Obama Plays Hardball with the Russians

Obama Plays Hardball with the Russians
By Jerome Grossman

In 1981, at the height of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president of the United States. He immediately heightened tensions using belligerent rhetoric attacking the Soviet Union as "The Evil Empire" while authorizing an enormous military buildup against "the focus of evil in the modern world."

A significant number of Americans were worried about the harsh negatives of the Reagan initiatives. One manifestation was the Nuclear Freeze Movement that sought to decrease tensions as well as the nuclear buildup by limiting all nuclear arsenals at current levels as a first step toward their eventual elimination.

Reagan showed his annoyance criticizing "the placard carriers", giving little credence to the groundswell of support for the freeze campaign that swept America in 1981 – 82. This grass-roots uprising was a major factor behind Reagan's March 1983 speech that initiated the missile defense program (SDI) that continues to waste billions of dollars in the military budget.

Among the protesters supporting the Freeze was Columbia University senior Barack Obama, who in 1983 published a plea in a campus newsmagazine for "a nuclear free world" opposing SDI and military industrial interests “with their billion-dollar erector sets."

Reagan's attachment to the concept of missile defense started a very expensive research program that has produced meager results while leading to continued wrangling with non-communist Russia over their installation in Eastern Europe. Reagan's SDI simply will not defend against a sophisticated missile equipped with decoys.

Obama recently announced that he was cancelling the missile defense shield installations in Poland and Czech Republic. He has been severely and incorrectly criticized by military hawks for this “unilateral” concession, but it wasn’t unilateral and it was a deal, not a concession The SDI system was always a bargaining chip and Obama was the first president who knew how to use it.
He eliminated the ineffective shield in Eastern Europe in exchange for much more valuable Russian concessions and cooperation on a variety of issues. Here are some of the particulars

1. Russia allows U.S. military flights over its territory, planes carrying soldiers and equipment to Afghanistan.

2. Russia allows Kyrgyzstan to give the U.S. an important military base on the Russian border.

3. Russia acquiesces to the U. S. training local troops in the state of Georgia with which Russia is at odds

4. Russia promises that it will not help Iran develop an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) capable of reaching the U.S.

5. Russia agrees to support the U.S. position on North Korea

6. Russia acquiesces in the expansion of U.S. influence in the Ukraine.

These are the Russian concessions we know about. There may be more. The media has failed to make the connection and to evaluate their importance in the continuing U. S. wars in Southeast Asia. At the same time, this change in U.S. policy gives a significant political victory to Russian leaders Putin and Medvedev, strengthening their positions at home and around the world.

When will Obama take political advantage of his coup? Probably during his 2012 reelection campaign when his record will be before the electorate and he will boast of his accomplishments on health-care and obtaining Russian cooperation. At the same time, Obama has fulfilled the promise he made at Columbia in 1983 to change policy on missile defense and to work for a world without nuclear weapons. Obama has proven that he knows how to play political hardball-at least with the Russians.

Revisiting Ronald Reagan

Revisiting Ronald Reagan
By Jerome Grossman

All of the current Republican candidates for president regularly and repeatedly invoke the name and the spirit of Ronald Reagan as the patron saint of the party, hoping to bless themselves by adoration of his life and work. Even one Democrat, Barack Obama has used the spirit of Reagan as an endorsement of change saying to a Nevada newspaper that Reagan offered a "sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing."

Reagan did change American politics by assembling a coalition composed of social conservatives, national security hawks, pro-business advocates, anti-tax activists, and religious fundamentalists. To the social conservatives, Reagan attacked the federal welfare system using manufactured stories of welfare mothers driving in pink Cadillacs to pick up their checks. To the national security hawks, he got tough with the Soviet Union, threatening the “evil empire” with nuclear annihilation. To the pro-business advocates, he relaxed antitrust enforcement and listened to corporate lobbyists. To anti-tax activists, he dramatically reduced the tax rate, demeaned the Internal Revenue Service; Eisenhower's top rate was 91%, Kennedy reduced it to 70%, Reagan and GOP successors cut it again by half.

But Reagan's unique contribution was to motivate the religious fundamentalists into serious political activity. At a political function in 1971, for example, he revealed a belief and familiarity in religious millennialism: “Everything is falling into place. It can't be too long now. Ezekiel says that fire and brimstone will be rained upon the enemies of God's people. That must mean they’ll be destroyed by nuclear weapons. They exist now and they never did in the past.” Then Reagan pointed out that Gog, the enemy of God and Israel is Russia, which “has set itself against God.” This echoes what the Rev Pat Robertson had been preaching and writing, that the invention of nuclear weapons should be welcomed as a sign of the immediacy of the Second Coming.

Reagan's notoriety and popularity increased as an icon of entertainment, bolstered by his acting career, his hosting of television programs, his work as spokesman for General Electric, and most importantly his electoral success in California. Some regarded him, however, as a washed up actor, an ignoramus and a tool of the rabid right. He suffered much of the same criticism of his intellectual capacity as George W. Bush.

Reagan did change America, as Bill Clinton said in 1991, while running for president,by exalting “private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family.” The great failure of the Clinton administration was that it failed to change the Reagan scenario. Now, the Democrats will have another opportunity but the campaigns so far have not spelled out the changes in foreign and domestic policy that will steer the nation away from Reaganism.

The Most Important Issue

The Most Important Issue
By Jerome Grossman

President Ronald Reagan said that nuclear weapons are “totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization.” On March 23, 1983, President Reagan's proposed to “eliminate the weapons themselves.” In 1985, at their Geneva Summit Conference, President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made their joint statement that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

In January 2007, a conference on nuclear weapons was held at the very conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Four of the participants produced an article “A world free of nuclear weapons” that appeared in the Wall Street Journal: Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under President Nixon, George Shultz, Secretary of State under President Reagan, William Perry, Secretary of Defense under President Clinton, and former Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia. All were conservatives; two were Republicans, two Democrats. All knew a lot about nuclear weapons. They quoted Reagan and spoke from experience, urging implementation of the neglected goal of worldwide nuclear arsenal reductions, negotiated in full embrace of the ideal of abolition.

The four conservative gurus had a political plan-to insert into the presidentential campaign a serious discussion of the most important issue facing the United States and the world. Their conservative backgrounds would allow their ideas about nuclear security to be accepted as a framework for a national colloquy, bypassing the prejudice against liberals and peaceniks in imperial America.

However, it did not happen. The Republican candidates simply ignored the issue. The Democrats acknowledged the dangers, but chose to focus their campaigns on Iraq, healthcare, immigration, personality and electability. For the media and the organizers of the repetitious and boring debates, nuclear weapons abolition was ignored.

But the real failure must be assigned to the voters who have not demanded answers from the candidates. They know that the arsenals of the U.S. and Russia are powerful enough to irradiate the entire planet, to threaten the existence of the human species, to destroy civilization. They must realize that if North Korea, Iran and Pakistan can manufacture nuclear weapons, that capability is within the range of dozens of other countries, that nuclear weapons are the great equalizers reducing the great powers’ ability to use conventional force. And nuclear terrorism may be just around the corner.

It is only a few minutes before midnight on the atomic clock. Time for a wakeup and time to prepare for abolition by adopting:
A declaration of no first use of nuclear weapons
A universal policy of taking all nukes off hair trigger alert
An international plan to secure all nuclear materials
A ban on building new nukes
A ban on all nukes in space
Ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
Reductions in the size of nuclear forces in all states that possess them

Voters of America: ask your favorite candidates for President, Senate, and House of Representatives what they are doing to save the world from nuclear annihilation -- the most important issue of our time.