Remember When?

Remember those halcyon days of 2004, when the candidates of both parties agreed that the single most serious threat to the national security to the United States was nuclear proliferation?

How's that going? About as well as the rest of the Bush foreign policy:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Pakistan is building a reactor that could produce enough plutonium for 40 to 50 nuclear weapons a year in what would be a major expansion of its nuclear program and an intensified arms race in South Asia, a report said on Monday.

For those keeping score at home, Pakistan, our makeshift ally in the War on Terra, is also home to A.Q. Khan, the world's most infamous marketer of nuclear information. (Khan is now supposedly under house arrest, though last I heard, unavailable to the US.) It's also in a long-term contention with nuclear power India, which is blaming Pakistan for involvement in the Mombai bombings. It's the place where the only thing stopping it from becoming an islamist republic is the strongman Musharraf, our supposed ally. Just the sort of place where we probably don't want more plutonium, in other words.

It really seems like the whole world has decided that what the United States wants is pretty much irrelevant, doesn't it? Remember when we had reality-based grown-ups in charge, and the world respected the US?