Via Robert Farley, an article noting that “The Bush administration is expected to announce next week a major step forward in the building of the country’s first new nuclear warhead in nearly two decades.” One of the worst-covered aspects of the Bush foreign policy has been this element of proliferation policy — namely, that one major source of our difficulty in getting the multilateral non-proliferation process to prevent Iran and North Korea from going nuclear is that we keep breaking the rules. The NPT requires the legitimate nuclear powers to be taking steps to disarm, toward an eventually goal of global nuclear abolition.
We’re going in the other direction, hoping, in essence, for Iran to be subject to restrictions tighter than what the NPT requires of Iran, while the United States (and Israel, and now India as well) can violate its terms or refuse to join its framework without consequence. Brute force is the only way you could possibly enforce that sort of ruleset. If the actual goal were non-proliferation — as opposed to asymetrical proliferation — it would be easy to find alternatives to war.