The Rockets' Red Glare....

If my fellow Americans ever wanted to know what it's like to live on death row, guess what, folks?  You're doing it right now - in bipartisan fashion (via Newsmax Insider):

A meeting in London between President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ended with the announcement that the U.S. and Russia will seek to further reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

But Newsmax has learned that progress toward arms reduction was set in motion by a little-publicized meeting last month involving Russian strong man Valdmir Putin and the two American elder statesmen, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz.

Kissinger, who served as Secretary of State under Presidents Nixon and Ford, and Schultz, President Reagan’s Secretary of State, traveled to Moscow along with former Senator Sam Nunn and former [Clinton] Defense Secretary William Perry.

They were acting as private citizens and not on an official visit, but Obama was using the statesmen to sound out the Russians on arm reduction.

A source revealed that Obama and Schulz spoke by telephone before the Russian meeting, and that Obama voiced his strong support for their nuclear initiative. Obama reportedly said the matter was a priority for his new administration, though economic issues were taking center stage for the moment.

Kissinger told the Los Angeles Times that after meeting with Putin he had found ample grounds for cooperation.

“I’m happy to report that the differences were not so remarkable and the agreements were considerable,” he said.

Kissinger, Shultz, Nunn and Perry made their views on arms reduction clear in an article that was published in the Wall Street Journal in January.

The four statesmen advocate “reversing reliance on nuclear weapons globally as a vital contribution to preventing their proliferation into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately ending them as a threat to the world.”

They argue that the end of the Cold War made the doctrine of mutual deterrence obsolete, but warn that the world is now “on the precipice of a new and dangerous nuclear era” in which North Korea and Iran could become nuclear powers and terrorists might obtain nuclear weapons.

To deal with the threat, what is needed is “intensive work with leaders of the countries in possession of nuclear weapons to turn the goal of a world without nuclear weapons into a joint enterprise,” the Kissinger team wrote in the Journal.

“Such a joint enterprise, by involving changes in the disposition of the states possessing nuclear weapons, would lend additional weight to efforts already under way to avoid the emergence of a nuclear-armed North Korea and Iran.”

Among the steps the statesmen suggest are “continuing to reduce substantially the size of nuclear forces in all states that possess them.”

That is precisely what Obama and Medvedev discussed in London. In a statement released after their meeting, the two leaders announced talks aimed at replacing the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which is set to expire in December.

Obama accepted Medvedev’s invitation to visit Moscow in July to assess negotiators’ progress on arms reduction, which would give the U.S. Senate enough time to debate and approve a new treaty before the December expiration date.

Get that?  The only way to keep North Korea and Iran and al Qaeda from going nuclear (or, rather, amassing more nukes than they have already) is for the United States to...shrink its nuclear deterrent - which, of course, Red Barry is already doing unilaterally by attrition - and hope our "partner in peace," Czar Vlad, will follow suit.

That's the same neoRussian Empire that is "completing the process of making Iran a nuclear power, and protecting North Korea's nuclear armaments as well as rebuilding their former empire by subterfuge and force," as well as militarizing the Western Hemisphere, "repeatedly blocking] and threaten[ing to block gas supplies to the West, often in the middle of winter, [and]pressur[ing] Kyrgyzstan into closing a U.S. base vital to supplying U.S. troops in Afghanistan," forcing our supply routes to that theater of the War on Terror to go through....Russia.  Meaning that they can, if they so choose, hold our very war effort hostage to extort God only knows what appalling magnitude of concessions from a Hussein White House that is proving itself all too happy to offer them up without being coerced in the slightest.

And, of course, Putin is moving toward the very rebuilding and modernizing his strategic nuclear forces that B.O. has specifically and publicly rejected, all the while mouthing the empty bromides of "detente" and "arms control" as well or better than his Soviet-era predecessors ever did.

If I wasn't convinced that Kissinger and Schultz were lost in the throes of senile dementia, I'd wander if they were pulling a rib on King Hussein akin to sticking a "kick me" sign on the back of the new kid at school.

And speaking of North Korea, they just took another giant step toward nuclear big-stick-dom:

North Korea fired a long-range rocket on Sunday, provoking international outrage and prompting the U.N. Security Council to call an emergency meeting.

The reclusive communist state said a satellite was launched into orbit and circled Earth transmitting revolutionary songs. But both the U.S. military and South Korea said it had failed to enter orbit.

Analysts say the launch was effectively a test of a ballistic missile designed to carry a warhead potentially as far as Alaska.

It was the first big challenge for U.S. President Barack Obama in dealing with the North, whose efforts to build a nuclear arsenal have long plagued ties with Washington.

“With this provocative act, North Korea has ignored its international obligations, rejected unequivocal calls for restraint, and further isolated itself from the community of nations,” Obama said, speaking on a European tour.

