Thoughts on Obama's Unilateral Disarmament

At a time when Iran is developing a nuclear weapon, North Korea is threatening "unpredictable strikes" while Russia & China are going on the offensive with regard to their own global ambitions, President Obama decrees we will have a policy of unilateral disarmament.

To be precise, the Obama Administration is pledging not to use nuclear weapons against supposedly non-nuclear countries even if they should attack us with biological and chemical weapons although Iran & North Korea are purportedly exempt from this policy.

Does President Obama honestly think that just because he's made this pledge that nations like Russia will follow suit? Nations like Russia would rightly view this as a retreat and an opportunity to escalate their nuclear programs.

Of course, Obama doesn't see it like that:

The greatest threat to U.S. and global security is no longer a nuclear exchange between nations, but nuclear terrorism by violent extremists and nuclear proliferation to an increasing number of states. For the first time, preventing nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism is now at the top of America's nuclear agenda.

The effect of this policy is that terrorists need only to launch a nuclear, biological or chemical strike from a "non-nuclear state" and President Obama has effectively tied our hands.

This announcement strikes me as little more than a futile effort to be liked by parts of the world that will never like us. Niccolo Machiavelli had it right. It is better to be feared than it is to be loved if you cannot have both. He was also right to declare, "Before all else, be armed."