Like most Democrat positions, the reasons appear superficially irrational. One always gets the sense that they aren't really telling you why they oppose something until you consider it in the context of their larger goals.Who knew Euroweenies were wiser than U.S. Dems and leftists?
The mere prospect of a missile shield was enough to give the U.S. significant leverage with the former U.S.S.R. because it threw the entire balance-of-power paradigm into the trash barrel. The Democrats horror was less about national security and more about political security. The status quo had worked in their favor for over thirty years and they saw the distinct possibility of joining the Soviets on the ash heap of history.
Subsequent events bore out that concern. Dozens of countries adopted democratic governance and embraced principals of globalism, dooming socialism to living-museum status. The uni-polar world had made it safe for the real enemy to prosper--free enterprise. Prosperous middle classes don't vote for socialism.
The missile shield nullifies forever the kind of military threat that could derail globalism. Sure, you'd still have terrorism, but nothing of the scale that could wipe out entire nations, economies and international trade--not a problem for you and me, but for ambitious left-wingers, it's a catastrophe. . .
That's why this little piece of by-the-way news is so important:NATO countries endorsed Bush administration plans for installing a missile defense system in alliance countries in Europe on Thursday even as they rebuffed President Bush’s entreaties to extend membership of the alliance to the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia.Getting that endorsement just made the Democrats plans for missile defense much, much harder to pursue. Making the missile defense a NATO alliance program sets a trap for the Democrats, who are on record as wanting to "strengthen our traditional alliances". Unilaterally abrogating the program would put them in a position of going-it-alone and having to explain to the American people what they are doing.
(via Instapundit, Mike's America)
1 comment:
Well, the realities are a little more complex than this article suggests:
1) For a missle-based ABM system, it's demonstrably provable that it is much, much cheaper to overwhelm the system than it is to build it. In other words, offense scales notably more cheaply than defense.
2) Given "1" above, it's clear that all a missle-based defensive system would have done in the middle of the Cold War is to exacerbate the problems of lots and lots of nuclear weapons. The treaty allowed the USA and the USSR to build one system, nominally to protect the capital of each nation. The USSR had one presumably covering Moscow -- the USA never bothered.
3) "Star Wars" changed that, since it wasn't missle-based, and, although it's highly debatable, was nominally something which could be built for a reasonable cost, and scaled differently -- or at least looked enough so that the USSR, whose Flush was already busted, could not "call", much less raise. They simply could not afford to match the pot. This contributed strongly to the breakup of the Soviet Union.
4) Those old arguments against an ABM system now are worthless. The USA is not facing an attack from hundreds of missles with dozens of MIRVed warheads. The likely missle attack now is a couple shots from NoKo or Iran (or a single shot from a subsidized terrorist group from an ocean-based ship). THIS a modern ABM system can certainly protect against. You probably won't pay to stop any weapon aimed anywhere, but you can certainly afford to protect the top 20-30 largest near-coastal cities. Terrorists won't get a lot of mileage off of blowing up someone's south-40 in the center of Mississippi. It would be a substantial scare but nowhere near the kind of "big splash" they would be looking for as a return on their investment. ... and we'd probably also make money selling the system to Israel, too.
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