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Laura Rozen of Politico has written an assessment of Vice President
Biden’s nuclear policy speech from last week that the White House is
sure to love. But that’s because she appears to have bought their line
of argument a little too uncritically and has mistaken symbolism for
substance. No doubt this is exactly the response that administration
salesmanship has been calibrated to create, but it misses the deeper
problems— problems which, the White House knows all too well, still
loom.
Rozen makes much of the fact that the Veep was
introduced by Secretary of Defense Gates. And I agree, the symbolism of
that move was pitch-perfect PR. Gates is A) a veteran Republican and
B) on the record as being in favor of certain steps that the
administration is on the record opposing. So the implicit message of
that introduction was: The Obama administration is wholly united on
nuclear policy; even the nuke hawk Bob Gates is on board with the Prague
agenda (i.e., the nuclear free world vision); critics to the
right—above all the Senate’s “Gang of 41”—need not worry about this
administration’s commitment the reliability of the stockpile; Gates has
vouched for Obama.
Rozen seems to buy that in toto. She
shouldn’t. [The Administration's Nuclear Games cont]
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