A famous world leader once said: “The facts as they are to-day cannot change the facts as they were last September. If I was right then, I am still right now.”
Conversations are almost certainly now taking place in South Korea, Japan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran that would have been considered impossible 20 years ago. Those countries leaders are either now thinking about acquiring or building nuclear weapons, or they’re asleep at the switch. Whether they choose to do so remains to be seen. But that they must now consider it is the new reality.
Throughout the Cold War, and into the 1990s, the proliferation of nuclear weapons was, for the most part, prevented by the reality of a robust US nuclear force tied closely to the understanding the US would consider nuclear threats against friends and allies as a threat against the US.
That truth unraveled due to bad policies: first, our failure to honor a foolish and impossible guarantee by President Clinton (in 1994) to defend the territorial integrity of Ukraine if they surrendered their nuclear arsenal (left over following the breakup of the USSR). Russia correctly assessed US posture vis-à-vis Ukraine, and in 2014 seized Crimea and began to undermine Kiev’s control of eastern Ukraine. Ukraine’s final submission to Moscow is now only a matter of time.
Then North Korea reached an agreement with President Clinton (1995) to end nuclear weapons research. Clearly, they did not. Now, they’re a nuclear-armed nation.
Iran reached an agreement with President Obama to end nuclear research just two years ago. If they ever intended to honor it, events in Korea – and elsewhere in the Middle East – will lead them to rethink that agreement.
That Col Qaddafi surrendered his nuclear development program to the US in 2003, only to be overthrown by a coalition of forces that included the US 2011, proved the value of a nuclear force.
There are multiple reasons why each of these situations ended in a failure for US foreign policy, but at the root, there’s the same issue: in each case the administration and the policy professionals of Washington were engaged in wishful thinking, building on the belief that the people of various nations will act the way Washington policy mavens want them to act, rather than in pursuit of their own national interests, even as our nuclear force has shrunk, and aged.
Now, consider the horrific crime statistics in the US: 7,881 blacks murdered in 2016 (up 900 from 2015), 91% murdered by other blacks. There were 15,399 murders in the US in 2016; black men make up just 6% of the US population but roughly half the murders are by blacks (and half the victims are blacks). Between 1980 and 2008 blacks committed half of all murders in the US; black men commit 42% of robberies, and 34% of all felonies across the nation.
At the same time only 59% of black males graduate from high school nation-wide (only 20% in Detroit).
In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan described an impending crisis in the black community, with more than 20% of black children born into a single parent household. If something wasn’t done about it, Moynihan warned, the black community faced disaster. Today, after two generations of aggressive government policies, more than 70% of black children are born into single parent households. One-third of these youths will spend time in prison. If they are growing up in an inner city, that number is higher.
The black community, in particular the poor urban black community, in the US has been destroyed. It was destroyed because government policies begun in the 1960s turned a crisis into a disaster.
What does that have to do with the failure of our nuclear containment policy and the impending nuclear weapon proliferation crisis? Simply this: both proliferation and the destruction of the black family – and a number of other impending crises – have their roots in the wishful thinking of “policy experts” convinced that the accepted wisdom of centuries on everything from child-rearing to economics to international relations could be readily dispensed with, and that the world would willy-nilly follow their line of reasoning. Specific policies generated these results. What we need now are new, and different, policies.
But don’t expect change from the policy wonks, they don’t change. Consider the quote above, from Neville Chamberlain, 17 March 1939, nearly 6 months after the Munich Accord was signed, 2 days after Germany invaded Czechoslovakia.
Copyright 2017 Arrias
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