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?”
Actually Reagan was clandestinely fighting all over the world and invaded and conquered one nation, and suffered the worst demonstrations ever with his aggressive moving of war weapons and personnel into Europe.
Reagan's era was a time of incredible aggression, mercenaries, secret operations, and constant harassment and confrontation and blocking of the communists.
Under Reagan we were high speed enough to be losing about 2200 men a year in our peace time military.
What would Brian Boitano do?
“I notice that almost no current politicians, media personalities or even Conservative spokes-people have ever served in any of these wars.”
The founders feared standing professional and mercenary armies which historically allowed imperialist powers to sustain a perpetual state of war. From their perspective the new nation was blessed with huge oceans protecting its borders from European and Asian powers. They perceived a citizens militia would be sufficient for defensive purposes. They did not envision our nation would ever project its power across the ocean and in turn would not be threatened by other large powers. In addition they believed a citizen army would resist being deployed to pursue foolish foreign adventures. Citizens would only leave to fight distant wars if there was an imminent and visible threat to their homes, families, livelihoods, and communities. Consider there would not have been an Iraq War if the man on the street had been called on to go overseas to fight it.
It is interesting the men (and now women) who decide to put American soldiers in harms way are never putting their lives or the lives of their families at risk. Perhaps we should have a rule for Presidents, Congressmen, cabinet officers, and generals. If you vote for a foreign war, your children will be drafted into the service and will serve on the front line for the duration. I suspect we might not have engaged in ground wars in Korea, Vietnam, Persian Gulf, Iraq or Afghanistan had such a law been in effect. In hindsight, it was the unpopularity of the draft that ultimately forced Nixon to withdraw from Vietnam. In contrast the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns in the first decade of this century were sustained for years because the average citizen was insulated from the pain by not having to serve.
I think that Obama should fight Russia after Ukraine passes homosexual rights laws.
Which would be the opposite of what Christ wanted, right?
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.
Those facts cannot be repeated often enough.
Additionally, his philosophy was almost entirely a product of his own intellect, and was truly creative and constructive thinking.
Reagan triumphed by building and producing rather that vandalizing and destroying, the hallmarks of the left.
Interestingly, the time Reagan used unilateral force was when US civilian citizens in a nation close to the United States, were endangered by Socialist infiltrators undermining a legitimate government, compromising their police, and constructing threatening military assets under the guise of economic aid.
The Neo-Con Fascistas can think that one over for a while.
Re:#104, Excellent accurate points.
True, Reagan was confronted with the fact that America was not insulated from Communism, it was here, and likely would have to be fought, but what better place to fight it than it's home of creation, Europe, let them take the consequences of their Pirate philosophy.
Reagan's era was a time of incredible aggression, mercenaries, secret operations, and constant harassment and confrontation and blocking of the communists.
An excellent idea considering how Communism expands and conquers.
Under Reagan we were high speed enough to be losing about 2200 men a year in our peace time military.
Considering that Reagan was building the high tech, high performance military that Obama and the Rats now abuse, those numbers are within reason for development and training added to operations.
“actually Reagan was clandestinely fighting all over the world”
Yes, but he didn’t get us into any wars.
Your description of the clandestine operations reminds me of the Saturday Night Live skit that had Reagan turn from a bumbler into a mastermind of global strategy, when the media left the room and the doors were closed.
Best president since Ike on foreign policy, and since Coolidge on domestic.
Reagan was the most aggressive president of the Cold War, we took a risk of voting for him to make an aggressive push against the communists, and he did, it was a heck of a ride.
Reagan was so aggressive that I rejoined the military in my mid 30s, to be a part of it.
Just as you overlooked his invading and conquering a country, you don’t seem to remember the Reagan years and the tensions as he kept up his global pace of conflict and confrontation.
I will never forget the tension among the troops in Europe under Reagan, we were close to total global war, and knew it, the rate of activity in Latin America was pretty amazing, and Africa, Reagan was obviously ready for war, but he was so aggressive that the other side couldn’t get a grip on things. Reagan emboldened the oppressed in the Soviet empire, to revolt, and terrified the Soviets enough that they failed to stop it.
I don’t know what your reasons are for trying to rewrite Reagan the cold war warrior, into Reagan the hands off pacifist are, but I assume it has something to do with being one of those guys who is only a merchant at heart, a libertarian only interested in money.
Huh? It would have been a blood bath for America, we had many 100s of thousands of GI's there and were probably going to lose at least 25% of our troops sent to reinforce from the US, before they ever reached the battlefield as their transport planes were shot down, and ships sank. Our 400 or 450 thousands of GIs already in Europe would largely have ceased to exist.
Western civilization and the US destroyed.
Some experts think that the closest we ever came to WWIII was under Reagan in 1983 during Exercise Able Archer.
It certainly would be unpleasant, but we warred in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and a few minor places against the Communists without those kind of losses or attacks on the continental US. Using foreign lands for battlefields has worked out quite well, not that I like it, but at the time Reagan did the right thing, and prepared in the best way known at the time to prevent overt Communist aggression.
It was the subversive campaign we lost, although Reagan tried very hard to fight it.
Reagan was by no means a pacifist. But he didn’t believe in unnecessary wars — unlike McCain and Bush. In fact, Reagan didn’t get us into any wars. The Grenada rescue operation wasn’t a war. Nobody fired back and it was over in one day. If you call that a war, I’ll spring for a dictionary because you need it.
Nobody believes in unnecessary wars, where do you guys come up with this nonsense.
The Grenada invasion conquered a country, and you thinking that it was captured without a shot and was to rescue medical students at risk, shows how ignorant you are about the time, you sound like a young libertarian.
Reagan broke the Soviets because they were terrified of him, he was clearly ready to go all the way, and he put us in the face of the Soviets, invading Grenada was a big part of that.
You would not have approved of what we were doing in Europe at the time, nor Africa, nor the Middle East, nor Latin America, the pace and level of push was extraordinary, and somewhat frightening, even American civilians were preparing for war.
Reagan wasn’t playing games.
You have no grasp of the scale of war that was expected to engulf Europe, America, and the world, if the Soviets attacked.
America was not expected to survive, Western Europe sure wouldn’t have.
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