James Carafano Compares Reagan and Obama on Russia
From James Carafano’s latest Washington Examiner column:
President Obama wants a world without nuclear weapons. So did President Reagan. The similarities end there.
How we get to a nuke-free world matters. To mitigate the threat of nuclear war, treaty negotiators must understand what they are up against. That includes understanding how the other parties plan to use nukes, both as military assets and as foreign policy tools.
Reagan knew that. But it’s not clear that Obama’s negotiators appreciate Moscow’s evident intent to keep using its potent nuclear threat to advance its foreign policy interests.
Like Reagan, Obama believes America must lead the way to nuclear disarmament. Unlike Reagan, he believes this requires an assertion of “moral” leadership, to be demonstrated simply by reducing our nuclear stockpile and refusing to modernize the U.S. arsenal. It’s a false premise.
In the post-Cold War era, U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles have atrophied, yet the nuclear threat has increased. Today, there are many more nuclear-armed states, and some are far less stable — and far more irresponsible — than the U.S.S.R.
Reagan recognized that the ultimate goal of arms negotiations is to make the world safer, more stable and more free. To eliminate the need for large nuclear arsenals, he went about eliminating the dependence — both ours and others’ — on massive nuclear attack as the guarantor of security.
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Tags: James Carafano, Ronald Reagan, Russia