A Reagan Doctrine for the Twenty-First Century

From Sweden in the Baltic to Tartus in the Mediterranean, Russian forces are on the offensive. The consensus among U.S. officials not beholden to the White House is that Mitt Romney was right. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is the most dangerous threat to America.

And not only to America: Russia’s attempts to reclaim its empire spread conflict and misery, prolong war, destabilize the postwar alliance system that has brought security and prosperity to the world, and erode Western values such as freedom, equality, and individualism. Though Russia may no longer espouse global communist revolution, the consequences of its militarism and aggression are not limited to a small geographic area. The Comintern is gone. But the goals of dominating the Eurasian heartland, Finlandizing Europe, and isolating and challenging the United States have returned. The stronger Putin becomes, the more despotic, poorer, and more corrupt is the world.

Except for sanctions imposed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the occasional scolding, President Obama has been uninterested in retaliating against imperialism and deterring further aggression. He holds the view that history will expose Putin as a pretender and fool, and that Russia will be bogged down in a Syrian quagmire just as it was bogged down in Afghanistan long ago. What Obama forgets is that the Soviet Union’s defeat in Afghanistan came about because the United States financed and equipped anti-Soviet forces—a course of action he has rejected since the Syrian uprising began in 2011.

Obama’s supporters note that there is no clear U.S. ally in the Syrian conflict. Obviously not, since the president did nothing to identify and assist potentially friendly anti-regime Sunnis when the war began.

Fascinating. What are these friendly Sunnis you speak of? The only sunni I will ever trust would be the king of Jordan. Good guy. The rest are turds. Desert turds.

For extra credit, who started this war? And in Libya. And in Egypt? It wasn’t Russia. It was barry and his Saudi masters.

What are you talking about? You're just showing your prejudice. It was started by the 'Arab Spring'. The winter of their discontent was over. The stench of freedom was everywhere. The Arab savagery had ended and now it's Springtime(For Hitler) all because of a Tunisian fruit stand man self-immolated himself to demonstrate the high prices of fruit.

And this act of insanity somehow stirred within every illiterate, unemployed Arab youth sending them on a jihad of their own overturning governments, demonstrating in the streets, overthrowing long time allies as terror groups got stronger and more embolden. p>And then some moron just out of journalism school overwhelmed by the joyous crowd, had the brazen naivete to speak for me, said some unintelligible crock of sh!t that I was now an Egyptian, we were all Egyptian. This manic, giddy journalist trying to make a fairy tale theme for these the poor, maligned people having suffered under the thumb of despots, murderers, sadists, were now free, Free at last, free at last, thank Allah all-Mighty free at last, concocted the absolutely obscene diabolical mantra "Arab Spring" and that's how ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood and the rest of the pre-Jurassic savages were born.

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