One of the hot issues in yesterday’s UK Prime Minister’s debate is over whether to replace Britain’s Trident nuclear missile system. The fault lines on this issue have oddly unified Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Conservative leader David Cameron. Both support spending more than $100 billion on this project in order to fully replace the existing Trident program thereby ensuring its existence for the next half century. Upstart Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats on the other hand, has called for its cancellation, arguing that such a program is both inconsistent with President Obama’s calls to work toward eliminating nuclear weapons and is a colossal waste of money that could be better spent on equipping British ground forces – that are suffering severe equipment shortages after a decade of fighting two wars.

In the debate, Cameron and Brown ferociously attacked Clegg on this issue in yesterday’s debate, as Brown even described his foreign policy approach as “anti-Americanism.” Brown derided:

I say to you, Nick, get real, get real. Because Iran, you are saying, might be able to have a nuclear weapon, and you wouldn’t take action against them, but you’re saying we’ve got to give up our Trident submarines and our nuclear weapon now. Get real about the danger.

But Clegg’s position on the trident is anything but “naïve” and “anti-American.” On the contrary, calls to end the Trident program reflect a much more astute understanding both of the role of nuclear weapons and of Britain’s place in the 21st century.

The notion that the UK needs nuclear weapons because of the dangers of Iran demonstrates an outdated world view that sees Britain as isolated and sees security issues in a vacuum. The fact is that the UK is in NATO – which means under Article 5 an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all. This means that an attack on the UK is an attack on the US and therefore the US nuclear deterrent is effectively a UK nuclear deterrent as well. If the UK’s nukes just magically disappeared there would be no practical change in its ability to deter a nuclear attack.

The debate over the Trident is therefore at its heart is not about questions of security but about nuclear weapons as a sign of global prestige and clout. The fact is that the role of nuclear weapons has significantly declined following the end of the Cold War, since, as Colin Powell noted, nuclear weapons are militarily “useless.” Clegg is therefore right when he states in defense of eliminating the Trident that “the world is changing, when we’re facing new threats.”

But a Britain that is willing to spend more than $100 billion dollars on a nuclear weapons program that has little real military utility, is not just swimming against the global tide, but is sending an incredibly regressive signal to the world over the importance of these weapons. Countries embedded in the international community that could go nuclear, such as Brazil or South Africa (which gave up its weapons), have chosen not too, because lacking any strong security rationale, these countries have calculated that nuclear weapons actually would diminish – not grow – their international standing. Building a new Trident therefore sends a signal that being international prestige is still tied to the possession of nuclear weapons.

This debate then is intimately tied to Britain’s broader apprehension over its global self image and its loss of its past hegemonic global status. In essence, nukes for the UK are like hair plugs – they have nothing to do with ones health, but everything to do with ones self image. However, a UK that confidently reduced its nuclear arsenal would alternatively send a strong signal to the world about the decreased importance of nuclear weapons and would in fact catapult the UK into a global leader on this issue. Far from losing credibility by passing on Trident, the UK’s international credibility and moral authority would be enhanced.

Finally, investing in a new Trident does nothing to bolster the “special relationship.” The fact is that Britain’s global importance and its military significance to the United States has nothing to do with its possession of nuclear weapons, but everything to do with its possession of a highly capable conventional armed forces that can fight alongside American troops.

There is a huge opportunity cost in having a cash-strapped UK investing billions on its nuclear forces, instead of spending on items that are actually relevant to its security and to the transatlantic alliance, such as equipment for its ground forces, helicopters, and fighter jets. David Cameron suggested in the debate that choosing between funding the two is a false “trade-off.” Well, it is only a false choice if Cameron is going to find that money for defense elsewhere, which he isn’t. If the US was in charge in the UK defense budget, the Trident would be cut in a heart beat.

In his 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama called for a “non-security” discretionary spending freeze to help bring down the deficit. He proposed exempting “security-related budgets for the Pentagon, foreign aid, the Veterans Administration and homeland security,” as well as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

On a party-line vote of 12 to 10 yesterday, the Senate Budget Committee approved “a $3.7 trillion budget blueprint” that goes further than Obama’s plan by “slicing $9.5 billion from discretionary spending in fiscal year 2011.” Under the Senate Budget Committee blueprint, approximately half of the savings would come from dramatic cuts to the budgets of the State Department and other international aid programs. Nevertheless, the committee decided to actually increase the Defense Department’s funding:

The 2011 federal spending plan approved by the committee Thursday on a 12-10 vote provides $573.8 billion for the Defense Department, which includes $133 billion for contingency operations. The amount makes the Defense Department one of the few federal agencies to see a budget increase; the non-war funding part of the defense budget would represent a 3.5 percent increase over 2010 funding.

