Obama Administration Negotiating For and From A Position of Weakness

The United States is headed by among its most inept, internationally scorned, ridiculed and disrespected Presidents ever (Jimmy Carter, an Obama advisor, is the competition for this “honor”). He is universally seen as a feckless amateur without leadership skills and a zero intimidation factor.

The anti-Reagan.

Add this to his far-felt pacifist beliefs and throw in a far left political appointee with little practical experience and the physiognomy of a school board member to serve as an arms negotiator with the ruthless Russians under Putin … and this spells a disaster in the making.

A sheep negotiating with wolves.

We are not safe while Obama remains our President!

The consequences of his ineptitude, lack of leadership and common sense, his destructive pacifism and quixotic ideologies are real existential threats to our country.

Missing Defense
Investors Business Daily 06/18/2010

Undersecretary of state for international security and arms control Ellen Tauscher

The Washington Times' Bill Gertz reports that U.S. diplomats are secretly negotiating with Russia to link nuclear arms reduction to limits on our anti-missile defenses.

As Gertz points out, "Pro-arms-control officials within the administration dislike missile defenses, viewing them as an impediment to offensive arms agreements."

Ellen Tauscher, the undersecretary of state for international security and arms control, has been talking to Moscow's deputy foreign minister, Sergei Rybakov, and that in and of itself should generate fears.

Tauscher's qualifications for her current job amount to little beyond her experience as a Democratic Party fundraiser and seven terms as a San Francisco congresswoman with a reputation, according to the media at least, as a centrist, but a voting record that shows her to be an unalloyed liberal.

Tauscher let it be known when she left the House for the State Department last year that her priority was to eliminate all nuclear weapons in the world.

If that requires giving away the store on missile defense, it's worth it in the worldview of an administration that was sure an extended hand would lead Iran to end its nuclear program.

Deputy Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty negotiator Frank Rose less than a month ago said at a London conference that the Obama administration was seeking a deal on missile defense "cooperation" via the Tauscher-Rybakov negotiations.

As quoted by Gertz, Rose said, "The door to tangible, mutually beneficial missile defense cooperation with the United States, and potentially with NATO, is wide open."

President Obama has already abandoned the Czechs and the Poles on missile defense against Russian aggression under the rule of former KGB operative Vladimir Putin.

Are we now going to leave ourselves defenseless too?

It's worth remembering the crucial role that a commitment to missile defense played in the demise of the Soviet empire.

Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky noted that President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, and the realization that Moscow didn't have the resources to compete with it, made Mikhail Gorbachev's advisers "finally accept demands for internal reform."

As British historian Andrew Roberts notes in his "History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900," Reagan himself would call strategic missile defense "the single most important reason, on the United States' side, for the historic breakthroughs that were to occur" in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Yet the Obama administration's attitude is like that of the liberal internationalists of the 1980s, described by Reagan Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in his autobiography: "The idea that any country might try to defend itself against the nuclear weapons of another country was not only revolutionary, it was sacrilegious."

As Roberts notes, detentists at the time "alternately (and contradictorily) denounced" missile defense "as expensively unworkable and strategically destabilizing."

The decades since have proved that missile defense is fantastically workable. The only thing that will stop free people from defending themselves against nuclear missiles is leaders deluded by notions of utopianism and appeasement.

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/537902/201006181904/Missing-Defense.aspx

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