One thing I remember distinctly in my political awakening was the utter stupidity of the Nuclear Freeze movement. These folks basically said the US should ignore the Soviet Union, not try to keep a nuclear advantage, and that somehow this would guarantee world peace. It would have done no such thing; the arms race did not, in the end, cause a war so much as it prevented one and, by pitting the backwards Soviet Union against the wealthier and more advanced U.S., ultimately bankrupted the Soviets.
The relative sanity of the world powers in the Cold War did a great deal to prevent a nuclear war. Though aggressive and ideological, the Soviets had a variety of “realist” concerns such as their maintenance of a buffer with Western Europe, their concern for Islamic fundamentalism on their southern border, their break with the Chinese, and their desire to avoid a nuclear confrontation with the U.S. The “Mutually Assured Destruction” framework worked because of the strong component of Soviet realism in their decision-making.
Yet we were told that a nuclear war was immanent. That the arms race was insane. Little children wrote poems about how scared they were about getting immolated in a nuclear war. Dramatic and scary movies like The Day After gave school children nightmares.
But now we face a situation where a much more volatile nation has endeavored to acquire nuclear weapons. And this power has stated its intention to wipe a neighbor off the map. And this power has behaved profoundly irresponsibly since its regime change in 1979, taking American embassy personnel hostage and supporting some of the worst terrorist groups on Earth, as well as supporting the murder of an allegedly blasphemous author. And this power has a certain romantic sensibility, imagining itself as the vanguard of a new, anti-materialist philosophy of asceticism and martyrdom. Yet the nuclear freeze crowd is nowhere to be found. There are no protests and enlistments of children in letter campaigns. No “five minutes to midnight” placards or the scary skeleton protesters. In short, the entire pacifistic left, which once warned us irrationally about an unlikely nuclear war, is out to lunch when the possibility of a real nuclear exchange or nuclear terrorism may soon be upon us.
Is this surprising? It is not, because the left has permitted the illiberal, extremist, and violent Islamic world to define itself as the non-white, non-western, third world victim. Wearing this mantle, it is immune from the criticisms that once graced our own regime for engaging in an entirely rational national security strategy vis a vis a, more or less, predictable adversary in the form of the Soviet Union. There will be no “red phone” to Islamic Jihad, Ahmadnejad, or any of Iran’s proxies. If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, the risk of a nuclear war of some kind will be much more real than it is today. And, sadly, there are comparatively few military and other options now at our disposal to do anything about it.
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