The following is an excerpt from Jim Arkedis’s op-ed published today in AolNews.com:
In today’s polarized political debate — with congressional Republicans refusing to cooperate on much of anything and their Democratic counterparts not terribly inclined to include them anyway — finding common ground on any issue has been nearly impossible. But this coming week might highlight one issue that could galvanize long-overdue bipartisanship: nuclear security.
On Tuesday, the administration released its Nuclear Posture Review, which charts a new course on the use of nuclear weapons. On Thursday, President Barack Obama travels to Prague, where he’ll sign the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. And early next week, the United States will play host to more than 40 world leaders at a nuclear security summit.
These events all aim to work toward the long-held promise of a world without nuclear weapons, a goal the president outlined a year ago this week in the Czech Republic.
After that speech, some conservatives jumped at the opportunity to cast the new president as green on weighty foreign policy issues. But Obama wasn’t driven by some fanciful naivety, as he was crystal clear that as long as others possessed the weapons, so would America. And it was a necessary reorientation—the work of ridding the world of nuclear weapons needed to be taken up anew after being sidetracked under Obama’s predecessor.
Read the full column at AolNews.com.
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