https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14181/limiting-nuclear-arms
Nearly 40 years ago, critics of President Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength” policy used the same template of criticism. This brush-off existed not because Reagan was putting forward unworkable or unrealistic ideas. The real root of the criticism was, and still is, frustration over the fact that their bumper-sticker ideas (such as a “nuclear freeze” or “Global Zero”) have never been accepted by top U.S. national-security officials or approved by Congress.
Reagan did not oppose arms control; he opposed “bad” and unverified arms control that gave huge advantages to Soviet Union, and opened what he famously described as a “window of vulnerability.”
The secret is that the push for a nuclear freeze or “Global Zero” — in 1981 as in 2019 — was not then, and is not now, about strategic stability or eliminating Russian or Chinese nuclear coercion. It is, rather, an effort to curtail U.S. military power.
Such a tethered America cannot be the leader of the Free World, after having jettisoned the twin fantasies of China’s “peaceful rise” or a “reset” with Russia. In a world in which enemies of liberty are on the march, the presence and judicious use of American power is critical.
It comes as no surprise that U.S. President Donald Trump’s reported plan to forge a new nuclear-arms deal with Russia and China — when New START expires in 2021 — is being attacked by American advocates of unilateral disarmament.
Take Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, for example. Echoing Russian complaints, Kimball wrote recently:
“[T]his new grand-deal gambit does not represent a serious attempt to halt and reverse a global arms race. It is more likely that Trump and [National Security Adviser John] Bolton are scheming to walk away from New START by setting conditions they know to be too difficult to achieve.”
