Posted on 03/15/2014 7:36:26 AM PDT by Colonel Kangaroo
Though Barack Obama is widely regarded as a weak president, is the new world disorder really all his fault?
Listening to the more vocal voices of the GOP one might think so.
According to Sen. Lindsey Graham, Vladimir Putin’s move into Crimea “started with Benghazi.”
“When you kill Americans and nobody pays a price, you invite this type of aggression,” said Graham. Putin “came to the conclusion after Benghazi, Syria, Egypt” that Barack Obama is “a weak indecisive leader.”
Also blaming Obama for Crimea, John McCain got cheers at AIPAC by charging, “This is the ultimate result of a feckless foreign policy in which nobody believes in America’s strength anymore.”
This “blatant act” of aggression “cannot stand,” said McCain.
How McCain plans to force Putin to cough up Crimea was left unexplained.
Now Marco Rubio seems to be auditioning to replace the retired Joe Lieberman as third amigo. His CPAC speech is described by the L.A. Times:
“(Rubio) said that China is threatening to take parts of the South China Sea … a nuclear North Korea is testing missiles, Venezuela is slaughtering protesters, and Cuba remains an oppressive dictatorship. He added that Iran continues to pursue nuclear weapons and regional hegemony and Russia is attempting to ‘reconstitute' the former Soviet Union.”
What all these countries have in common, said Rubio, is “totalitarian governments.” Rubio proposes a U.S. foreign policy of leading the world to “stand up to the spread of totalitarianism.”
Not quite as ambitious as George W. Bush’s “ending tyranny in our world,” but it will do.
Where to begin.
First, it is absurd to suggest Putin felt free to restore Crimea to Russia because of Obama’s inaction in Benghazi. And while Castro’s Cuba and Kim Jong-Un’s North Korea are totalitarian, Putin’s Russia is not Stalin’s. Nor is Xi Jinping’s China Mao’s China.
Russia and China are great power rivals and antagonists, not the monster regimes of the Cold War that massacred millions. We must deal with them, and they don’t take direction from Uncle Sam.
As for Iran, 17 U.S. intelligence agencies say it has no nuclear weapons program. Moreover, Hassan Rouhani is an elected president now presiding over the dilution of his 20-percent-enriched uranium in compliance with our November agreement.
McCain points to Obama’s failure to enforce his “red line” in Syria with air and missile strikes, when Bashar Assad used chemical weapons, as the reason Obama is not respected.
But a little history is in order here.
While John Kerry and Obama were ready to attack Syria, it was the American people who rose up and said “no.” It was Congress that failed to give Obama the authorization to go to war.
If McCain, Graham and Rubio think Obama should attack Syria, why don’t they get their hawkish Republican brethren in the House to authorize war on Syria? See how that sits with the voters in 2014.
Last fall, Lindsey Graham was shopping around a resolution for a U.S. war on Iran. What became of that brainstorm? After Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans are weary of what all this bellicosity inevitably brings.
Is Russia really reconstituting the Soviet Union?
True, Putin seeks to bring half a dozen ex-Soviet republics, now nations, into an economic union to rival the EU. But where the state religion of the USSR was Marxism-Leninism, i.e., communism, Putin is trying to restore Russian Orthodox Christianity.
There is a difference, as there is a difference between Stalin murdering priests and Putin prosecuting Pussy Riot for blasphemous misbehavior on the high altar of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.
How do we think King Abdullah would have handled the women, had they pulled their stunt in the Great Mosque in Mecca?
While China is indeed moving to claim the East and South China seas, bringing her into possible conflict with Japan over the Senkakus, the GOP is not without culpability here.
It was a Bush-led Republican Party that voted to throw open America’s markets to China. Result: In the last two years, China ran up $630 billion in trade surpluses at our expense, a figure larger than the entire U.S. defense budget for 2015.
Our trade deficits with China provide her annually with enough dollars to finance her own defense budget twice over. Twenty years of such U.S. trade deficits have given the Middle Kingdom the trillions it needed to build the armed forces to drive us out of East Asia.
Are U.S. sailors and Marines now to die defending the Senkakus against a menacing China that the Bush free traders helped mightily to create?
If Sen. Rubio wants to “stand up” to China, why not call for a 50 percent tariff on all Chinese-made goods. Try that one out on the K Street bundlers and U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Yet Marco Rubio in the primaries would be healthy for America. A showdown between non-interventionists and the neocon War Party, to determine which way America goes, is long overdue. Let’s get it on.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”
“why do you care whether Russia takes over Crimea, seriously?”
The right of nations to self-determination is the cardinal principle in modern international law. The United Nation Charter stipulates that “nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and fair equality of opportunity have the right to freely choose their sovereignty and international political status”. The Crimea republic is entitled to no less than that. It was never fully part of Ukraine, as it has its own Constitution, government and parliment.
