BRET BAIER (HOST): Charles, you wrote a column about this, and how President Obama is a foreign policy idealist. Explain that.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Well, we saw it today. I mean, here's a guy who went around the world when he's inaugurated -- I don't know if you want to use the word apologize, but confessing to a long history of Americans sins. From the maltreatment of the Indians, to the coup in Iran in '53, the coup Guatemala, how we're arrogant towards Europe, the list is very long. And it's sort of -- he closed the circle of that apology tour today in Hiroshima, and to say it wasn't a formal apology, of course he wasn't going use the word and yes, he did speak of war in the abstract. But he did it in Hiroshima.
If you want to do a speech about war in the abstract, you do it in Prague, which is what he did in 2009. When you do it in Hiroshima, of course you're talking about World War II, of course you're talking about American dropping the war, and of course the implication is that we have a sense of guilt about it, if not an overt apology. Look, this is a visit he should have made next year as a private citizen, in which case he can speak like a naive private citizen about escaping the logic of fear. What other way is there of dealing with nuclear weapons other than the logic of fear, i.e. deterrence? Eliminating them is never going to happen, it would weaken us.
Do we want to be without nuclear weapons when there's a nut case, Pyongyang who's acquiring them, apocalyptic, genocidal mullahs in Iran who are acquiring them? Of course not, and the president speaking as president was representing the United States, I thought it was embarrasing, his utopianism and the implicit apology dishonored our nation. Not something he should have done.
