Sensible Americans are high skeptical of Iran’s willingness to adhere to international agreements when it comes to its quest for nuclear weapons.

Yale student Harry Graver shares this view, as he critiques the new “Global Zero” anti-nuke campaign:

They boast: “This isn’t your grandma’s anti-nuke campaign.” And when it comes to scale, that’s certainly true. Global Zero, a group dedicated to “a world without nuclear weapons,” touts 300 global leaders, numerous prestigious signatories and 450,000 members worldwide. Its members have hosted flashy galas across the world, made videos with A-list celebrities (Morgan Freeman, Alec Baldwin, etc.) and have even taken multiple trips to pressing political hotbeds like Bonnaroo.

The architects of the movement are not shy about being their own loudest cheerleaders. They have labeled themselves as “one of the most remarkable social movements in history” orchestrated by a “visionary group of leaders and experts.”

And our generation seems to like it: The initiative has 150 college and high school chapters in 20 different countries, 6,000 Twitter followers, and over 30,000 Facebook likes. The chapter at Yale is one of the most active of the bunch, even hosting a posh conference here last year.

Yet while such an endeavor may not be my grandma’s campaign, it is lipstick — Instagrammed, tweeted, well-funded, celebrity-sprinkled lipstick — on an old pig. The underlying idea has been around for decades; in fact, Barack Obama championed it as a college student in 1983. As president, he is now all too willing to let Global Zero take up the cause, hook, line and sinker, as it fits into his prosaic playbook for wooing millennials: promise lofty ideals with short specifics, while casually gliding over the snags of substantively disastrous policy.

…We should push for a higher discourse than the utopic impulses that belie Global Zero. It is a movement not in search of a problem but rather for a long-lost time before humanity tipped the brink into a nuclear world. Yale students — many of whom will have a very tangible impact on how our nation conducts itself in the future — have a choice as to whether to engage in this world or indulge in another.

We’ve come of age under a president who chose the latter. How’s that working out?