A Noble, Bad Idea

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President Obama has announced a new American policy concerning the use of nuclear weapons (the “Nuclear Posture Review”). According to the New York Times, “For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons or launched a crippling cyberattack.”

The president putting forth this comprehensive agenda is not an old hawk like Reagan or the Bushes, but rather one who has apologized, bowed, and backpedaled abroad in courting enemies like Syria and Iran while snubbing old friends such as Britain and Israel. Context matters. Fairly or not, the world will see these latest pronouncements as more in line with the abstract idealism of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate than with the leader of the world’s sole superpower, on whom billions in the real world rely to keep the peace through deterrence.

Obama is currently engaged in an ongoing war against radical Islam, whose adherents seek to gain weapons of mass destruction. He operates in a landscape in which nuclear proliferation is on the rise from Iran to North Korea, and when a host of other anti-American autocracies such as Syria and Venezuela either boast about their desire to obtain nuclear weapons or have already stealthily built reactors. The timing, in other words, could not be worse.

Third, ambiguity is essential in nuclear poker. All nuclear states must at some point play the game. A potentially aggressive state never quite knows how bad the reaction might be should it gamble and initiate an attack—and this is what keeps the peace. Predictability and limiting options on the part of responsible states only invite unpredictability and the expansion of choices for known bad actors.

So these well-meant gestures are both ill-timed and ill-conceived—all the more so in coming from someone who, in just 14 months in office, is attempting to overturn numerous bipartisan American foreign policies of a half-century, largely on the premise that the United States in some fashion has been in the wrong and needs to make amends to an array of belligerents.

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