When I was young and stupid, I thought that the US should totally disarm. I didn't see the need for nuclear weapons, much less a military at all. My adolescent thinking went along the lines of, if we give up our weapons, every other nation will do the same and then we can live in peace and harmony.

Then I grew up.

Unfortunately for America, the adolescents are now in charge: From IDB:

There's no deep, dark secret behind the Obama administration's strategy in defending America against nuclear aggressors, whether they be rogue powers like Iran or North Korea, or a terrorist group like al-Qaida. Both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made it very clear on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday that the policy is the moral force of the U.S. disarming itself.

According to Secretary Clinton, we now "think we will ultimately be safer if we can introduce the idea that the United States is willing to enter into arms treaties with Russia to reduce our respective nuclear arsenals." Such a stance "will perhaps deter others from acquiring nuclear weapons."

Of our disarmament treaty with Russia, Secretary Gates said, "I think it puts us in a much stronger position in terms of going to other countries and getting their support for putting pressure on the Iranians and the North Koreans."

Words and paper - that's what we heard from America's highest-ranking officials charged with protecting us from potential nuclear aggressors. Asked about the inevitability of a nuclear Iran and whether U.S. policy has shifted to containment, Gates claimed, "we're doing everything we can to try and keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons."

Why is it that liberals believe that "setting an example" means a fig to the very nations who have demonstrated time and time again in the past that the only thing they respond to is American strength? What kind of a drug-addled mind could make the leap of logic it takes to actually believe that disarming in the face of the growing strength of your enemies - both potential and current - makes us "safer?"

A moral example? Only someone entranced with the idea of the "Brotherhood of Man" could possibly believe anything as dangerously naive as the idea that our immoral enemies would suddenly pull a 180 and begin to act as moral players on the world stage.

The New Left, after 40 years of preaching, is finally getting its day in the sun to demonstrate the efficacy of its moral tenets. We have been lectured by these arrogant sots for decades about how American bellicosity is the root cause of the world's troubles, and that if only America would disarm, walk softly, cooperate with the UN, subsume its vital interests, and make nice with those who hate us, all will be well in the world and the fairy tale will have a happy ending.

The question in my mind is, will these people wake up in time to see the horrific damage they are doing to our security and the security of the world that we have painstakingly built up since the end of World War II? It was not a perfect world we helped to construct, but at least it kept things from spinning out of control. Does Obama and his like-minded minions at the State Department, who never met a negotiation they didn't like, realize the drastic changes they are implementing? For the first time in 60 years, the world will operate without the US as a rough guardian of the status quo. And the breathtaking realization that no one seems to have really thought this through is frightening.

My fear is that, when things don't go their way, that they will draw the wrong conclusion and bow even lower, disarm even further, grovel even more nauseatingly, in the face of threats and militant actions by the aggressor nations. A lifetime of advocating deliberate American decline is about to be put to a real world test.

I am not sanguine about the outcome.