Disarming America: Obama Betrays Reagan's Dream
IBDEditorials.com
The Obama Record: The president's shredding of the Constitution began at the Preamble's provision for the common defense. He gave away our missile defense to appease Moscow and betray our allies.
Derided as Star Wars, the Strategic Defense Initiative announced by President Reagan on March 23, 1983, was to be the fulfillment of his dream of being able to deter or even defeat a nuclear missile attack, rather than avenge one, with a multilayered system of defenses aimed at enemy missiles in all stages of flight.
SDI and its concept of defending America and its allies were attacked as destabilizing and the cause of a new arms race. In truth, it was an extension of Reagan's strategy of "we win, they lose," which would confront and defeat, rather than merely contain, the USSR.
When Reagan met with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986, there was no talk of special relationships or reset buttons, only a commitment by the leader of the Free World to defend the U.S. against nuclear missile attack. Reagan stood firm, and the Soviet Union would soon collapse.
Last May, when Obama was in Deauville, France, for the G-8 Summit and bilateral discussions with world leaders such as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, he hailed Senate passage of a New START Treaty that eviscerated U.S. missile defense as evidence of "an outstanding relationship" that "is good for the security and the prosperity of both of our countries."
It was certainly good for Moscow. It now had an American president who believed the threat we faced was nuclear weapons, not those who would consider using them against us. Eliminate those weapons and you wouldn't need such a thing as missile defense.
In Prague on April 24, 2009, Obama pledged an effort to rid the world of nuclear weapons, calling them "the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War." We won that war in part because of our possession of those weapons and in part because of Reagan's commitment to build a missile defense against them.
Victory, however, was not in Obama's vocabulary, and the concept of "we win, they lose" was and is totally foreign to him. So too was the concept of loyalty to allies freed from the imperial yoke of Soviet imperialism.
Obama would curtail deployment of additional ground-based interceptors (GBIs) at Fort Greely in Alaska and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. He has also canceled ready-to-deploy missile defenses such as the Air Force's Airborne Laser program in which converted 747s with high-intensity lasers would destroy enemy missiles in their vulnerable boost phase.
The president would also scuttle plans for ground-based interceptors to be based in Poland, with tracking radars in the Czech Republic, designed to shoot down missiles launched from Iran against the U.S. or Europe.
He'd betray allies who risked so much. Within hours of Obama's election in 2008, Medvedev announced that Moscow would deploy SS-26 Iskander missiles in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad between our NATO allies Poland and Lithuania. He said that "we are ready to abandon this decision to deploy the missiles in Kaliningrad if the new American administration, after analyzing the real usefulness of a system to respond to rogue states, decides to abandon its anti-missile system."
The Russians objected to our missile defense plans, and Obama caved. This gutting of missile defense would come on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland on Sept. 17, 1939. "Just after midnight," the Czech prime minister, Jan Fischer, said later, "I was informed in a telephone call by ... President Obama that (his) administration had decided to pull out from the plan missile defense shield installations" in the Czech Republic and Poland."
The New Start Treaty that President Obama signed was in fact a missile defense Munich in exchange for appeasement in our time.
Obama's gutting of missile defense would go beyond merely defunding promising missile defense systems such as the Airborne Laser, curtailing deployment of ground-based interceptors or betraying our NATO allies. He would also pursue betraying the U.S. by giving our missile defense secrets to Moscow.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Brad Roberts recently testified before a House Armed Services subcommittee that the Obama administration was actively considering giving Moscow classified missile defense data to allay Russian concerns about the capabilities and intent of our proposed ballistic missile defense system based in Europe to guard against missiles launched from Iran. This would include data such as the burnout velocity of Raytheon Co.'s Standard Missile-3 interceptors, the centerpiece of our Aegis ballistic missile defense system.
Obama not only set America on a downward spiral of military mediocrity by signing the 2012 defense authorization bill. He also issued a signing statement that language in the bill restrictions aimed at protecting top-secret technical data on the U.S. Standard Missile-3 might impinge on his constitutional foreign policy authority.
The president wants to save the New Start Treaty that the Russians have threatened to abandon if we try to fully implement Reagan's dream of defeating a nuclear missile attack. Russia has unilaterally asserted that any qualitative or quantitative improvement in U.S. missile defenses would justify withdrawal from the treaty.
From betrayal of our allies to betrayal of our missile defense secrets, Obama has systematically shredded Reagan's dream of a nuclear umbrella sufficient to deter or even defeat a nuclear missile attack. For some reason, apologizing to and appeasing our enemies has been more important than defending the American people.