Gingrich: The U.S. is at greater risk of attack under Obama

Tender red meat on a day when SecDef Gates is announcing cuts in defense spending, including $1.4 billion slashed in missile defense. There’s some boilerplate about Gitmo and interrogations, but most of his ire’s directed towards The One’s response to North Korea:

In a chat with POLITICO readers, Gingrich also called the administration’s response to the North Korean missile launch a “vivid demonstration of weakness in foreign policy.” He said Obama’s proposals for a resumption of nuclear arms limitation talks reflected “a dangerous fantasy that runs an enormous risk. … Not since Jimmy Carter have we had an administration this out of touch with reality.”…

On the North Korean missile launch, he said “the embarrassing repudiation of the United States appeal to the United Nations Security Council Sunday afternoon is a vivid demonstration of weakness. This is beginning to resemble the Carter administration’s weakness in foreign policy.”

He said Obama’s speech on nuclear disarmament in Prague on Sunday “is a dangerous fantasy that runs an enormous risk. It is part of the Obama administration’s substitution of words for thoughts and fantasies for achievements.”…

“There was amazing symbolism in North Korea deciding to launch a missile the very day President Obama was speaking to Europeans about his fantasy of nuclear disarmament. The West has talked with North Korea for over 15 years and they just keep building nuclear weapons and missiles. We have been talking with the Iranians for a decade and they continue to build nuclear capability and missiles.

I don’t take Obama’s nuclear disarmament rhetoric seriously (yet), partly because he’s been reasonably prudent on foreign policy so far and partly because he’s even more prone to indulging in utopian pap before European audiences than American ones. All part of our new national image makeover, you see. As for North Korea, what exactly is the alternative to how Obama handled it? What would McCain have done differently? Newt told Fox News Sunday yesterday that a President Gingrich would have disabled the missile before launch — “there are three or four techniques that could have been used” — but that’s so nutty and “out of touch with reality” itself that I can’t believe he seriously means it. With Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan already on the Pentagon’s plate and the economy teetering towards depression, he would have risked a regional war involving millions of Koreans, Japanese, and Chinese and a global economic meltdown just to prove a point about missile tests? How, exactly, would the threats to the United States in the Middle East be lessened by America suddenly having to commit tens or hundreds of thousands of troops to defending Seoul? Granted, the UN kabuki is pointless, but it keeps North Korea reasonably quiet while we attend to more pressing matters. What am I missing here?

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