In addition, Mr. Obama insists that the United States must become a party to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty - an accord a majority of the U.S. Senate rejected ten years ago on the grounds that it was unverifiable and inconsistent with the nation's need to maintain a safe, reliable and therefore credible nuclear deterrent. The effect of such a reversal would be permanently to preclude underground tests of the American arsenal, condemning it to assured obsolescence and evaporating credibility.

Far from reducing the global proliferation of nuclear weaponry, the decline of confidence in America's deterrent is likely to exacerbate that trend. As the bipartisan Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States put it in an interim report last December: "Our non-proliferation strategy will continue to depend upon U.S. extended deterrence strategy as one of its pillars. Our military capabilities, both nuclear and conventional, underwrite U.S. security guarantees to our allies, without which many of them would feel enormous pressures to create their own nuclear arsenals....The U.S. deterrent must be both visible and credible, not only to our possible adversaries, but to our allies as well." (Emphasis in the original.)

Ironically, these acts of U.S. self-restraint in the interest of setting an "example" for the rest of the world are quintessential progressive realism - a practice that reflexively believes America must stop doing things in its self-defense that, in light of world conditions and hard experience, are perfectly sensible, all in the hope that the rest of the world will behave in ways that history suggests are not in the cards.

An even more dramatic example of this vaulting unrealism is the Obama administration's response to the growing threat of ballistic missiles in the hands of actual and potential U.S. adversaries. The Russians and Chinese are perfecting new generations of advanced missiles, including some designed to defeat defenses and destroy carrier battle groups. Meanwhile, the Iranians and North Koreans are testing ever-longer-range "space-launch vehicles" and other ballistic missiles, apparently with a view to being able to execute strategic electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) attacks against the United States. (For a vivid insight into the horror such an attack would inflict on our society, see the best-selling new novel by Bill Forstchen, One Second After.)

Incredibly, Team Obama thinks the way to address this grave and growing danger is: to cut billions from our anti-missile defense programs - especially those designed to protect our homeland against EMP and other attacks; to forego deployment in Europe of missile defense radars and interceptors as NATO has twice agreed to do; and to resuscitate preposterously out-dated Cold War notions of U.S.-Russian "stability" by imposing new bilateral restrictions on defenses. The only realistic prognosis from such a U.S. approach would be more threatening missiles around the world and fewer American capabilities to defeat them.

American security policy needs to be rooted in realism, alright. But that should be in the sense of what might be called "conservative realism" - in accordance with which the United States needs to equip itself and behave in light of the way the world really is, not on the basis of some fantasy about how it might be if only we disarmed.