With an eye toward his legacy, President Obama is pushing a significant shift in U.S. nuclear policy.
The administration’s new, Nuclear Posture Review builds specifics onto a speech the president delivered a year ago in Prague, Czech Republic, where he outlined his vision for a future without nuclear weapons. The president on Wednesday heads to Prague to meet with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, where the two leaders intend to sign a pact reducing each country’s nuclear arsenal by one-third.
Taken together, the president’s nuclear policy moves are steeped in the kind of history-making, heavily symbolic atmospherics that deeply appeal to Obama and his ambitions for leadership .
Further reducing nuclear weapons with his Russian counterpart places Obama in a historic counterpoint to President Reagan, who began his own process with Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s. Speaking aloud of a world free of nuclear weapons reflects Obama’s idealism and desire to play a major role in world history.
In a nod to his own, modern sensibilities, the president also highlighted how the revised policy marks a shift from the old, Cold War thinking of earlier decades to reflect more immediate threats to national security.
The Nuclear Posture Review “recognizes that the greatest threat to U.S. and global security is no longer a nuclear exchange between nations, but nuclear terrorism by violent extremists and nuclear proliferation to an increasing number of states,” Obama said.
The new policy rejects the use of nuclear weapons against nonnuclear countries, a departure from existing policy that allowed such attacks to answer a biological or chemical attack.
A key exception would apply to any nation that fails to comply with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — such as Iran and North Korea.
Under the new policy, the United States also will develop no new nuclear warheads and halt nuclear testing while improving the capabilities of conventional arms and pursuing nuclear arms reductions with other countries.
Critics of the president’s new stance, including many Republicans, are variously calling the president’s revised policy naive, an empty gesture, a solution in search of a problem or worse — a move that will make the nation less safe.
Some environmental, anti-nuclear-weapons and liberal groups hailed the president’s move but said that more is needed — specifically a guarantee that nuclear weapons would never be used in a first strike, that the United States will pull all of its warheads out of Europe and more.
Others saw a distinct legacy-burnishing advantage for Obama, whose ambitions took a beating over the summer with the health care debate and other setbacks, but now appear to greater advantage.
“You know, when he was first elected, my sense was that this guy had a chance to be either one of the greatest presidents in American history … or an unsuccessful one-term president,” said Andrew Kuchins, a Russian policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Now, “he’s looking considerably more successful in his political capital — again, not only important here at home, but it’s also extremely important for him abroad.”
