Posted on 10/11/2018 6:32:52 PM PDT by Kaslin
Nearly a half-century ago, President Richard Nixon's secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, established a successful U.S. strategy for dealing with America's two most dangerous rivals. He sought closer ties to both the Soviet Union, with its more than 7,000 nuclear weapons, and Communist China, with the world's largest population.
Kissinger's approach was sometimes called "triangulation." But distilled down to its essence, the phrase meant ensuring that China and Russia were not friendlier to each other than each was to the United States
Given that the Soviet Union was much stronger than China at the time, Kissinger especially courted Beijing.
The idea was similar to British and French policy in the mid-1930s of discouraging Adolf Hitler's Third Reich from becoming the partner of Josef Stalin's equally powerful and dangerous Soviet Union. Unfortunately, that effort failed, and Nazi-Soviet cooperation led to their joint invasion of Poland in 1939 and the outbreak of World War II.
We forgot Kissinger's wisdom during the Obama administration's coddling of China and the schizophrenic Russian "reset."
The reset was initially a disastrous appeasement of Russian conventional and cyber aggressions. Its failure soon led to an about-face demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin as an anti-democratic authoritarian -- as if he had been, or would ever be, anything other than a tyrant.
Russia systematically reabsorbed Crimea, leveraged Eastern Europe, caused turmoil in Ukraine, terrified Western Europe, returned to the Middle East after a 40-year hiatus, and hacked into U.S. electoral and political institutions.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
“... hacked into U.S. electoral and political institutions”
Hacking Hillary Clinton’s unprotected email server can hardly be called an electoral institution. Give me a break.
Good stuff from VDH, as always.
“...China’s stock market is way down. Its economy is slowing and its currency declining. Average Chinese citizens wonder why, in tough times, their leaders are lavishing foreign aid on African countries and other Asian nations ...”
Sound familiar to any Americans?
I don’t think he appreciates how deeply Russia is indebted to China now though.
Today was a VERY big deal in terms of Russia:
Ukraine’s Orthodox Church was officially granted Independence from Russia by the leader of the Eastern Orthodoxy, Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople.
This puts hundreds of years of history in flux. Moscow’s sense of entitlement to hegemony from imperial days, to Soviet times, till now has rested on narratives that find their roots in Orthodox territorial alignment and Moscow’s self-identification as the ‘third Rome.’
Ukraine finally has the spiritual and institutional affirmation for their claims to sovereignty and nationhood.
https://www.ft.com/content/723c14da-cd4b-11e8-b276-b9069bde0956
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