Obama Anachronistes

Last Sunday, the New York Times wrote about President Obama at Columbia University in the 1980's. The article opens:

"In the depths of the cold war, in 1983, a senior at Columbia University [Barack Obama] wrote in a campus newsmagazine, Sundial, about the vision of “a nuclear free world.” He railed against discussions of “first- versus second-strike capabilities” that “suit the military-industrial interests” with their “billion-dollar erector sets,” and agitated for the elimination of global arsenals holding tens of thousands of deadly warheads."

I don't think the Times reads The Mercurial Pundit, so it must be a coincidence that I wrote a week ago:

"[President Obama] is locked in a 1980's ideology of the Left that he learned as a young man, that Reagan's "Star Wars" was the mad plan of a Cold War ideologue."

The Nuclear Freeze movement of the 1980's, which is what Mr. Obama was cheering in the 1983 Sundial article, is a classic example of the completely ahistorical nature of Leftist ideology. It formed itself on an undeviating moral principle "Freeze Nuclear Weapon Development Now!," which was chosen for no other reason than (1) it was a great sound-bite, and (2) in application it could be used to oppose every aspect of Ronald Reagan's agenda. It's often unstated premise was that Reagan, and every other Republican who viewed the Soviet Union as a massive threat to world peace and security, was a war-monger, locked in the Military-Industrial Complex with their rich buddies, hoping against hope for some chance to use nuclear weapons against somebody (x-ref. numerous Hollywood cartoon caricatures).

However, the actual history of the public and private debates within the serious sides of the Democratic and Republican Parties of the 1970's paints a different story. These debates revolved around complex and nuanced differences over just how the Cold War competition between East and West could be stabilized and deep dangers like the Cuban Missile Crisis avoided. Sounds like a goal worthy of the idealists of the Nuclear Freeze, right? If they were idealists, yes. Unfortunately they were ideologues, and idealogues couldn’t care less about what might really be going on in the world.

Another historical nicety the Left missed was in assuming Ronald Reagan was an amiable dunce/puppet of others. This was all so much hooey. Reagan left the Governor's mansion of California and immediately established himself as a powerful voice on foreign affairs. All during the 1970's he was the focus and spokesman of opposition to the foreign policy Realism strategy of the Nixon-Kissinger types. And he gave much better than he got from the educated elite of the foreign policy establishment.

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His views on our strategic posture were typically simple and yet powerful. Fueled by a gusher of oil revenues from the world-wide oil shocks of the early 70's, the Soviets were becoming increasingly aggressive and belligerent around the world. In the face of this, we had adopted a weak negotiating strategy on nuclear weapons which culminated in the SALT treaties of the 1970's that allowed the Soviets, for the first time, superiority in the number of nuclear warheads. As a result, Reagan believed the SALT treaties only emboldened the Soviet's further in their adventurism around the world, and that from a nuclear standpoint, the situation was untenable. It would only be a matter of time before the Soviets provoked a nuclear showdown through arrogance, ignorance or negligence.

Now you can accuse the Democratic-Republican foreign policy Realists of being wrong, or Reagan of being wrong, but you cannot accuse any of them of being war-mongers. That is just not what the debates of the 1970's were all about. They were all about how to stabilize the world during the Cold War and make nuclear confrontation less likely, not more.

Here is an example of how the Nuclear Freeze ideology blinded the Left. In his 1983 article, young Barack Obama quotes approvingly the opinion of one Mark Bigelow of the campus group Arms Race Alternatives that the deployment of Pershing II's and Cruise missiles in Europe needed to be stopped. Mr. Bigelow said,

"Because of their small size and mobility, their deployment will make possible arms control verification far more difficult, and cut down warning time for the Soviets to less than ten minutes. That can only be a destabilizing factor."

Mr. Bigelow overlooks, of course, the fact that the destabilizing factor was not the proposed deployment of these nuclear missiles by the United States, but the hundreds of SS-20's already deployed by the Soviets, aimed at Europe, China and Japan. Each of these missiles had three nuclear warheads, were reloadable, and highly mobile to insure survivability in the field. Mark Bigelow should have been asking the same question Reagan was: how do we get the Soviets to back away from this crazy ham-handed nuclear confrontation strategy they were embarking on? But Mr. Bigelow couldn't ask such a question, because his ideology told him Ronald Reagan and the rest of the war-mongers were the problem.

A more rational version of Mr. Bigelow's opposition to Reagan's nuclear strategy might have been that it was too dangerous to ratchet up the confrontation provoked by the Soviets with our own Pershing II deployments. But now we have the benefit of historical hindsight, which shows that Reagan was correct in his strategy and marvelously adept in negotiations with the Soviets. The Pershing II's were deployed, and within five years, dismantled, along with all of the Soviet SS-20's.

History vindicates Reagan on the Pershing II's, SDI and on his vision to reduce nuclear arms in the world via his START treaty with the Soviets. As such, this "war-monger" did more to advance the ideals of the Nuclear Freeze movement than Mr. Obama and his friends could ever have hoped for. Before START, the Soviets and the United States had almost 20,000 nuclear warheads. Today, after 20 some years of START, the number is 2,200.

But as I said last week, “ideologues like our current President are not much interested in history that doesn't conform with their prejudices.” Reagan was bad, SDI and START were feints designed to continue the Cold War and the Military Industrial Complex, and our President has nothing to learn about negotiating with the Russians from old war-mongers.

Mr. Obama has a bold new goal, the elimination of nuclear weapons forever. But prior to his summit meeting with Russian President Medvedev this week he unilaterally made drastic cuts in spending on SDI and on deployment of missile defense in Eastern Europe. Presumably, he’s channeling his inner Mark Bigelow in his concern over how “destabilizing” these things are.

So, he goes to Russia with negotiating leverage of … what? Old bumper stickers from his Nuclear Freeze days? Putin and the like will chew him up and spit him out, and somebody like Reagan will then have to come along and clean up President Obama’s nuclear mess.

Hopefully before anyone gets hurt.