Tuesday, November 16, 2010
G.O.P Preventing progress again?
During this years Lame Duck season Obama hoped to accomplish 1 thing; restoring an arms treaty with Russia, "The treaty, which would force both countries to pare back nuclear arsenals and resume mutual inspections that lapsed last year for the first time since the cold war." Obama has made great progress in foreign relations during his presidency, improving the image of the U.S to foreign countries. The G.O.P originally was going to vote for this treaty, in return for more nuclear weapon funding over the next 10 years. This bill needs a 2/3 majority to be passed, but now the G.O.P (Led by Mr. Kyl) has backed out and made it nearly impossible for this treaty to get passed. Mr. Kyl stated that "he informed the Senate Democratic leader that there was not enough time to resolve all the issues during the lame-duck session that opened this week." This decision by the Republicans has troubled Russian officials as they have "expressed fear that Republican victories in this month’s midterm elections would damage relations. 'We don’t have confidence that the document will secure enough votes,' Konstantin I. Kosachev, chairman of a parliamentary foreign affairs committee, said earlier in the day, according to the Russian news media. 'The problem is not that the document is bad. We are confronting the fact that Republicans refuse to ratify the treaty.'”Once again it seems that the politics that are being played are for preventing the other side from getting a win. Politics being more partisan then ever, do you ever believe that there will be grounds for progress in a bipartisan way ever again? Or will we be subjected to this constant blocking of progress from the minority party?
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3 comments:
Personally, I think that the treaty should be passed, but we should not increase nuclear weapon funding. It seems somewhat contradictory: we will sign a treaty agreeing to "pare back nuclear arsenals" in return for being able to increase nuclear weapons funding? Also, I think that the current Republican tactics are proving disastrous for our country; the fact that the Republicans are risking our relationship with other countries in issues as serious as nuclear weapons just for a few political points is absurd. Also, the fact that we can't even come to an agreement regarding issues abroad, where our image is at risk, shows that we probably won't be able to progress in a bipartisan way anytime soon.
The fact that Republicans are trying to block this treaty is absurd. How many nukes could you possibly need? It would take a mere fraction of any P5 country’s arsenal to start a nuclear winter and kill just about everyone anyways. Russia seems to have the bigger nuke overproduction problem though. 8,500 operational and 11,000 stockpiled as of 2005, is way over the top. If lessening nuclear stockpiles will win the U.S. "international relations points", then I see no reason why we shouldn't. I highly doubt any country is going to choose to nuke the U.S. because we took down a couple thousand nukes.
Here’s a BBC article with a helpful map and nuke count chart:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4256599.stm
Also, in regards to the lack of bipartisan cooperation, I don't think that Republicans and Democrats will be able to make a whole lot of progress based on agreement until something drastic and unifying comes along. There haven’t exactly been many complete upheavals of opinion in the past twenty years, so this seems unlikely. Maybe if a nuke being held at a launch site went off and caused a disaster, both parties would vote for such a treaty but that's extremely unlikely. Until then, I guess we'll just have to be satisfied with two distinct and stubborn parties.
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