Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Foreign Policy Absurdities

As part of my self-appointed effort to ventilate the stale discourse of contemporary foreign policy, I offer up my list of Top 10 Truly Absurd Features of Contemporary Foreign Affairs. To make it a challenge, I’m excluding any mention of John McCain.

No. 1: It is absurd that the United States still has thousands of powerful nuclear weapons on constant alert or in strategic reserve.

[...]

Inflicting unacceptable damage requires remarkably few weapons [...] and it no longer makes any sense for the United States to keep thousands of them in its arsenal. It’s expensive, it undermines the broader effort to slow proliferation, and it increases the risks of nuclear accidents or even nuclear theft. [...]It’s easy to get confused about this subject if you spend too much time reading the arcane writings of nuclear strategists — who can come up with all sorts of bizarre warfighting scenarios where numbers might make some purely theoretical difference — but once you pull your head out of the fog and think about the issue like a normal person, our present posture looks rather silly.

No. 2: The current composition of the U.N. Security Council makes no sense. In other words, it’s absurd.

  Stephen Walt: Foreign Policy
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...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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