Democrats’ anti-Russia madness
Like a saloon blowhard emboldened by the intake of a few too many brews, the Democratic Party is ready to kick some Rooskie ass. What could possibly go wrong? Never mind that Russia’s a formidable military and nuclear power.
Hey, bring it on! The bigger they are, the harder they fall! While we’re mucking around in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and other far-flung places, heck, why not add the Baltic nations and Ukraine to the list?
Around Washington, Russia is once again the Great Ogre of the Volga. And any who hesitate to join the fray against it are chickens, yellow-bellies, sissies unwilling to stand up for their country. They are Putin puppets. Traitors, by gawd!
Those who peddle such lame-brain bellicosity once were aligned with the Republican Party, in the form of the nutty, right-wing John Birch Society.
Eventually, the Birchers went too far, even for blustery conservatives. The Birch Society’s top loon declared America’s iconic patriot, Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower “a tool of the Communists.” That was when the Birchers jumped the shark.
William F. Buckley Jr., the erudite apostle of conservatism, stepped forward to pronounce the Birch Society’s conspiratorial ravings “far removed from common sense.” He urged the GOP to cease hobnobbing with this deranged cohort, and the party pretty much took his advice.
The hankering today for a rumble with Russia is worthy of contemplation. Marx famously said history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. Today’s farcical developments look like they could go straight to tragedy.
It’s the Democratic Party that’s now sounding like latter-day Birch Society whackos — the party and other leading anti-Trump hysterics such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC et al. Who’ll have the courage to step forward as Buckley did and denounce the knucklehead nonsense?
Very few so far. One of the notable few is Stephen F. Cohen, author of many books on Russia, former director of Princeton’s Russian Studies Program. His misgivings about the “New Cold War” enthusiasms roiling the Democratic Party (and parts of the GOP) are not easily dismissed as ideological humbug. He can hardly be consigned to the category of right-wing kook and shunted aside as such.
Cohen’s articles have long been mainstays of the venerable, old-line lefty journal, The Nation — of which his wife, Katrina vanden Huevel, a backer of Bernie Sanders, is editor and part owner. He has always kept critics on the right in a state of frothy agitation over his scholarly equanimity regarding things Russian. Now he has critics of the left all lathered up too.
Cohen, who speaks Russian and has spent many years in Moscow sifting through Kremlin archives, sees a toxic “neo-McCarthyism” leaching into U.S. politics, especially among Democrats. Most disconcerting, he says, is the political left’s willingness — indeed, eagerness — to indulge itself in Russian bear-baiting, with reckless indifference to tripwires that could set off catastrophic conflagration.
Those who are shaking their fists over Russia’s “attack on our democracy” in the 2016 presidential election and are likening this largely phantasmagorical event to Pearl Habor should pause to contemplate the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency’s assessment of Russian military might.
Russia possesses, says, the DIA, “one of the most potent missile forces in the world,” not to mention 20,000-plus heavy battle tanks, 245 naval vessels including nuclear subs, 40 active and reserve combat “maneuver brigades” and eight combat “maneuver divisions.”
As regards prickly relations with adversarial nations, liberals traditionally have been the voice of restraint.
No longer. They’re now among the loudest breast-beaters. In his latest book, “War With Russia?”, Cohen wonders: Have liberals let their hatred of Trump “nullify their own principles?” It’s a rhetorical question. The answer is: You bet. They have let their Trump derangement syndrome undermine not only their principles but their grasp on reality as well.
Even the one-time peacenik wing of the Democratic Party today seems, in its anti-Trump pathology, prepared to see the nation go to the brink with Russia if that’s where the crazed pursuit of Trump happens to lead.
Here liberal Democrats are in lockstep with the neo-conservatives, who have always been eager to stir up a fracas and then stand aside and have other Americans do the fighting. “Let’s you and him fight while I hold your coat,” the neoconservatives have always said.
Now liberals are picking up on the refrain.
Who’ll step forward and volunteer for duty defending South Ossetia (population 53,000) from Russian troops? (Americans first may want to see if they can find this tiny hotspot on the map.)
When the Soviet Union collapsed under the dead weight of its own oppressive, self-defeating bureaucracy, the United States opted, thanks in no small part to Republicans, for a triumphalist end-zone dance rather than long-view diplomacy to help Russia get through a chaotic transition and out of the wreckage of Communism.
