Kumbaya Foreign Policy

This is precisely why you don't put a law professor/community organizer with no executive, foreign policy or military experience in charge of your country.

I would usually be glad to see president Obama essentially handing the government back to conservatives in 2010 and 2012, but in this case he's also putting my life in danger. So maybe not such a good thing, on the whole.

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Obama Limits When U.S. Would Use Nuclear Arms

by DAVID E. SANGER and PETER BAKER
Published: April 5, 2010

WASHINGTON — President Obama said Monday that he was revamping American nuclear strategy to substantially narrow the conditions under which the United States would use nuclear weapons.

But the president said in an interview that he was carving out an exception for “outliers like Iran and North Korea” that have violated or renounced the main treaty to halt nuclear proliferation.
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Mr. Obama’s strategy is a sharp shift from those of his predecessors and seeks to revamp the nation’s nuclear posture for a new age in which rogue states and terrorist organizations are greater threats than traditional powers like Russia and China.

It eliminates much of the ambiguity that has deliberately existed in American nuclear policy since the opening days of the cold war. 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….
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I agree with Allahpundit's analysis at Hot Air:

All this is, really, is a symbolic gesture of good faith to put pressure on Russia and China to reduce their own stockpiles. Why we think they can be trusted to do that, especially when the United States is handing them a tactical advantage by reducing its own stockpiles unilaterally, is beyond me. But then it’s also beyond me why Obama would suspend development on any new forms of nuclear weapons, which the new policy also demands...

...In limiting the nuclear deterrent to nuclear weapons (and, in certain cases, biological attacks) instead of WMD generally, doesn’t this create an incentive to focus on developing bio and chemical weapons? In most cases those are less dangerous than nukes, but nukes are also harder to develop and more easy to monitor. Do we really want tomorrow’s A.Q. Khans focusing on smallpox instead? Exit question two: If the point here is to raise the taboo on using nuclear weapons, doesn’t that actually make them more enticing for jihadi fanatics?