The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [148]
Is cheap oil worth the costs—in blood and treasure—of war? Will our military intervention in a particular ethnic dispute lead to a permanent political settlement or an indefinite commitment of U.S. forces? Can our dispute with a country be settled diplomatically or through a coordinated series of sanctions? If we hope to win the broader battle of ideas, then world opinion must enter into this calculus. And while it may be frustrating at times to hear anti-American posturing from European allies that enjoy the blanket of our protection, or to hear speeches in the UN General Assembly designed to obfuscate, distract, or excuse inaction, it’s just possible that beneath all the rhetoric are perspectives that can illuminate the situation and help us make better strategic decisions.
Finally, by engaging our allies, we give them joint ownership over the difficult, methodical, vital, and necessarily collaborative work of limiting the terrorists’ capacity to inflict harm. That work includes shutting down terrorist financial networks and sharing intelligence to hunt down terrorist suspects and infiltrate their cells; our continued failure to effectively coordinate intelligence gathering even among various U.S. agencies, as well as our continued lack of effective human intelligence capacity, is inexcusable. Most important, we need to join forces to keep weapons of mass destruction out of terrorist hands.
One of the best examples of such collaboration was pioneered in the nineties by Republican Senator Dick Lugar of Indiana and former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, two men who understood the need to nurture coalitions before crises strike, and who applied this knowledge to the critical problem of nuclear proliferation. The premise of what came to be known as the Nunn-Lugar program was simple: After the fall of the Soviet Union, the biggest threat to the United States—aside from an accidental launch—wasn’t a first strike ordered by Gorbachev or Yeltsin, but the migration of nuclear material or know-how into the hands of terrorists and rogue states, a possible result of Russia’s economic tailspin, corruption in the military, the impoverishment of Russian scientists, and security and control systems that had fallen into disrepair. Under Nunn-Lugar, America basically provided the resources to fix up those systems, and although the program caused some consternation to those accustomed to Cold War thinking, it has proven to be one of the most important investments we could have made to protect ourselves from catastrophe.
In August 2005, I traveled with Senator Lugar to see some of this handiwork. It was my first trip to Russia and Ukraine, and I couldn’t have had a better guide than Dick, a remarkably fit seventy-three-year-old with a gentle, imperturbable manner and an inscrutable smile that served him well during the often interminable meetings we held with foreign officials. Together we visited the nuclear facilities of Saratov, where Russian generals pointed with pride to the new fencing and security systems that had been recently completed; afterward, they served us a lunch of borscht, vodka, potato stew, and a deeply troubling fish Jell-O mold. In Perm, at a site where SS-24 and SS-25 tactical missiles were being dismantled, we walked through the center of eight-foot-high empty missile casings and gazed in silence at the massive, sleek, still-active missiles that were now warehoused safely but had once been aimed at the cities of Europe.
And in a quiet, residential neighborhood of Kiev, we received a tour of the Ukraine’s version of the Centers for Disease Control, a modest three-story facility that looked like a high school science lab. At one point during our tour, after seeing windows open for lack of air-conditioning and metal strips crudely bolted to door jambs to keep out