I don't know what's more pathetic, the NoKo's alibi or False Messiah's bland bromide diplobatory response.  No, I take that back, I do know which was the more pathetic - Pyongyang was sneering its contempt for the West in general and Barack Obama in particular.  Generalissimo Hopeandchange thinks his pumping of words into the ether actually matters.  As if Kim jong-IL gives a frog's fat leg about "international obligations, unequivocal calls for restraint, and international isolation."  Ooooooh, THAT'll intimidate him - until he remembers that he can bombard Hawaii, Alaska, and the U.S. West Coast (all within range of the Taepodong-2) with nuclear weapons.  Then he'll feel MUCH better.

Well, that and the fact that he can blackmail us into submission with his capability of flattening South Korea with conventional artillery alone, and he's under the protection of the combined Sino-Russian strategic nuclear arsenals.  The perqs of being the ChiComms' "bad cop," and all that.

For those who value, if not obsess over, multilateral alliances, this particular crisis makes Japan a vitally important strategic cog in any "containment" scheme (for geostrategic as well as cultural reasons, a far more realistic option than with the apocalyptic theocrats in Iran).  So it comes as utterly no surprise that the Li'l President's witless pacifism flipped the bird at our erstwhile allies in Tokyo:

But Tokyo harbored doubts about how Washington would react. While the U.S. also readied warships and missile-defense systems, it made clear that it would not intercept the missile. The Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, Admiral Timothy J. Keating, asserted that Washington has the capability to shoot down the missile. But before the launch, Secretary of Defense Gates stated the U.S. would not shoot it down unless it was headed towards U.S. territory. The message to Japan was clear: We will protect our territory but not yours.

Nor, alas, can the whole of this abominable state of affairs be laid entirely at the Chosen One's cowardly feet:

This is just a further indication of a growing split in the American-Japanese perception of the threat from North Korea. During the latest round of multilateral North Korean disarmament negotiations, termed the Six Party Talks, in 2007, the U.S. broke from Japan by removing Pyongyang from the list of state sponsors of terror, never made North Korean missiles an issue for negotiation, and appeared ready to settle for a freeze of plutonium production at one known nuclear site, Yongbyon. Japan is still very concerned about other nuclear production sites and the highly-enriched-uranium program North Korea claimed it had in 2003. Essentially Washington’s policy amounts to accepting North Korea as a nuclear state, trying to deter it from proliferating, and defending the American homeland. This is not an altogether acceptable policy for a Japan that sits within range of North Korea’s short- and medium-range missile force and is usually the main recipient of North Korea’s rhetorical bellicosity.

Not unlike the callous backhandings we keep giving Israel, really.  Like the Jews, the Japanese are a lot closer to a dire national security threat than we are, and do not have the luxury of indulging in criminally negligent fantasism.  They can't afford to dally in delusions when the consequences of being wrong are quite literally lethal.  It's easy for the Obamunists - and the Bushies before them - to settle for half-measures that are no-measures, and sit meekly by while the NoKos flagrantly renege on the Six Party Agreement to shutdown Yongbyon right in front of us.  This "you're on your own" under-the-bus-throwing tells Japan, right along with Dear Leader, that they cannot trust the Obamericans to stand by them when it matters the most.

Likely end result?  A nuclear and missile arms race in Northeast Asia.  The Japanese will have no choice what with Barry O shutting down anti-ICBM development, dismantling our existing anti-missile defenses, and canceling "fifth-generation" weapons platforms like the F-22 Raptor with which NoKo missile sites, launching platforms, and nuclear facilities could be effectively targeted and attacked.  And betraying Tokyo into charting an independent foreign policy course away from our orbit could produce new alignments with adverse consequences easily avoided by showing a modicum of loyalty now.

The irony is that with the demonstrated NoKo ability to hit American territory, we really are in the same boat as the Japanese, just as we are in the same crosshairs with Israel vis-a-vie Iran.  Yet even during a time of war Barack Obama carries on as if the conflict with Islamic Fundamentalism, and the growing strategic encirclement of the U.S. from Red China and North Korea through Venezuela to Syria and Iran, with Putinical Russia linking them all together, did not exist.  Or at the very least, like the only enemies we have are those that he hasn't had a chance to grovel into becoming our friends yet.  I find myself seriously wondering if any of us are even going to live long enough to oust Red Barry once and for all in 2012.

Hence, the death row lede above.

But perhaps it is this passage of Dan Blumenthal's & Leslie Forgach's in the Corner at NRO that most directly captures the terrible predicament in which we find ourselves:

The U.S.-Japanese alliance is the cornerstone of peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region, grounded in the joint promotion of democratic values and free-market principles. [emphasis added] 

If Barack Obama's first ten weeks in office has taught us anything, it is that he himself does not believe in either one.  Indeed, his worldview is far closer to that of our enemies - the ones that he can't wait to extend the hand of friendship.

Maybe that NoKo "satellite" was playing B.O.'s Greatest Hits.

That'd be almost as deadly as the warheads earmarked for an American city near you.