Obama unlikely to retaliate against a nuke attack on US?

By Aryeh Spero (American Thinker):

What if a Muslim country, such as Iran, launched a nuclear attack against us, or if agents aligned with Pakistan using dirty bombs were to attack America? Would Barack Hussein Obama retaliate with nuclear force, as has been our stated policy since the 1950s? Would he even unleash a barrage of non-nuclear shock and awe that would level those countries so that they’d be incapable of striking a second time?

When queried in Japan in November 2009, Mr. Obama declined to defend President Harry Truman’s nuclear attack on Hiroshima, despite it having saved hundreds of thousands of American soldiers who would have otherwise died trying to defeat the recalcitrant Japanese. Many on the left and in academia have gone so far as to characterize it as a display of American racism, questioning if we would have done so had the victims been British. They ignore the efficacy of how that one-time use of a nuclear weapon spared this country from ever being a victim of nuclear attack.

This is a question the president needs to be asked, given how he is a proponent of a doctrine labeled Responsibility to Protect, “R2P.” The question is, though, what is Mr. Obama’s conceptual understanding of the term “responsibility” and how will it influence the manner in which he wages war?

The past may be a guide. As with all references to “responsibility,” domestic or foreign, Obama sees responsibility as a type of sacrifice by the more powerful to those less powerful, be it redistribution of wealth or sacrificing one’s optimal protection when weighed against how it effects those he considers innocent. A nuclear response to a nuclear attack on us, or even a devastating shock and awe campaign, would certainly kill many non-combatants Obama would consider innocent.

The assumption that, as with all presidents, Mr. Obama would do what is best for America and Americans cannot be taken for granted. We’ve never before had a president who sees himself primarily as a citizen of the world and initiates policies not always in the best interests of America but in the interest of more important (to him) global goals: loans to Brazil for their offshore drilling, hundreds of millions to Palestinian Arabs and Muslim countries — increasing an already unbearable debt on Americans to do so. Not to mention how he has tried every which way to stop Arizonans (Americans) from protecting themselves from murder, rape, thievery, and destruction of their property from mobs cascading into our open borders — doing so, as he always does, by invoking some universalist “morality” and mission that, in his mind, supersede our parochial needs. He has reneged on our commitment for a space shield for our allies in Eastern Europe while offering it to Russia, a threat to America.

Indeed, Obama has spent much time traversing the globe apologizing to all those countries that he claims have been the target of “arrogant” American military power. Would he, then, be inclined to use the essence of American military power, its nuclear force? Many around the world will not be deterred from going nuclear against us unless it is unequivocally understood that they will be annihilated if they do so.