Trashing Cirincione, Acquitting Bush
Gabriel Schoenfeld’s LA Times column denouncing the “theology of arms control” is very weird. He starts out talking about Obama’s pledge to renew America’s equipment to nuclear abolition and then abruptly transitions into how Joseph Cirincione, the president of the Plougshares Fund, an informal Obama advisor and one of the most respected nuclear wonks in the country, thought that Syria didn’t have a nuclear weapons program when it did. For Schoenfeld, the presence of a Syrian nuclear program – one that wasn’t especially close to actually acquiring a bomb – proves that the approach of using NPT style international treaties to halt proliferation combined with a committment by the nuclear countries to pursue abortion is dead. But is it the NPT’s fault that Syria is proliferating? When you consider that we have had eight years of a president who’s done his best to trash the nonproliferation approach that Shoenfeld criticizes, shouldn’t we we perhaps look to that radically new approach as the source of our problems?
It’s probably a good idea to review the nonproliferation lowlights of the current administration. After Bush petulantly withdrew form the Agreed Framework with North Korea, they developed more nuclear weapons than they ever did under Clinton. Also, his committment to unilateral military action as the primary means to deal with proliferation – despite the obvious fact that Iraq had no nuclear program – provided an incentive for every country on the US’s bad list to acquire a nuclear deterrent as soon as possible. And how could we forget the India Nuclear Deal, a blatant violation of the NPT that sent the message that the US would opt out of its nonproliferation treaty committments if it meant some short-term geopolitical advantage. And there’s also the serial trashing and attempted discrediting of the IAEA, despite (really, because) their being freakishly accurate about Iraq.
The only theology that’s been shattered recently is the hawkish adherence to the rule that the United States can make the world safe from the danger of nuclear violence by a doctrine of unilateral preemption.
