Posted by
Always To The Right on Thursday, December 11, 2008 4:32:13 PM
I made this point in the posts linked up top: How is this policy
preferable to helping Israel boost its second-strike capabilities? It
already has enough firepower to “completely and utterly obliterate”
Iran. Outfit its submarines with nuclear CBMs, upgrade its defensive
anti-ballistic missile systems, and and let it take care of business.
The “umbrella” route
only really makes sense for countries with no weapons, to deter
regional nuclear powers from bullying them and to deter those under the
umbrella from being spooked into building nukes of their own. That’s
why Hillary’s idea to extend the policy to Saudi Arabia makes a certain
perverse sense — or would, if you could find an American eager to jump
into a nuclear war to defend Riyadh. The umbrella policy could, I
guess, in theory be an incentive to get Israel to give up its own
weapons and set a “non-nuclear” standard for the Middle East, but given
the vicissitudes of American politics and, as Richard Fernandez
says, the fact that there’s no reason to believe the west would act to
nuke Iran when it wasn’t willing to stop Iran from getting nukes in the
first place, the Israelis would be insane to agree to that.