Mirabile Dictu — An Intelligent Foreign Policy Decision

To the great astonishment of all of us who believed the U.S. government incapable of making an intelligent foreign and defense policy decision, the Obama administration has decided to terminate the U.S. plan to place anti-missile missiles in Poland and related radars in the Czech Republic. The plan had mightily provoked the Russian government, which not unreasonably viewed the program as part of a U.S. plan to stage a successful first-strike on Russia while crippling the Russians’ missile counterattack. This decision hardly means, of course, that U.S. ambitions and plans for total earth-and-space military domination have been altered in the large. Yet, by removing an element that provoked the Russians unnecessarily, the recent announcement should help to calm the nervousness in Moscow.

Now, if only something can calm the nervousness and will to power in Washington, D.C., the world will be able to breathe easier. Although the end of the Cold War pushed the threat of nuclear war out of the public’s consciousness, this threat remains the most menacing one for all mankind, and efforts to diminish it now seem stuck in low gear.