Obama: Nuclear Illusionist

An editorial from the Wall Street Journal:
Rarely has a Presidential speech been so immediately and transparently divorced from reality as Mr. Obama's in Prague. The President delivered a stirring call to banish nuclear weapons at the very moment that North Korea and Iran are bidding to trigger the greatest proliferation breakout in the nuclear age. Mr. Obama also proposed an elaborate new arms-control regime to reduce nuclear weapons, even as both Pyongyang and Tehran are proving that the world's great powers lack the will to enforce current arms-control treaties. . . .
The President went even further in Prague, noting that "as a nuclear power -- as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon -- the United States has a moral responsibility to act." That barely concealed apology for Hiroshima is an insult to the memory of Harry Truman, who saved a million lives by ending World War II without a bloody invasion of Japan. As for the persuasive power of "moral authority," we should have learned long ago that the concept has no meaning in Pyongyang or Tehran, much less in the rocky hideouts of al Qaeda.
The truth is that Mr. Obama's nuclear vision has reality exactly backward. To the extent that the U.S. has maintained a large and credible nuclear arsenal, it has prevented war, defeated the Soviet Union, shored up our alliances and created an umbrella that persuaded other nations that they don't need a bomb to defend themselves.
The most dangerous proliferation in the last 50 years has come outside the U.S. umbrella on the South Asian subcontinent, where India and Pakistan want to deter each other. No treaty stopped A.Q. Khan. Meanwhile, the world's most conspicuous antiproliferation victories in recent decades were the Israeli strike against Saddam Hussein's nuclear plant at Osirak, and the U.S. toppling of Saddam and the way it impressed Libya's Moammar Ghadafi.
All of which means that any serious effort at nonproliferation has to begin with North Korea and Iran. They are the urgent threat to nuclear peace, the focus of years of great-power diplomacy and sanctions. U.N. resolutions have formally barred both countries from developing an atomic bomb and the missiles to deliver them. If Iran acquires a bomb or North Korea retains one despite this attempt to stop them, then the world will conclude that there is no such thing as an enforceable antinuclear order. It will be every nation for itself.
In the Middle East, a Shiite bomb will send the region's Arab nations scurrying to Pakistan to get a Sunni weapon. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and perhaps even Iraq will be in the market for a deterrent. The Turks -- long a power in the region but wondering if NATO membership is enough protection -- will also seek to join the nuclear club. Meanwhile, Japan will increasingly wonder if Americans would really risk an attack on themselves in order to protect Tokyo. The nightmare imagined by strategists at the dawn of the atomic age in the 1950s, with every major nation getting the bomb, will be that much closer.
Mr. Obama is a brilliant talker, and his words thrilled a Europe that wants to believe he can conjure peace and a nuclear-free world. But note well how little the Europeans answered the President's call for more troops in Afghanistan, much less any help in stopping a nuclear Iran. Mr. Obama is offering pleasant illusions, while mullahs and other rogues plot explosive reality.