Seven Reasons Why Obama's Nuke-Free Utopia Won't Work

Good article by Thomas P. M. Barnett. [Link]

George W. Bush had his "axis of evil," while Obama seems to find nuclear weapons to represent a kind of natural evil unto themselves — no matter who possesses them. Now the twentysomethings in Prague may have cheered his invocations of "hope" and "change," and others may be jumping on board, but I've discovered something in my years of global-strategy analysis, and it's not the deadly fatalism Obama describes — it's the modern realism he ignores: Nuclear weapons are the single best thing that has ever happened in mankind's long history of war.

Globalization existed prior to World War One, but then nukes arrived with their own "crystal-ball effect," previewing the suicidal destruction of modern war between great powers. And if globalization's economic interdependence was a "great illusion" back then, it's become a rock-solid strategic reality in recent decades — and our recent global financial contagion has only made that more indisputably clear. Meanwhile, the world's great powers have come to understand that nuclear weapons are for having, not using. And that is why no nuclear power has ever directly gone to war against another.

If Obama simply wants to reengage Russia on further warhead reductions, fine. But it seems to me that his nuclear utopianism is not so much an extension of his youthful optimism as a vestige of the generational guilt promoted by Cold Warriors like Henry Kissinger — "wise men" who seek to end America's hypocrisy in preaching non-proliferation while relying on nuclear weapons as strategic back-stop. This vision isn't just a backwards one; it's a dangerously destabilizing policy agenda that makes conventional great-power war conceivable once again. Here's why Obama's nuclear ideals put World War III back on the table: