Posted on 01/30/2016 10:15:41 PM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
The Kremlin spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year on a global propaganda network that spreads conspiracy theories, distorts reality, and incites suspicion and hatred of the United States and its representative democracy. And that is just Russia - China and Qatar have similar operations. We have nothing that bears comparison. The main Putin network, RT, has more employees than the Voice of America. We are disarming ourselves not only materially but also ideologically. This must end.
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. Nor has he aided fully those few groups - "Syrian Kurds close to Turkey, moderate forces supported by Jordan close to its border, and small number of other moderate Syrians" - that, at least rhetorically, the United States backs today.
Obama's critics, meanwhile, are concerned with tactics. Both Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio have called for America to impose a no-fly zone over Syria. They're several years too late. A no-fly zone might have worked at the beginning of the conflict, as part of a strategy of coercive diplomacy to remove Bashar al-Assad and reach some sort of power-sharing agreement among Syrian tribes. Now, with Su-25s flying unrestricted over Syria, a no-fly zone would be greeted by the Russians as a nonstarter.
Worse, it would invite direct confrontation with the Russians, who are already buzzing NATO airspace from their new southern flank. Putin would like nothing more than to humiliate America over the skies of Raqqah. A no-fly zone is also superfluous. Our forces are already operating above parts of Syria - we could establish safe-havens at any time without asking for Russian permission. The problem isn't our capabilities. It's our lack of will.
What to do? The time has come for a revised strategy towards Russia, the greatest military and ideological threat to the United States and to the world order it has built over decades as guarantor of international security. We've faced a similar problem before. To create a freer and richer world, not the United States but Russia must be knocked back on its heels.
That is exactly what Ronald Reagan did in the final years of the Cold War. What is required today is a Reagan Doctrine for the twenty-first century - a comprehensive military, diplomatic, and cultural approach that elevates America’s stature and diminishes Russia's.
I can hear liberals already: Reagan, they'll say, was not a warrior but a peacemaker. Didn't he negotiate with Gorbachev, didn't he offer at Reykjavik to eliminate all ICBMs in exchange for the right of strategic defense? And so he did. But to focus only on Reagan's diplomacy is to suffer from historical myopia. It is to ignore Reagan's first term in favor of his second.
The hawkish policies Reagan enacted between 1981 and 1985 gave him the economic, political, and military leverage to become friends with Gorbachev later. And only with Gorbachev: During Reagan's first term, three Soviet leaders preceded the author of glasnost and perestroika. The president didn't meet with any of them. "They keep dying on me," he liked to say.
In their moral disapproval of force, in their fallacious belief that human beings of every nation and every government share the same values and interests, liberals forget that every diplomatic solution is based on the balance or preponderance of military power. It is the weaker party that seeks negotiations - just as Europe and the United States, consumed by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, did after Russia’s invasion of Georgia. Just as President Obama, preoccupied with ending the Middle Eastern wars and resolving the financial crisis, attempted his reset with Russia. Just as Europe and the United States, in the grip of anomie and malaise, have sought to freeze the conflict in Ukraine and "de-conflict" the escalating war in Syria.
Let's reverse the equation.
Like the strategy pursued by our fortieth president more than 30 years ago, a twenty-first-century Reagan Doctrine would have three parts:
Military buildup. President Reagan reversed the degradation and demoralization of the U.S. armed forces. The defense budget in his first term more than doubled. Yes, there was waste. But more important than the $400 toilet seat were the B1 bomber, the stealth fighter, the Trident submarine, and hundreds of F-14s and F-15s. Defense spending created jobs, inspired patriotism, and laid the foundation for American success in Operation Desert Storm and the Balkan wars. We use many of these platforms to this day.
The gusher of weapons scared our enemies. "The scale and pace of the American buildup under Reagan," writes Henry Kissinger in Diplomacy, "reinforced all the doubts already in the minds of the Soviet leadership as a result of debacles in Afghanistan and Africa, about whether they could afford the arms race economically and - even more important - whether they could sustain it technologically."
Who now holds such doubts? The trajectory of U.S. troop numbers and defense budgets is downward. The "sequester" is about to take a huge bite of the Pentagon's resources. Our ability to fight in two theaters at once, a pillar of postwar American defense policy, is in doubt.
"Just as the threats have become visible and undeniable," write the authors of "To Rebuild America's Military," a new American Enterprise Institute report, "the United States is continuing to cut the armed forces dramatically, having imposed the cuts through an extraordinary means - a law imposing arbitrary limits on parts of the federal budget and employing the mindless tool of sequestration - with no analysis whatsoever of the impact on the nation's security."
The AEI scholars recommend a return to the level of defense spending proposed by Robert Gates, and the gradual build to "an affordable floor of 4 percent of gross domestic product that would sustain the kind of military America needs." These numbers might not be as shocking as Reagan's. But at least they would reverse the hollowing out of the force. And they would grab the attention of the Kremlin.
Both left and right are likely to oppose more spending on the grounds of debt and deficits. For the left to make this critique is disingenuous - their leading economists say deficits do not matter in the current economic environment and call for an expansionary fiscal policy. What the right needs to understand is that deficit reduction and balanced budgets are worthy goals in a time of peace. And peacetime this is not.
Strategic Weapons. Vladimir Putin plays ICBM politics. His regime holds nuclear retaliation as its ultimate trump in negotiations - and while the Russians have not played this card, oh how they love to show it.
The U.S. response is naive. Not to mention contradictory. It combines idealistic calls for nuclear abolition with hapless and toothless diplomacy that does little to stop Iran from spinning centrifuges, North Korea from building more bombs, and Russia from violating treaty commitments.
We forget we hold nuclear cards, too. This is a fact Reagan did not lose sight of. "The two strategic decisions which contributed most to ending the Cold War," writes Kissinger, "were NATO's deployment of American intermediate-range missiles in Europe and the American commitment to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)."
Keep the Pershing IIs on hold (for now). But please update and modernize our nuclear forces, which exist in an embarrassing state of disrepair and neglect. And do not forget the importance of strategic defense: Development of anti-ballistic missile technologies would be a highly controversial, and highly important, part of any renewed defense buildup. The broadening of the missile shield reassures allies - and worries Russia.
Not only would a revitalized and advanced nuclear force, coupled with increased funding and enlargement of strategic defense, assert U.S. supremacy, deter adversaries, and develop innovative technologies. It would also bring political benefits to whoever proposed it.
When Reagan announced SDI in the spring of 1983, notes Kissinger, "The experts had all the technical arguments on their side, but Reagan had got hold of an elemental political truth: In a world of nuclear weapons, leaders who make no effort to protect their peoples against accident, mad opponents, nuclear proliferation, and a whole host of other foreseeable dangers invite the opprobrium of posterity if disaster ever does occur."
The president's duty is to ensure that it does not - not by terrorists who desire weapons of mass destruction, not by the states that possess them.
Insurgency. It was Charles Krauthammer who coined the phrase "Reagan Doctrine" in an April 1985 essay for Time magazine. The article described Reagan's support for anticommunist forces in Nicaragua, Angola, Afghanistan, and beyond. Some of those forces, like Solidarity in Poland, truly were democratic. Others, like the mujahedin, were the enemies of our enemy - and thus, in specific circumstances, worthy of our help.
It takes a set of moral blinders the size of the president's ego not to recognize today's Russia as America's enemy. There is no other power as devoted to undermining U.S. authority and prestige and interests - from subverting the NATO alliance to replacing us as the dominant external power in the Middle East to hacking our technological infrastructure to harboring the fugitive Edward Snowden. As America has waned, Putin has waxed. And so for America to wax, Putin must wane.
We must arm his enemies. That means deadly weapons and massive financial aid to Ukraine. Forward bases in the Baltics. And the sending of arms and cash to the Syrian rebels his jets are strafing. Not even the liberal Vox.com pretends that Putin is going after ISIS; why should our government?
Imposing costs on Putin requires dealing with unsavory people. It risks unforeseen consequences, some potentially negative. But the actual consequences of the policy being pursued at the moment - ongoing war, regional destabilization, humanitarian chaos, Islamic radicalization, and erosion of U.S. leadership and credibility - are worse.
The insurgency launched by Reagan was not limited to arms. It also had an ideological component. "The Reagan Doctrine has been widely understood to mean only support for anticommunist guerillas fighting pro-Soviet regimes, but from the first the doctrine had a broader meaning. Support for anticommunist guerillas was the logical outgrowth, not the origin, of a policy of supporting democratic reform or revolution everywhere, in countries ruled by right-wing dictators as well as by communist parties," says Robert Kagan in A Twilight Struggle.
Speaking forthrightly and proudly of liberal values, and condemning their abuse within the Russian sphere of influence, is a requirement of any foreign policy associated with Ronald Reagan. As Secretary of State George Shultz put it in 1985: "The forces of democracy around the world merit our standing with them. To abandon them would be a shameful betrayal - a betrayal not only of brave men and women but of our highest ideals."
Standing with the forces of democracy is not the same as calling for elections everywhere. Elections are not the beginning of the policy. They are its endpoint. The beginning is in the rhetorical promotion of individual freedoms, in renewed financial support for nongovernmental organizations promoting civil society and an independent media, in education in the habits and traditions of the West.
The Kremlin spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year on a global propaganda network that spreads conspiracy theories, distorts reality, and incites suspicion and hatred of the United States and its representative democracy. And that is just Russia - China and Qatar have similar operations. We have nothing that bears comparison. The main Putin network, RT, has more employees than the Voice of America. We are disarming ourselves not only materially but also ideologically. This must end.
The agenda I have outlined would cost quite a bit of money. It would involve America with some morally suspect individuals. The debate over it would be heated. There would be reprisals.
But the Reagan Doctrine was all of those things, too. And it worked. "The Reagan Doctrine proclaims overt and unashamed American support for anti-Communist revolution," Krauthammer wrote in 1985. "The grounds are justice, necessity, and democratic tradition." Replace anti-Communist with anti-authoritarian, and what has changed? If we are to reestablish American ideals, American interests, and American pride, we must hurt the bad guys, and overtly and unashamedly revise the Reagan Doctrine for a new American century.
Putin? He is one bad guy. So let's take off our gloves.
"...."You claim it is tough talk to discuss carpet bombing," [Ted] Cruz said. "It is not tough talk. It is a different fundamental military strategy than what we've seen from Barack Obama."
Cruz continued to hammer Obama over his military strategy.
"Barack Obama right now, No. 1, over seven years, has dramatically degraded our military," he said.
He then invoked the Persian Gulf War, using it as justification of his strategy of increased air attacks:
Just two weeks ago was the 25th anniversary of the first Persian Gulf War. When that war began, we had 8,000 planes. Today we have about 4,000. When that war began, we had 529 ships, today we have 272. You want to know what carpet-bombing is? It's what we did in the first Persian Gulf War: 1,100 air attacks a day, saturation bombing that utterly destroyed the enemy. Right now Barack Obama is launching about 15 and 30 air attacks a day. He's not arming the Kurds. We need to define the enemy, we need to rebuild the military, to defeat the enemy, and we need to be focused and lift the rules of engagement so we're not sending our fighting men and women into combat with their arms tied behind their backs. Jan 28, 2016
Russia is doing the Lord’s work in the Middle East while we sit and criticize. Let’s postpone hating the USSR back into existence for a while, ‘mkay?
Russia is doing the Lord’s work in the Middle East while we sit and criticize. Let’s postpone hating the USSR back into existence for a while, ‘mkay?
Crazy talk. The Soviets can have Afghanistan.
Even after helping the muzzies, they turned and brought their sabres to our shores.
China helped to kill or harm more Americans post WWII than any other country. Yet the think tankers turn a blind eye to that and want us to focus on Russia.
A U.S. Navy destroyer carried out a second transit near a disputed South China Sea island claimed by China and two other nations, the Pentagon announced Saturday.
China's Defense Ministry denounced the warship transit and said its forces had forced the destroyer USS Curtis Wilbur out of the area.
Pentagon spokesman Cmdr. Bill Urban said the freedom of navigation operation by the Wilbur took place Saturday near Triton Island in the Paracel Islands chain in the northern part of the sea "to challenge excessive maritime claims."...
"This operation was about challenging excessive maritime claims that restrict the rights and freedoms of the United States and others, not about territorial claims to land features," he added. While the U.S. government takes no position on the competing sovereignty claims, "the United States does take a strong position on protecting the rights, freedoms, and lawful uses of the sea and airspace guaranteed to all countries, and that all maritime claims must comply with international law," the spokesman said.
None of the three nations' governments were notified of the transit, the second time a U.S. warship has conducted a freedom of navigation operation after a hiatus in such operations of over three years.........
....China is claiming some 90 percent of the South China Sea as its maritime domain, and the Pentagon has said it rejects the claim. China has set up a vaguely defined "Nine Dash Line" covering most of the sea.
Navy officials have said the Chinese claims have threatened the transit of some $5 trillion in annual trade through the region, including an estimated in $1.2 trillion in trade bound for the United States.
President Barack Obama called on China in November to halt construction on some of the 3,000 acres of newly - created islands in the disputed waters that are now being militarized with airfields, deep water ports, and other military features.
Days later, China's government responded to the president's call by announcing that the construction of military facilities would continue.
China is building airstrips on three islands in the Spratlys that the Pentagon has said could be used to station warplanes capable of controlling the entire airspace over the sea.......
Urban, the Pentagon spokesman, said the latest operation demonstrated that "the United States will fly, sail and operate anywhere international law allows."
"That is true in the South China Sea, as in other places around the globe," he said.
However, a senior military official said the failure to conduct the navigation operations between 2012 and last October was the result of bureaucratic opposition within the Obama administration that sought to avoid upsetting China.
The official said the former commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, Adm. Samuel Locklear, had proposed conducting the close transit warship transits in the South China Sea but was overruled for years by officials in other agencies of government who blocked the requests by failing to respond to the admiral's requests.
After a while, [Locklear] stopped making the requests.
Last year, McCain disclosed during a committee hearing that the administration had restricted Pacific Command from conducting the operations for both aircraft and warships.
"The administration has continued to restrict our Navy ships from operating within 12 nautical miles of China's reclaimed islands," McCain said Sept. 17.
The hearing prompted the new Pacific Command chief, Adm. Harry Harris, to renew the transit requests and the first operation was carried out Oct. 26 near the Spratlys Islands, in the southern part of the sea........
The entire content of the article is worth reading.
I read it. We are broke. Where are we gonna get the money? We haven’t paid off the Reagan debt, we still have Bush and Obama after that.
You want to start WW-III now.
That is addressed in the piece.
Lol...Forever war? 20 Trillion isn't enough? I still see no facts on where we are gonna get the money and the author says it doesn't matter.
I cannot imagine a worse time to toss that “STUFF” on the forum.
This is just so much noise right now.
We have a caucus tomorrow, and this subject can be addressed anytime in the next ten months.
?
It's the perfect time. This is vital "stuff."
A Commander in Chief is what Iowans will be voting for.
No, what they need i someone who won’t send out fraudulent voter packets.
LOL
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This is fraud, hubris and disrespect, and fair warning about a future from knowing the past:
A draft dodger.
The same Trump who fought to keep veterans from LEGALLY selling outside his Trump Tower.
Showing his NYC values, Trump called vets a detriment to NYC (and when he lost he put up huuuge planter barricades).
He failed though, just like he did when he tried to take a widow's home for a limo parking lot for a NJ casino - then praised the eminent domain Kelo decision as "wonderful").
A phony who had nothing to say about Fort Hood in 2009, but in 2012 (with political aspirations) decided to start pandering and tweeted about it.
This is what you get with a "President" Trump:
A commander in chief that belittles U.S. prisoners of war.
A commander in chief that likes and defends Putin - a KGP goon that shoots down domestic airliners.
A commander in chief that is in awe of Kim Jung-Un and how, at such a young age, he took charge - in such a commanding way - the brutal family dictatorship of North Korea (that closed society of starving people).
Smear away. Your job ends in less a little over 48 hours.
That's a leap.
You want to let Russia and China roll over us?
We stand up and make them stand down.
They're making their moves. Obama has given them the field.
You tell me what is a smear?
About 90% of your posts.
Any questions?
That’s an expected tactical comment by you.
I source what I post.
It’s hardly my fault that the shoe fits.
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