SUMMER AT THE KREMLIN AT 7:32 A.M. ET:  President Obama, the first lady, and a cast of thousands, have arrived in Moscow.  Great things are said to be in store.

The trip is grimly reminding some observers of President Kennedy's meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961.  Kennedy got badly rolled, something he admitted, and Khrushchev came away believing the new president was weak.  It's widely thought that this belief led directly to Moscow's attempt to place missiles in Cuba in late 1962, ushering in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Now there are fears that another young president doesn't quite get the game.  Jennifer Rubin, writing in "Contentions," notes a New York Times piece reporting that Obama, as a college student, was enamored of the nuclear-freeze movement: 

Those who suspect the president is engaged in a bit of dangerous self-delusion and denial about certain unpleasant realities regarding the threats from rogue states won’t be heartened to read that his current non-proliferation fetish stems, at least according to the New York Times, from his college infatuation with the nuclear freeze movement. Apparently, youthful Obama did not focus on the results from Ronald Reagan’s refusal to buy into the fantasies of liberals –namely the fall of the Soviet Empire. That lesson has entirely eluded now-president Obama. Is it any wonder his critics find his posture fraught with peril and entirely out-of-touch with the threats we face?

As the Times reports:

“This is dangerous, wishful thinking,” Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, and Richard Perle, an architect of the Reagan-era nuclear buildup that appalled Mr. Obama as an undergraduate, wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal. They contend that Mr. Obama is, indeed, a naïf for assuming that “the nuclear ambitions of Kim Jong-il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be curtailed or abandoned in response to reductions in the American and Russian deterrent forces.”

COMMENT:  It's being reported that the U.S. and Russia are within range of an agreement to limit nuclear weapons and delivery systems.  Problem is, the Russians are insisting on a compromise in our plan to place missile defense systems in Eastern Europe as the price for the arms-reduction pact.

President Reagan turned down a similar demand from Mikhail Gorbachev, stunning the treaty-at-any-price crowd in Washington.  But Reagan's firmness on missile defense convinced the Soviets that this president could not be rolled and that the Cold War was essentially over, and that it was ending in an American victory.

President Obama seems incapable of embracing concepts like "victory," except when he's running for office.  We have reason to be concerned about what may be cooked up in this Moscow meeting.

July 6, 2009