Maybe Nukes Aren't So Bad

Thomas P.M. Barnett, writing in Esquire, is certain to make the anti-war crowd apoplectic:

George W. Bush had his "axis of evil," while Obama seems to find nuclear weapons to represent a kind of natural evil unto themselves — no matter who possesses them. Now the twentysomethings in Prague may have cheered his invocations of "hope" and "change," and others may be jumping on board, but I've discovered something in my years of global-strategy analysis, and it's not the deadly fatalism Obama describes — it's the modern realism he ignores: Nuclear weapons are the single best thing that has ever happened in mankind's long history of war.

Barnett is no raging neo-con, and he has been highly critical of Bush on more than one occasion.