Wars, Political Battles Complicate Obama Effort to Prevent Spread of Nuclear Weapons

President Obama's decision to order a nuclear review comes as he takes the rare step of chairing a watershed session of the UN security council. Photograph: Reuters

From Global Security:

WASHINGTON -- Well before the 2008 election, foreign-policy hands predicted that the next commander in chief would confront an incendiary in-box without precedent in the modern American presidency. Recently, Barack Obama has begun to grasp what they meant (see GSN, Sept. 23).

After spending his honeymoon wrestling with the Great Recession and health care, and with cap-and-trade and climate change on deck, Obama will soon enter a stretch of his young presidency that includes deciding how to end an unpopular war in Iraq, salvage a failing war in Afghanistan, and avoid a potential war with Iran. All are likely to affect his signature initiative to check what many experts see as the greatest long-term threat to U.S. national security -- the spread of doomsday weapons.

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My Comment: An interesting analysis on what appears to be the priorities for President Obama and his agenda. While I do not have any disagreement with its view on what President Obama wants .... the article does not properly focus on the component that will greatly influence and impact both his domestic and foreign agenda.

That component is the economy and the Federal Government's trillion dollar deficits.

This is the 800 lb gorilla and 2 ton elephant in the room. If President Obama cannot reverse the deterioration of the economy .... both his domestic and foreign agenda will be crippled, and the Democrats will be paying a heavy political price in the 2010 and Presidential elections in 2012.

Nuclear proliferation is important .... but in today's world no one is listening to the U.S. and President Obama. Our economic and financial strength was always adequate to sway countries to our side .... but that is rapidly becoming an option that we are not able to fulfill. The genie is out of the bottle and we are now living in an environment where numerous countries are now positioning themselves to acquire nuclear weaponry .... and there is nothing that we can do to change this.