President Barack Obama's call on Wednesday for "peace with justice" as he proposed the reduction of America's nuclear arsenal has communist overtones and could trigger an arms race, veteran journalist Bill Gertz says.
"It's somewhat of a radical departure from our nuclear deterrence posture and could be very destabilizing and prompt a nuclear arms race by a lot of countries," Gertz, a senior editor at the Washington Free Beacon website and columnist at The Washington Times, told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.
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"The president is using a new term to support his earlier disarmament call-back in 2009 in Prague, and it's called 'peace with justice,' which has a very Marxist, Leninist ring to it.
"All of the rhetoric of the communist groups around refer to peace with justice, [and] now the president has employed it for the first time."
On Wednesday, the president, speaking in Berlin, proposed reducing the American nuclear arsenal by as much as a third.
He said the Defense Department must help the United States fight the threats of the 21st century with a "strong and credible strategic deterrent."
Obama added: "When Europe and America lead with our hopes instead of our fears, we do things that no other nations can do, no other nations will do. So we have to lift up our eyes today and consider the day of peace with justice that our generation wants for this world."
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The president's edict is unclear, Gertz said.
"[He] issued new guidance which limits the use of nuclear weapons in U.S. security strategy and it states that they will only be used under extreme circumstances without specifying what that is. After we've been nuked by North Korea or Iran, it's not clear," he said.
Gertz,
who wrote last month that Obama would call for a reduction in nuclear weapons, said he was also surprised by Obama's revelation that he'll call on nuclear cuts from the Russians.
"Almost as an afterthought the president announced that, well, 'I've done this review, I've determined that we could have one-third nuclear weapons than we plan to have' ... so that brings us down to about 1,000," he said.
"And then, 'Oh, by the way, I intend to do this, to seek these cuts with the Russians.' But the whole set-up for that makes no mention that this is going to be part of negotiations with the Russians. So it's like telling the Russians, 'Hey we're going to cut our arsenal. If you guys want to come along, that'd be nice!'"
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Gertz believes the terrorist threat by al-Qaida is actually growing, not decreasing, as the administration has said.
"Al-Qaida is not on the path to defeat. ... They've moved on. They're going to Syria, they're going to North Africa, they're going to Somalia, they're going to all of the ungoverned spaces where there are no major efforts to use drones to strike these leaders," he said.
"So we're facing the growing al-Qaida threat."
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