Posted on June 25, 2025
Obama And The Bomb
Why non-nuke deals have become
non-starters
by
Daniel Clark
"The
Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to
be awarded to President Barack Obama," the official press release began, "for
his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation
between peoples. The committee has
attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without
nuclear weapons." Perhaps the committee
should have waited for more than nine months into the Obama presidency before
jumping to such a conclusion.
Late in 2001, Algerian President
Abdelaziz Boutefika relayed an ultimatum from President George W. Bush to
Libyan dictator Moammar Qadaffi that "either you get rid of your weapons of
mass destruction or he will personally destroy them and destroy everything with
no discussion." In 2003, after seeing what
had become of Saddam Hussein, Qaddafi complied by giving up his nuclear
ambitions and his already existing stocks of chemical weapons.
It seemed
like a smart move on his part at the time.
Saddam had threatened to use his weapons of mass destruction, and had
blocked, evaded, and tried to bribe the weapons inspectors, and as a result he
was hiding out in the desert, awaiting capture and execution. Unlike the Butcher of Baghdad, Qaddafi was
somewhat cooperative with the inspections, resulting in a gradual normalization
with the West. Until civil war broke out
in Libya in 2011, that is. With no
discernible national interest at stake, President Obama led an international
coalition that hammered the Libyan forces with naval and air bombardments. After seven months, Qaddafi was deposed, and
soon afterward the rebels captured, beat, sodomized and killed him. If there was any doubt about Obama's
responsibility for this, his grim but unserious Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton spelled it out when she gloated, "We came, we saw, he died."
The power
vacuum that existed in Qaddafi's absence made way for the rise of the terrorist
group Ansar al-Sharia, which killed four Americans in the attack on the U.S.
consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012.
In the long run, that might prove not be the worst of it; for the
episode had illustrated that it doesn't pay to make concessions to the United
States where nuclear ambitions are concerned.
Obama's
next nuclear double-cross was worse, in that it victimized a friendly nation
while benefiting an adversary. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the
diffusion of its nuclear arsenal became an acute international security
concern, with a significant fraction of them being inherited by newly
independent Ukraine. President Bill
Clinton, along with the heads of state of Ukraine, Russia and Great Britain,
signed the Budapest Memorandum, by which the Ukrainians agreed to turn their
nukes over to Russia, presumably to be destroyed. In exchange, the other three signatories
promised to protect the territorial integrity of Ukraine, meaning of course
that Russia would never invade.
This was not a treaty, as it should
have been, but America's obligation to uphold it is plain to see. Naturally, the Ukrainians didn't trust the
Russians not to attack, and they probably weren't convinced that Britain had
the wherewithal to stop them. The
assurance they needed, which persuaded them to give up their nuclear deterrent,
came from the United States of America.
Twenty
years later, the territorial integrity of Ukraine was violated when Russia
invaded and seized Crimea. Apart from
imposing some largely symbolic sanctions after the fact, President Obama did remarkably
little. He barely even offered Ukraine
any rhetorical support, let alone military aid.
He would defend this inaction years later, in a 2023 interview with
CNN's Christian Amanpour, when he offered the flimsy Kremlin talking points
that "Crimea was full of a lot of Russian speakers, and there was some sympathy
to the view that Russia was representing its interests." Did he mean Crimea kind of belonged to Russia, even though it sat within Ukraine's borders? So much for integrity.
The current crisis in Iran might never have happened if Obama had done
anything to encourage the "green revolution" that arose in reaction to Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad's bogus re-election in 2009.
Our president offered the dissidents no moral or material support,
because he was determined instead to forge an alliance with the Iranian
mullahs. There is no guarantee that the
rebellion would have succeeded with America's help, but if it had, Obama could
have negotiated a nuclear deal with a far friendlier counterpart than the
hostile regime with which he made a wholly unsatisfactory agreement in 2015.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, informally known as the Iran
nuclear deal, threw an economic lifeline to the mullahs in the form of over
$100 billion in sanctions relief, along with a clandestine cash payment of $400
million. To the degree that the deal
inhibited Iran's ability to develop nuclear weapons, it did so only
temporarily, with the relevant provisions sunsetting after 8 to 15 years. Long before those expiration dates arrived,
however, the efficacy of the agreement was already called into question by the
fact that Iran had been allowed a degree of control over the verification
process. In a lapse in judgment that
defies innocent explanation, the Iranians were allowed to submit their own soil
samples for examination, rather than having the International Atomic Energy
Agency obtain them directly from the inspection sites.
Obama's nuclear non-proliferation policies could hardly be more
counterproductive. The message they sent
to the rest of the world was that if you cooperate with the Americans by giving
up your nuclear program, you will live to regret it, if you're lucky. Remain hostile and obstinate, on the other hand,
and they will reward you.
We didn't need to wait for all of these developments to realize how
terribly wrong the Nobel Committee had been about Obama. It revealed as much in its opening sentence,
as soon as it used the phrase "for his extraordinary efforts." Here's a man who has never put an extraordinary
effort into anything in his entire life -- except, perhaps, for maintaining his
image.
The Shinbone: The
Frontier of the Free Press