There is an interesting opinion piece today by Timothy Egan on nytimes.com about mutually assured destruction (MAD). MAD is a Cold War era policy that says essentially “if you nuke our cities, we promise to nuke your cities”.
Egan assumes, like many people do, that MAD kept us safe during the Cold War. But he criticizes the Pentagon for continuing to rely on MAD in an era where the greatest threats to United States security are terrorist organizations:
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I am constantly flabbergasted by how “common knowledge”, even and especially among experts in a particular field, can so often be so wrong. And I don’t even mean “wrong if you really know what you’re talking about”; I mean “illogical at face value”. I’ll start with a couple examples from football (it is that time of year), and then get to one about national security (inspired by this op-ed in today’s New York Times).
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I read McCain’s Foreign Affairs essay the other day, which is really quite good. There are certainly things in it I disagree with, but when compared with the nonsensical mess that Giuliani wrote, it does make you appreciate that McCain has some grasp of the issues at hand. On the issue of nuclear power, however, McCain’s stances came off as incredibly hypocritical. (To be fair, he actually is just proposing that we follow through with policies that the Bush Administration has proposed, so he’s not the only hypocrite on the issue.) McCain is very clear that nuclear proliferation, especially to terrorist sponsoring states like Iran, Syria, and North Korea, is a very bad thing. And to counter this, he wants to strengthen the IAEA (the UN-affiliated body that handles these things) by, in part, tasking them with preventing the spread of nuclear power technologies. By itself, this is a reasonable thing to do; after all, one of the problems we’re running into with both Iran and North Korea is that nuclear power technologies look an awful lot like nuclear weapons technologies (both the parts and the satellite photos). At the same time, McCain wants to reduce American reliance on “foreign oil” by expanding our own reliance on nuclear power. It’s a classic case of what’s good enough for us is too good for you.
I encourage you to take a look at this series of articles being published in Foreign Affairs. In a nut shell, the journal asked each of the “top” presidential candidates to write an essay outlining their foreign policy goals and strategies if they are elected president. So far, four candidates have responded: Obama, Edwards, Giuliani, and Romney.
As with any mid-election statement, there are plenty of platitudes and not enough specifics–especially when it comes down to actually paying for things. That being said, the general styles and philosophies of the candidates come through pretty clearly, and there are enough specific policy proposals to be able to compare and contrast the candidates. For instance, all four candidates express a need to hire more soldiers, but in different ways. Romney and Giuliani want to build new combat brigades to be part of an overall expansion in military power, to return the military to the size and prominence it had during the Reagan years; Obama focuses on recruiting more Marines and special ops forces, to refocus the military on counter-terrorism and peace-making; Edwards stresses the need to improve pay and benefits for soldiers and veterans, and to eliminate the reliance on the National Guard to provide support personnel.
In the last week, Barack Obama has made three controversial foreign policy statements: that he would not consider using nuclear weapons to strike at terrorists; that if he had “actionable intelligence” about Osama bin Laden’s location and Pakistan refused to act, he would consider striking into Pakistani territory without their permission; and that he would be willing to sit down for high-level diplomatic meetings with Iran, Cuba, and North Korea. Those statements, and the general reaction to them, tell us quite a bit about how the different candidates are trying to position themselves with regards to foreign policy and the war on terror. And frankly the reaction has been pretty disturbing.
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