Build It and They Will Leave

Are you enjoying seven or eight hours of uninterrupted sleep each night? Are you not drinking too much? Are you unable to break out into cold sweats at random moments throughout the day? Kaj Leers can fix all that:

Are you a world leader with dictatorial aspirations? Need cash quick? Want the world to listen? Would you like an embargo scrapped, or to invade a country without drawing immediate condemnations and threats of war from the other neighborhood toughs? Then build yourself some nuclear weapons, pronto.

That seems to be the message the West’s diplomats are sending the world. Whether you’re terrorist-supporting Iran, a tinpot dictator in North Korea or a would-be czar with aspirations to reunite Russian-speaking territories by force, the path to getting your heart’s desire involves possessing and developing a nuclear weapons program.

Obama and NATO have shown that against someone like Putin, words are preferable to action — although it’s difficult to say how much of that fecklessness is due to Russia’s nuclear stockpile, and how much of it is due to Western leaders living in a dream world informed by wishful thinking rather than by hard reality.

But whatever the reason, between the Russo-Ukrainian War (let’s call it what it is) and more than a decade of failure to halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions, it’s safe to say that non-proliferation is dead or very close to it.