The United States pushed NATO right up to the front stoop of an always wary if not paranoid Russia. America declined to acknowledge that Russia had even a sphere of concern, never mind a sphere of influence on its own western border — a western border whence once had come, at a phenomenal loss of Russian lives, the invading armies of Napoleon and Hitler. How would a hostile alliance on our own doorstep, incorporating nations of, say, Central and South America, go over here? We may now be getting a taste of this.
Now the United States is ensnared in alliances committing itself to potential warfare in behalf of such new NATO members as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Montenegro, places many of us can’t even locate on the
map. And now, on top of this, America is enmeshed in potential hostilities regarding such NATO “partners” as Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. Wasn’t it George Washington who warned us against “entangling alliances”? He’d be scoffingly dismissed today as an “isolationist.” Wasn’t it a chain reaction of entangling alliances that triggered World War I?
Despite potential new flashpoints on Russia’s doorstep, Democrats and their media gofers continue to hector Trump over the “Russia collusion” red herring. They rail against him for “aiding and abetting the enemy,” for being “a de facto agent of the Kremlin,” even for the death-penalty crime of “treason.”
As for Putin, prominent U.S. politicians and Bigfoot journalists have taken to portraying him in the most alarmist terms they can conjure — as “an evil man intent on evil deeds”; as “a man without a soul,” as a man reminiscent of “Hitler”; as “a ghoul.”
Such language rings of precursor propaganda, of fightin’ words that invite rash action. The “Russia collusion” madness, in Cohen’s assessment, is in large measure the work product of “a kind of journalistic cult,” of mass media hysteria impervious to factual analysis, harkening back to the old war-mongering era of Hearst yellow journalism.
The resulting “New Cold War” is no mere academic matter, says Cohen. It ominously constrains “the president’s capacity to conduct crisis negotiations with Moscow” should hostilities approach a flashpoint as they did in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, he says.
If Russia meddled in our election in 2016, the meddling involved marginal efforts to little effect — certainly nothing on the scale of the Clinton Administration’s financial and political meddling in behalf of disastrous President Boris Yeltsin’s reelection in 1996, Cohen adds.
As he reckons it, the partisan strategy of toppling Trump and writing off relations with Russia as collateral damage comes with few if any pluses — with mostly stark minuses.
A policy of bear-baiting Russia denies us a potentially valuable ally against hothead Islamic militancy and pushes Russia toward alignment with China.
If Putin doesn’t conform to our ideal of acceptable character in a leader, neither do countless other unsavory rogues we do business with around the world out of a sense of real politik, for example, Saudi Arabia’s cut-throat princes, Egypt’s strong-man ruler Gen. Abdel Fatah el-Sisi and China’s Xi Jinping, a made-over Mao Zedong with slick PR and “free trade” American corporate oligarchs as suck-up buddies.
Since Europe remains dependent on Russia for oil and gas, a U.S. policy of making Russia the Boris Badinoff of our cartoon diplomacy seems destined only to weaken an already fraying western alliance. Our biggest military “ally” in NATO is an increasingly hostile and Islamized Turkey.
The reality is that other European NATO allies to the west have equivocating “leaders” and paper-tiger militaries that would be hard-pressed to stand up to a Big Ten marching band.
And, Cohen notes, a U.S. policy of demonizing the Kremlin surely doesn’t make it any easier for Putin to hold the leash on his own hardliner George Pattons and Curtis LeMays.
The notion that Putin desperately favored the election of Trump over Hillary Clinton and colluded with Trump to achieve that goal ranks among the nuttiest of fantasies, in Cohen’s view. He invites us to think about it.
If Kremlin forces so favored Trump, why would Russian sources have concocted for the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign a “dossier” crafted to besmirch and destroy Trump’s candidacy? Does that make any sense other than out on the far reaches of antiTrump Loony Land?
Cohen doesn’t ask the question himself, but wouldn’t Putin have reserved in some distant corner of his heart at least a small warm spot for Hillary, knowing it was, after all, her State Department that signed off on a deal giving Russia ownership of 20 percent of America’s strategically critical uranium productive capacity — and knowing that her hubby Bill pocketed a $500,000 speech fee from a Russian investment bank with a stake in that deal?
After 65 years of standoff on the Korean peninsula; after the 20-year debacle of Vietnam; after nearly three decades of mucking around in Iraq; after nearly two decades of floundering around in Afghanistan, and after nearly 40 years of hostilities vis-à-vis Iran, can it be anything less than insanity to think that mounting tensions with Russia are worth the partisan price of taking Trump’s scalp?
Now the United States is ensnared in alliances committing itself to potential warfare in behalf of such new NATO members as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Montenegro, places many of us can’t even locate on the map.