Both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Department Secretary Robert Gates supported full funding for Obama’s foreign affairs budget request. In her letter to Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) on April 20, Clinton argued that international aid is actually more “cost-effective” than military spending:

Our investments in development and diplomacy are smart, cost-effective, and squarely in the best interests of American taxpayers and our national security. They are relatively small compared to the cost of active military engagement, and they can end up delivering impactful savings. In Iraq, for example, our $2.6 billion request for State and USAID will allow the Defense Department budget to decrease by about $16 billion — a powerful illustration of the return on civilian investments.

As CAP Senior Fellow Lawrence J. Korb has advocated, the Defense Department should not be exempted from this spending freeze. Freezing “the base defense budget at its current level of about $532 billion would not hinder the Pentagon’s ability to conduct the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.” Approximately $20 billion in savings could come from, among other measures, cutting missile defense while maintaining funding for its continued research and development, cutting FY 2011 F-35 purchases to twenty, and canceling the Zumwalt-class DDG-1000 at two ships.

The Department of Veterans Affairs also saw a 7.4 percent boost in the Senate Budget Committee’s proposal. The Obama administration requested the increases for both budgets. As the Navy Times notes, this blueprint is “just the first step in the long congressional budget process. The House Budget Committee has not started writing its version of the budget blueprint.”

In what seems to to be an attempt to affirm the wisdom of the Pentagon’s decision to rescind his invitation to speak at National Prayer Day observances, conservative American cleric Rev. Franklin Graham tells the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn that “I don’t speak against the Muslims” but that he does not back down from calling Islam an “evil” and “wicked religion”:

GRAHAM: I do not fight the Muslims, I don’t speak against the Muslims. But the religion — I don’t agree with the teachings of Muhammad. I do not agree with the teachings of this religion.

QUINN: You stirred up some controversy when you talked about Islam being an evil religion, a wicked religion.

GRAHAM: Mm-hmm.

QUINN: Tell me about that, because you later made statements where you sort of said ‘No, I didn’t really mean this’ –

GRAHAM: No, no, no, I never backed down from that. I never retracted that.

QUINN: Tell me what you said.

GRAHAM: Just take women, and what Islam does to women. True Islam cannot be practiced in this country. Okay? It cannot. If you were my wife, I can’t beat you because you didn’t want to have sex with me or whatever. I can’t just get tired of you and say ‘I divorce you’ and kick you out of the house. We have laws that protect you, okay? Just look only at how they treat women. It is shameful. It is wicked. It is evil.

Watch it:

My first response to this is that America deserves smarter clerics. Graham’s impressively ignorant rant about what “true Islam” says about women seems to have been gleaned from a Chick tract. Given that the definition of “true Islam” is sort of a live discussion among many Muslim populations these days (just as is the definition of “true Christianity” among Christians) the idea that a defiantly closed-minded rube like Graham should presume to speak for it is just comical.

Remarkably, having just generalized negatively about Islam, Graham then complains about the tendency of “the media” and “Hollywood” to generalize negatively about Christianity:

QUINN: How would you react if the people you were dealing with said Christianity is an evil religion and a wicked religion?

GRAHAM: I hear that every day from the media. I hear it in Hollywood. Every time they put a minister on TV they always make him out to be some wacko crazy guy who runs off with the church secretary or who steals money, or whatever. And that’s — Hollywood does this.

QUINN: Why do you think so?

GRAHAM: Why? Because I think many of them just hate God.

Because he hates generalizations so much, Graham goes on to insist that, whereas Hollywood is only interested in sex and degrading women, “Jesus lifted women up! Hollywood wants to make women just a sex object for man’s pleasure.”

“This is just how corrupt we have become,” Graham says. “We are a morally bankrupt society.”

Leaving aside whether Jesus himself did, in fact, “lift women up,” there’s simply no denying that Jesus’ followers have, for hundreds of years, found in Jesus’ teachings a justification for keeping women down. Franklin’s own father, the Rev. Billy Graham, wrote in 1969 that “The Word of God teaches that the primary duty of a woman is to be a homemaker,” and “the appointed destiny of real womanhood” is to be “wife, mother, homemaker.” And now the son wants to claim the struggle for womens’ equality for Christianity? Please.

As for Franklin Graham’s condemnation of America as a “corrupt” and “morally bankrupt society,” one should note that this is a point on which he is in strong agreement with a number of famous Muslims.

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