with a strategy of deterrence by pre-emptive response. Which is what makes the situation dicey.
Setting aside the always intractable problem we have with Israel being a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, it isn’t bizarre at all. The idea is to disincentivize nations from pursuing small nuclear weapons programs (compared to ours) as a rational defense strategy.
More significant non-signatories are India and Pakistan. Major conflict there could bring China in on the side of Pakistan and Russian in on the side of India. All four countries treat this as possibility and work diplomatically to avoid it when terrorist or conventional conflict erupts. So far.
Israel has the backing of the US (nominally) and Russia backs Iran and Iraq (nominally) because conflict could quickly spread into all of Russia’s Islamic regions and not just Chechnya.
BTW, under the treaty, all of South America, Africa, and Australia are identified as nuclear-weapons-free zones. South Africa ended their nuclear program in order to make Africa nuclear-free. Germany and Italy have no weapons of their own but depend on the US to share weapons if they are attacked.
The Obama administration sees Israel’s NPT status as an opportunity rather than an ‘intractable problem.’ Diplomatically it puts Israel in a difficult position in their strategy of putting Iran first as an existential threat and a resolution of the Palestinian issue as a distracting hobby. I tend to think the big shift in US/Israeli relations is that we now see Middle East policy in the opposite priority.
What Obama’s policy does is implicitly commit the US to diplomatically begin to negotiate down India’s and Pakistan’s nuclear arsenals. In order to do that, he must also negotiated down Russia’s and China’s nuclear arsenals. China is waiting for US and Russian arsenals to be reduced sufficiently to begin negotiations with some security of having rough parity.
The challenge is to eventually make Europe, Asia, and North America (that is, the US) nuclear=free zones.
The disconnect is that politicians consider nuclear weapons a trump card, the military considers them a tool to have in reserve, and diplomats consider them very dangerous unless there is more restraint shown than has been in the past. A single nuclear-armed nation immediately begins an arms race with those nations with which it is in conflict.
Republicans in Congress, with some exceptions, are so locked into ideology over reality that they still consider nuclear weapons as the source of American imperial power, ignoring the lessons of 1962. The question is whether there are eight to ten Republicans who understand the importance of the issue not to posture with it. And who will vote to ratify the new treaty. A Republican president would have no trouble getting it done — and two did; the language is not that much changed. But can Obama hold all of the Democratic caucus to voting to ratify; the healthcare law experience makes that doubtful.
Very interesting. also appreciate your use of the subjunctive in second sentence, Booman!
For progressives unhappy with Obama for not being progressive enough, his work on this issue may or may not make a difference—but it should.
There’s little or no domestic political advantage for Obama to be pushing nuclear weapons disarmament, de-escalation and control. And yet he keeps doing it—in speeches, in treaty negotiations, in Pentagon policies and strategies.
Maybe, just maybe, Obama really is a center-left politician who cares about enacting progressive policies, and is willing to cut the deals he perceives to be necessary to move the country in that direction.
Ignoring the fact that Iran is a signatory and not (so far) in violation of the NNPT, and that for decades the US has been in violation of the NNPt (for failing to honor our commitment to work toward disarmament), this is nonetheless a tremendous step forward.
People need to understand that in doing this, Obama has explicitly overruled the draft NPR, which called for no major paradigm shift, and the preferences of his own defense secretary, who has lobbied hard for a new generation of “modern” nuclear weapons.
The trick is that for the ratification of START (or CTBT, which Obama has also pledged to resubmit to the Senate), Sen. Jon Kyl, the Republican point person on these issues, was expected to demand the new weapons Gates wants as the price for any Republican support. There’s no way, after this announcement, that Obama can sign off on that deal — which is good. (Obama’s tendency to sign away the farm before negotiations had even begun was a major concern here. This time, he’s clearly chosen not to do that.)
Incidentally, Obama does have some Republican cover for this; a number of past Republican foreign policy heavyweights, including Henry Kissinger and George Schulz, have come out backing nuclear abolition. I’d bet Obama lined up their support on this move ahead of time.
All other things being equal, the paradigm shift is far more important than Senate ratification of either treaty. It does far more to reduce the threat of nuclear war, and far more to convince other countries that, for a change, the US is serious about ending its hypocrisy over maintaining an enormous stockpile of these weapons while decrying their development by anyone else. Obama deserves huge props for this.
Now, about those Israeli nukes…
The emphasis on NPT signatories is a veiled threat to Likud which is unlikely to have been missed in that quarter. Exposing Israel to UN pressure on their NPT status is one of the more likely hard-ball tactics in the Obama administration’s possible escalation strategy. We’ll see.