No, Obama Didn't 'Kill' Nonproliferation

Mead’s column exemplifies everything that is wrong with the state of our foreign policy debates today.

Walter Russell Mead doesn’t know much about nonproliferation:

History will name Barack Obama as the man on whose watch nonproliferation definitively failed.

Mead’s column exemplifies everything that is wrong with the state of our foreign policy debates today. It is inaccurate about many things, Mead lies more than once, and there is no supporting evidence to back up any of his most important claims. The column got published anyway, complete with a repeat of Mead’s favorite lie about Iran’s nuclear program. All of this is forced into a brain-dead hawkish framing that Mead uses to blame one of the biggest supporters of nonproliferation for the supposed death of nonproliferation. The average reader that doesn’t know much about the subject would come away from it with a worse understanding of the relevant issues than when he started. Mead’s analysis leaves his audience more in the dark than they were before.