The cheapest debating trick in the nuclear weapons/arms control business is the well-crafted rhetorical question. Rhetorical questions are asked not to seek answers, but to advance preferred outcomes. Hardy perennials include, “Can’t we do better than…?” The best rhetorical questions frame a public policy argument advantageously, untie purse string, help gain approval for a treaty …
FYRP: The Non-Lugar Program
by | 2013-06-19 | 9 Comments
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming. Department of State | Nunn-Lugar is dead. Long live non-Lugar. Here, have a fact sheet. Bloomberg | Wait. So Iranian President-elect Rohani is ready to suspend enrichment of 20 percent uranium (for sanction relaxation, of course). He is ready to fulfill one the US’s major demands? Sounds great! Or way too good …
Peace, Justice and Nuclear Arms Reductions
by | 2013-06-19 | 14 Comments
[Update below the jump. -Ed.] Berlin brings out the best in U.S. Presidents. President Barack Obama has now tried in Berlin to replicate successful JFK’s recipe for curtailing nuclear tests. Senior administration officials have talked privately with the Kremlin about taking parallel steps to reduce strategic forces by one-third and to make bold reductions in …
The Vision Thing
by | 2013-06-17 | 10 Comments
President George H.W. Bush bemoaned his lack of “the vision thing.” In contrast, George W. Bush was a bold visionary. By acting on his ambitious rhetoric to extend freedom, fight terrorism and wage preventive war, Bush 43 became America’s least admired wartime President since Harry S Truman. (Read it and wince: Bush’s second inaugural address …