Read post #80, you might be able to get it.
None of your business. Have I ever asked personal questions on this forum? Nope.
The right of nations to self-determination is the cardinal principle in modern international law.
A “vote” under the barrel of a gun is never “self determination”. Who is your dog in this fight? No self respecting conservative would ever cheer for Team KGB. So FRiend, what is your allegiance?
why do you care whether Russia takes over Crimea, seriously?
It is not in the interest of the United States to have a murdering KGB thug attempt to reassemble the USSR. Freedom through strength, FRiend.
Really? I haven't seen NATO get us into trouble lately. It's more a club to keep up relations with Europe in case some new threat arises somewhere in the world. If some new menace develops, we shouldn't have to recreate connections and alliances all over again from scratch.
You have to balance the dangers of isolationism against those of interventionism. Retreating from involvement in foreign affairs after WWI may likely have helped make WWII possible. (I know there's the argument that our involvement in WWI itself made WWII possible, but that's the kind of clever argument that dodges the point of what we should do if a real threat to world peace does arise somewhere).
And what might that be that doesn’t then require a firm, in turn, response from Russia until there is no turning back?
Diplomacy is the only route in atomic warfare. It’s as they say on Wall Street, avoiding war is too big to fail.
Putin isn’t going to mess with a muscular NATO. He’s a bully and thug who only tangles with those weaker than him. So give him Crimea and humiliate him by reinforcing NATO in other parts of the FSU. He won’t be rolling a fifth column into any country with major NATO facilities. If Putin wants to play economic terrorist then just expropriate Russian owned assets. Putin only has a winning hand when the west doesn’t play.
I have some Russian immigrant friends who say that Reagan really defeated the Soviet union through the people on the street. They say he didn’t speak over them as a ruler but spoke directly to them as a leader.
One who died a few years ago was a middle aged professor in a crowd Moscow university when Reagan spoke. Rather than the usual politicians who spoke over the crowd, it was as if Reagan sought out faces in the crowd and spoke to individuals. He said that simple act broke the hold the soviets had over the people.
The speech
http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/3416
Each time, he spoke directly to me.
So you're not an American, but you're promoting a consistently anti-American view on an American forum. Got it.
In fact, just looking at your comments list I don't think I've seen a single comment that could be considered positive about America. For that matter, just looking at your 50 most recent comments I don't think I can see a single comment that is not about Ukraine.
Each comment is, without fail, either something derogatory about the public officials of the United States, the foreign policy of the United States (both past and present), the American public or something that puts Russia in a good light.
Your apparent view is that Putin is only acting to protect ethnic Russians from the US/NATO/EU/Soros neo-Nazi conspiracy, and that the warmongering Americans are just spoiling for a fight with a Russia anxious only to protect its backyard. This also happens to be the viewpoint propagated by the Kremlin.
That's what I know, and that's more than enough to write you off for what you are.
This is a false dichotomy.
Obama will be listening to the Realists
Listen to Kissinger, James Baker, Bob Gates, Brzezinski
There's a realistic happy medium, but the last three presidents have been totally incapable of restraint. Given the quality of current American politicians, finding the optimum middle out of them is like trusting the alcoholic to administer himself the proper dosage of medicinal liquor.
As far as NATO, the one reason I see for us remaining would be the fact that our presence prevents significant German rearmament. But I think a strong case can be made that the negatives outweigh the positives. I suspect Putin would be distressed at the idea of a NATO without the US, but for him a NATO that ends at the German-Poland border would be ideal.
Very well said. My thoughts exactly.
Knowing what I know now, I would never go fight again, and I never encourage anyone to do so. Their blood, and our fortunes, are not being sacrificed for the sake of our country at all anymore.
I notice that almost no current politicians, media personalities or even Conservative spokes-people have ever served in any of these wars. Almost none. It certainly was never like this before in our history, and I can’t help but think that this is all orchestrated by the design of the globalist powers behind the scenes.
It would be as if Russia reestablished the Warsaw Pact with Mexico as a member.
you didn’t answer my question. what difference does it make whether Russia controls Crimea. Give me specifics.
As for “reassembling” the Soviet empire, if they try to retake Poland, Hungary, etc, now that would be a problem. Crimea makes no difference to the US, and you haven’t offered any argument otherwise, just empty rhetoric.
Oh, and It’s not “anti-American” to oppose unnecessary wars. If it were, Reagan would be an anti-American by your definition, because he didn’t invade any countries, didn’t get us into any wars.
Grenada isn't a country?
Reagan was a great man and a great president.
And he didn’t get the US into any wars. He won the Cold War without firing a shot. Wish George W Bush had been a Reaganite instead of a Woodrow Wilsonite.
that was a two-day rescue operation. if you’re likening it to real wars, you’re joking of course
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