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Obama Needs Help

Paul Richter’s December 28 article in the Tribune Newspapers begins reveals the problem.

President Barack Obama's ambitious plan to begin phasing out nuclear weapons has run up against powerful resistance from officials in the Pentagon and other U.S. agencies, posing a threat to one of his most important foreign policy initiatives.

Obama laid out his vision of a nuclear-free world in a speech in Prague in April, vowing the U.S. would take major steps of its own to lead the way. Eight months later, the administration is locked in internal debate over a top-secret policy blueprint for shrinking the United States' nuclear arsenal and reducing the role of such weapons in military strategy and foreign policy.

Officials in the Pentagon and elsewhere have pushed back against administration proposals to cut the number of weapons and narrow their mission, according to U.S. officials and outsiders who have been briefed on the process.

In turn, White House officials, unhappy with early Pentagon-led drafts of the blueprint known as the Nuclear Posture Review, have stepped up their involvement in the deliberations and ordered that the document reflect Obama's preference for sweeping change, according to the U.S. officials and others, describing discussions on condition of anonymity because of their sensitivity and secrecy.

As is typical for articles like this, no names are mentioned. The players appear to be Pentagon officials, US officials, outsiders who have been briefed on the process, and White House officials. But who are these people? They request and receive anonymity because the matter of nuclear weapons is so sensitive, but wouldn’t it be great if we knew exactly who is saying what about the most crucial issue of our time? 

Since no one will speak on the record, we can safely speculate that this issue is the focus of a high-voltage conflict. I guess that’s comforting. It means the US government is deeply and seriously divided, which is a great change from all previous administrations. It also explains why President Obama, in his Prague speech promising to work for a nuclear-weapon-free world, felt compelled to add that it might not happen in his lifetime.

Did he mean that physically eliminating nuclear weapons is so difficult it could take 40 or 50 years to accomplish? Obviously not. Was he referring to the difficulty of negotiating with the Russians, Chinese and other nuclear-weapon states? Maybe. Gareth Evans, the Australian co-chair of the ICNND (International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament) said so during an NGO roundtable in Hiroshima. “It’s easy for you NGOs to say all nuclear weapons should be eliminated by 2020, but you haven’t talked to China. You haven’t talked to Israel.” Gareth definitely gave us the impression that the problem lies in obtaining agreement among the nation states with the weapons. 

I have no doubt that international negotiations for a nuclear-weapon-free world will reveal some thorny issues that could take some time to resolve, but forty or fifty years? I doubt it. In fact, I suspect that substantive international negotiations for a nuclear-weapon-free world would lead rather quickly to a nuclear weapons convention, which is precisely why such negotiations are being ferociously resisted by certain elements in certain governments.

The real problem, and the reason Obama said, “…maybe not in my lifetime,” is the high-voltage domestic (US) conflict between those who want to eliminate nuclear weapons and those who still cling to the dream of “nuclear primacy,” that is, the ability to launch a nuclear first strike without fear of retaliation. With nuclear primacy, the fantasy goes, they will be able to dominate the world and control its resources.

In Hiroshima, the idea that powerful forces in the US are still doing everything in their power to “win” the Cold War by achieving the ability to fight and win a nuclear war is too crazy to contemplate. However, F. William Engdahl in his 2009 book Full Spectrum Dominance tells us that the Cold War never really ended.

According to Engdahl, “Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and a small clique of neo-conservative war hawks” believe that “the ‘Bush doctrine,’ the policy of pre-emptive war, now include[s] the doctrine of pre-emptive nuclear strike.” That is, “…a powerful segment of the US military-industrial leadership and its policy elites [have] renew[ed] efforts to attain nuclear ‘first strike’ superiority.”

But neo-conservatives are not the only US policy makers seeking world dominance. Zbigniew Brzinkski, who was President Clinton’s national security advisor, clearly states US strategy in his book The Grand Chessboard:

In brief, for the United States, Eurasian geo-strategy involves the purposeful management of geo-strategically dynamic states…. To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geo-strategy are to prevent collusion and to maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.

Obviously, the goal is control—of Russia, China, India, the entire world and all its resources. However, some countries are not interested in being US vassals. Some will do whatever they have to do to avoid that, as Putin proved when Georgia attacked South Ossetia. US planners and pundits were apparently shocked by Russia’s intense and violent response to Georgia’s aggression, but they should not have been. Putin has been expressing Russia’s alarm quite clearly. In February 2007 he said:

NATO has its frontline forces on our border…[I]t is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relations with the modernization of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?

Also in February 2007, Keir Leiber and Daryl Press writing in Foreign Affairs justify Putin’s alarm saying:

Washington’s continued refusal to eschew a first strike and the country’s development of a limited missile-defense capability take on a new, and possibly more menacing look…a nuclear-war-fighting capability remains a key component of the United States’ military doctrine and nuclear primacy remains a goal of the United States.

Thus, 20 years after the end of the Cold War, the great powers remain on a nuclear collision course. Who will control the oil of the Middle East and Africa? Who will control the vast riches of the Congo? Who will control the water in Kashmir and Tibet? If the leaders of the great powers are determined to answer these questions through competition, if they are determined to win, and if they are willing to use violence to do so, they will inevitably lead us to a paroxysm of violence that will make WWII look like a picnic.

At the next election, we need to get rid of the current crop of war-culture leaders and elect new leaders who understand cooperation, problem solving and how to resolve conflict through techniques other than brute, violent force. In the short run, everyone who thinks peace is better than war needs to be on Capital Hill, on the Internet, and in the streets doing everything we can to strengthen Obama against the Pentagon. The dream of world dominance is doomed to disaster. Obama knows this and, appearances to the contrary, will lead us away from war if he has the political power to do so. We need to give him that power.

To understand why nuclear weapons are at a pivot point right now or to get involved in eliminating them, go to: www.2020visioncampaign.org.