Dirty Dealing with Dmitry...

..or was it with Vladimir?

The other day, while Michael Jackson was being laid to rest among much fanfare, Obama was busy cutting a deal with the Russians on reducing the nuclear arsenal of each nation.

Comrade Karla forwarded the above picture of Obama. Looks like Obama was seated at the kiddie's folding table during Thanksgiving Dinner. I wondered if during the negotiations, the Russian flag was bigger than the American one.

While the idea of renewing the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) is being hailed with much hype by the Democrats, one key element is being left out: Obama is not providing any funding to maintain, let alone update our aging nuclear warheads. If this continues, the US will unilaterally disarm by neglect.

Ralph Peters rolls-in on this in the New York Post:


DESPERATE DEAL
By RALPH PETERS

July 7, 2009 --

PRESIDENT Obama went to Moscow desperate for the appearance of a foreign-policy success. He got that illusion -- at a substantial cost to America's security.
The series of signing ceremonies in a grand Kremlin hall and the litany of agreements, accords and frameworks implied that the United States benefited from all the fuss. We didn't.

We got nothing of real importance. But the government of puppet-master Vladimir Putin (nominally just prime minister) got virtually all it wanted. In Moscow, this was Christmas in July.

Ignore the agenda-padding public-health memorandum and the meaningless "framework document on military cooperation" (we've had such agreements before; the Russians always just stiff us). The main course in Moscow was arms control.

President Obama's ideological bias against nuclear weapons dates back to his undergraduate years. Yet those weapons kept the peace between the world's great powers for 64 years. A few remarks about deterrence notwithstanding, Obama just doesn't get it.

He agreed to trim our nuclear-warhead arsenal by one-third and -- even more dangerously -- to cut the systems that deliver the nuclear payloads. In fact, the Russians don't care much about our warhead numbers (which will be chopped to a figure "between 1,500 and 1,675"). What they really wanted -- and got -- was a US cave-in regarding limits on our nuclear-capable bombers, submarines and missiles that could leave us with as few as 500 such systems, if the Russians continue to get their way as the final details are negotiated.

Moscow knows we aren't going to start a nuclear war with Russia. Putin (forget poor "President" Dmitry Medvedev) wants to gut our conventional capabilities to stage globe-spanning military operations. He wants to cut us down to Russia's size.

Our problem is that many nuclear-delivery systems -- such as bombers or subs -- are "dual-use": A B-2 bomber can launch nukes, but it's employed more frequently to deliver conventional ordnance.

Putin sought to cripple our ability to respond to international crises. Obama, meanwhile, was out for "deliverables" -- deals that could be signed in front of the cameras. Each man got what he wanted.

President Obama even expressed an interest in further nuclear-weapons cuts. Peace in our time, ladies and gentlemen, peace in our time . . .

We just agreed to the disarmament position of the American Communist Party of the 1950s.
The Russians also enjoyed our president's empathy for their position on missile defense. Apparently, Eastern Europe really does belong to the Kremlin's sphere of influence.
Not least, Obama fell for the sucker offer of the year: The Russians will generously allow us to fly our troops and weapons through their airspace to Afghanistan.

This ploy is utterly transparent: Putin intends to lull us into dependency on a trans-Russia supply route -- giving him a free hand in Georgia, Ukraine and elsewhere.

By Putin's calculus, we'll complain about further aggression on Russia's frontiers, but take no action that would jeopardize our new supply line. Meanwhile, we serve as the Kremlin's proxies, protecting its sphere of influence in Central Asia against Islamist influence from the south and working on the Russians' Afghan heroin problem.

What did our president get in return? Russia will import more American meat products (which Russia needs). And we can re-open our Moscow office investigating the cases of POWs and MIAs from yesteryear's wars. Well, I served in that office 16 years ago. Even during the Yeltsin-era "thaw," the Russians stonewalled us. And Putin's no Boris Yeltsin.

Our president also got some generalizations about North Korea and Iran, but no hard commitments. Russia -- which designed many of Iran's nuclear facilities -- wouldn't even promise to permanently deny Iran the sophisticated air-defense systems that would make it harder to hit Tehran's nuke sites.

And you could read something else in President Medvedev's imperious bearing behind his podium yesterday: Moscow longs for the world to view Russia and the United States as equals again, as joint arbiters of a global condominium, reviving the Kremlin's Cold-War status (for which Russians feel passionate nostalgia).

They got that, too. And we got nothing, nothing, nothing. Unless you think trading our military superiority for hamburger sales is a winner.

There's been a debate in the Obama administration between veterans who learned the hard way not to trust the Russians and the new, unblooded idealists. Now we know who won.
Great news for the Russian Federation. Bad news for America. Until an adoring media spins it, of course.


This generated some discussion among my friends. (Comrade Karla's comments are in red).

Ralph's somewhat over blown on his arguments (as he sometimes is), but more importantly he misses bigger picture issues:

(1) Missile Defense - Obama is quietly strangling it. This is bad for both defense of the U.S. at a time when North Korea and Iran are developing missiles that can hit the U.S. and also because backing out of the deal in Eastern Europe is going to be a tremendous long-term foreign policy disaster. Rightly or wrongly, we strong-armed Poland and the Czech Republic into accepting anti-missile sites, which earned them the wrath of Russia. If we back out, those countries are going to feel screwed and go from the most pro-U.S. countries in Europe to something less friendly.

Unfortunately, the west has a long and strong tradition of screwing both Poland and the Czechs.

(2) Nuclear warheads - yes, he talks about numbers, but he misses the real, longer-term issue -- he has cut 100% of the funding for a new warhead design. We are heading for a situation where the only warheads left will be for Trident II and even those have a nominal 20-30 year lifespan which will be greatly exceeded (there is some work to try to extend that to over 50, but no one knows how relaible they are going to be by then). We may unilaterally disarm ourselves by refusing to modernize our arsenal. The Russians, of course, are busily developing new warheads and delivery systems. That is the real danger!

Also unfortunately, I think he knows exactly what he's doing where this is concerned.

On the "good" news front, Russia is likely to suffer more in the long term form anuclear Iran than we are, but they are too stupid and blind to realize it. Cold comfort, however!

Less stability--I still can't figure out why so many on the left seem to love unstable/dangerous international political landscapes. Where they don't exist, they go out of their way to foster them, it seems.