President Barack Obama signed a nuclear arms control treaty with Russian President Dmitri A. Medvedev that, if ratified by lawmakers in both countries, would reduce the allowed number of deployed strategic warheads from 2,200 to only 1,550.
While that “only” is sarcastic, conservative talk show hosts and others, including Sarah Palin, aren’t joking around when they say 1,550 is not enough to keep America safe. They also detest Obama’s nuclear policy review provision that would reduce the role of nuclear weapons.
According to the Obama administration’s new nuclear strategy, the U.S. will not develop new nuclear weapons and agree not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear arms states in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
When I first read reports on this issue, I thought it was an objectively good thing with which no one on earth could possibly disagree. I mean, what could be so terrible about taking one more step towards making nuclear weapons obsolete?
The fact that some leading conservative voices, which I hate to say now includes Palin, reject U.S. attempts to reduce the role of nuclear weapons signals that the American political scene is divided by sound-bite arguments and narrow worldviews. The fact that we can never come to an agreement on any issue anymore because we are too polarized may not signal our demise, but it does show our stupidity.
The main problem with conservatives these days is that they have no principles. I am more conservative than liberal, but during my lifetime, I have rarely found a conservative figure worth their label. Most of the time, being “conservative” means going around cursing whatever Democrats happen to support at the moment and invoking popular patriotic images for an evil cause.
For instance, let’s take the two things people like Palin and Sean Hannity invoke the most: Ronald Reagan and the men and women in our armed forces.
On Hannity’s Fox News show, Palin said Obama is going in the opposite direction than he should be and that we need to be more like Reagan, who stood strong on national defense.
But the fact is that Reagan was actually all about what Obama is attempting to accomplish with this new nuclear policy and with the new treaty with Russia. Reagan, the adopted Christ of conservatives, once said, “I believe we’ve come to the point that we must go at the matter of realistically reducing . if not totally eliminating, nuclear weapons &mdash the threat to the world.”
If there is more to be said on this issue of “What Would Reagan Do” former secretary of state under Reagan, George Shultz, said it when he told The Daily Beast, “President Obama has picked up on the notion that we can seek a world free of nuclear weapons, and that was very strongly felt by President Reagan.”
Using the men and women in military service to justify one’s ideologically-driven and politically-motivated stance is patently unpatriotic. Palin told Hannity, “It’s also a slap in the face to our men and women serving in uniform today.” American soldiers are not some monolithic entity of the same mind and judgment when it comes to issues of national security or foreign policy. “Our men and women in uniform” are just buzzwords employed mindlessly by politicians and talk radio hosts.
Much of the criticism against Obama on this issue is unfounded. Many of the arguments revolve around the idea that we are backing away from being tough on Iran and North Korea. Hannity said we should not make deals with rogue states. Pamela Geller, a conservative columnist and blogger, said, “Obama is removing nuclear defense at a time when Iran’s devout mullahcracy is building their nuclear arsenal with the global objective of a universal caliphate.”
But these arguments seem to ignore the fact that Obama has said there is an exception in the new nuclear policy for “outliers like Iran and North Korea” who go against non-proliferation treaties.
It’s mind-blowing to think that some people do not realize having a lot of nuclear weapons and threatening to use them is dangerous for everyone.
Matt Watson is a graduate student majoring in Spanish. He can be contacted at [email protected].