BARACK Obama is a wonderfully gifted showman. And what a splendid show he's put on this past week or so concerning nuclear weapons.
First came the new Nuclear Posture Review, apparently dramatically reducing the circumstances under which the US might use nuclear weapons. Then came a new nuclear arms agreement with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to reduce US and Russian nuclear arsenals by a third.
It is all, to use Obama's favourite word, "unprecedented".
Or is it?
It all points the way to a glorious future where the world is free of nuclear weapons.
Or does it?
At the very least, it shows the Obama administration is deadly serious about nuclear disarmament.
Do you think so?
Here's the thing: it's still really all about Iran.
And on Iran, the Obama administration is failing, and failing badly.
As for the rest, they are very much less than meets the eye.
Take the US-Russia agreement. It is a good thing for the US and Russia to have fewer nuclear weapons down to a certain credible minimum. But there is not a symmetry or equality between the two powers. Russia has only one purpose for nukes, to deter the US.
The US, on the other hand, has many global responsibilities and many more people than just the Russians it needs to deter.
The headline numbers in the US-Russia agreement are that each side will cut its maximum deployed nuclear warheads from 2200, as they agreed in an earlier deal George W. Bush entered into, down to 1550.
This is all well and good. But the agreement doesn't deal with non-deployed weapons. So you can take a warhead off deployment and put it in storage and it doesn't count under the new numbers, but it's still there.
Similarly, there is a great deal of opacity in the way deployed warheads are counted. Each bomber, for example, counts as only one weapon, even though a plane can carry dozens of nuclear warheads. Depending how they configure their nuclear arsenals, the US and Russia could reach the new dramatically lower limits without doing anything much of consequence, perhaps reducing by fewer than 200 each the actual deployed war heads.
Then there's Obama's Nuclear Posture Review.
The big headline here is that the US will no longer threaten to use nukes against countries that attack it or its allies with chemical or biological weapons, unless those countries are themselves nuclear-weapons powers or not signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
This, allegedly, is a serious narrowing of potential use of nuclear weapons. But US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates explained that the US reserves the right to reinterpret this commitment if the chemical or biological attack is devastating.
Well, how much of a change does this really represent?
If it had turned out that the anthrax mailed to various Americans in 2001, which resulted in a small number of casualties, had been sponsored by, say, Libya, an NPT signatory, would you have expected the US to use nuclear weapons? I don't think so.
The exemption for non-NPT signatories is important because the US does have a very worried ally in Japan. It's worried about the potentially crazy actions of North Korea and it wants and needs the US's extended deterrence. So this new declaratory policy allows the US to continue, absolutely unchanged, the full extent of its old extended deterrence policy, which reassures Tokyo.
About the only case in recent memory where even a remotely conceivable use of US nukes against an NPT signatory came up was way back in 1991. Then US secretary of State James Baker met Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz. Baker told the Iraqi: "God forbid chemical or biological weapons are used against our forces; the American people would demand revenge."
The Americans never at any stage contemplated using nuclear weapons against Iraq. But Baker wrote in his memoirs: "I purposely left the impression that the use of chemical or biological agents by Iraq could invite tactical nuclear retaliation."
In so far as it has any effect at all, Obama's new declaratory policy will prevent his successors from deploying that sometimes immensely useful, quite precisely calibrated, strategic ambiguity.
But Obama is altogether way, way too focused on declaratory policy. And this, sadly, is a way of avoiding substance.
Declaratory policy in nuclear matters only applies to the good guys. The Soviet Union had a declaratory policy during the Cold War of "no first use", that is to say, Moscow declared that it would under no circumstances be the first power to use nuclear weapons.
Not a single strategic analyst, politician or, indeed, sane human being with an IQ above room temperature took the declaration seriously. If it was, indeed, a credible declaration, the US could have abolished its nuclear arsenal altogether, confident that no matter what happened, the Russians would never use their nukes against the Americans. But, of course, no American policy-maker gave such an action a second's thought.
Everyone recognised that the Soviet declaratory policy was meaningless, or, at best, a worthless propaganda effort.
Similarly, Obama's declaratory policy will have zero effect in Moscow, Beijing, Islamabad or Tehran.
We are seeing an eerie and tragic reprise in nuclear policy of the failed dynamic of climate change policy.
The easy bit is the declaratory policy, especially for long-term intentions. Yes, we'll cut greenhouse gases by 20 per cent, 50 per cent, 100 per cent, 200 per cent, so long as that commitment can't be measured until 2050 or beyond. These are easy words and cheap ones, especially for a politician skilled at showmanship. What counts is what gets done in the next three or four years, when that politician is still in office.
The critical non-proliferation challenge over the next three or four years is Iran. And here, Obama is failing, and not just failing but failing dismally and utterly, failing without the slightest compensation of even partial success, failing now without even a serious effort to succeed.
One of the alleged benefits of the deal with Russia is that Moscow is now allegedly willing to consider sanctions against Iran. Just how long is this danse macabre going to go on?
No sooner had Medvedev made that statement than the Deputy Russian Foreign Minister made it clear that any serious sanctions, especially those which might hit refined oil products, were absolutely out of the question.
We have heard endlessly about how the Obama administration is on the brink of persuading the Chinese to approve sanctions.
The Chinese also know all these dance steps and will get all the attention and courting from the Americans on offer, but in the end, any sanctions they approve will be near to meaningless.
Obama himself, in a remarkable interview with The New York Times, acknowledged finally that there is no doubt Iran wants nuclear weapons. Obama said: "The current course they're on will provide them with nuclear weapons."
He acknowledged that any UN sanctions his administration finally gets up will not deter the Iranians from this purpose: "We're not naive that any single set of sanctions automatically is going to change Iranian behaviour." And he pointedly refused to repeat Hillary Clinton's call some months ago for "crippling sanctions".
All this put together is a way of saying the Americans have given up any serious effort to stop the Iranians. Washington is now just going through the motions.
Consider that China continues to increase its financial investment in Iran's oil sector, with China National Petroleum signing a new deal to deliver oil field equipment for Iran. Turkey is considering a multi-billion-dollar investment. Does this sound like the prelude to serious sanctions?
This week, Obama will host a big international summit dedicated to nuclear disarmament. It could do some seriously good work in furthering the Bush-era programs to secure nuclear material and help keep it out of the hands of terrorists. But it will do nothing towards actual nuclear disarmament. Obama has substituted showmanship for reality in these matters.
We are going to get the politics of flatulent excess. There will be grandiloquent speeches, soaring rhetoric, spellbinding proclamations, fine sentiments to make the angels sing, but nothing serious will be done about the real threat of Iran becoming a nuclear-weapon state.
There is a bizarre rumour circulating in security circles that Obama may try some bold gesture to link Israel's nuclear weapons with Iran's.
This surely cannot be true as it would certainly mark the most irresponsible foreign policy gesture yet by the Obama administration, and it would do nothing towards preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear weapons state.
Obama's recent penchant for beating up on Israel has paradoxically hurt Washington's standing among Arab nations. The Arab view of the US embodies a weird Janus-faced contradiction. It sees the US as insanely powerful and decadently weak at the same time. Beating up on Israel confirms the impression of US weakness, that it might ditch, or at least humiliate, even its closest allies.
But the bottom line is this: if Iran gets nuclear weapons, US policy has failed utterly. Almost everything else is mere showbiz.
