Sunday Morning Talk Show Thread 20 March 2022

FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): Guest anchor Trace Gallagher: Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.); Dr. Vivek Murthy; Gen. Tony Tata (U.S. Army, Ret.). Panel: Guy Benson; Juan Williams; Jacqui Heinrich; Howard Kurtz.

MEET THE PRESS (NBC): Hosted by Chuck U. Toad: NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg; Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.); Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.); Richard Engel, reporting from Ukraine. Panel: Shane Harris, Washington Post; David Ignatius, Washington Post; Angrea Mitchell; Amna Nawaz —just another easily forgotten group of angry Leftists slinging anti-American balderdash.

FACE THE NATION (CBS): Margaret Brennan anchors: Qin Gang, Chinese Ambassador to the U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin; Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.); Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.S. Oksana Markarova; former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine and author Marie Yovanovitch (“Lessons From the Edge: A Memoir”); and, HE’S BACK, Former FDA commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb.

THIS WEEK (ABC): Hosted by Little Georgie Steponallofus: Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.); Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.); Dr. Anthony Fauci, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Panel: Jonathan Karl; Rachel Scott; Chris Christie; Donna Brazilenut –more Fat RINOs and Left-wing Propagandists!

STATE OF THE UNION (CNN): Anchored by Jake Toe-Tapper: U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield; Polish Ambassador to the U.S. Marek Magierowski; former CIA Director David Petraeus; Prime Minister of Estonia Kaja Kallas.

Panel: David Remnick, the New Yorker; Masha Gessen, the New Yorker—Tapper doesn’t always have a panel, but when he does, it is made up of fruits and nuts!

SUNDAY MORNING FUTURES (FNC): The Show to watch! Hosted by Maria Bartiromo: Mayor Vitali Klitschko, Kyiv, Ukraine; Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio); Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.); author Peter Schweizer (“Red-Handed”).

A letter from America's greatest diplomat, George F. Kennan whose "Long Telegram" authored while Ambassador to the Soviet Union resulted in the containment Policy that eventually took down the Soviet Union. Kennan was strongly against NATO expansion.

[From the National Interest--Spring 1998]

The Dangers of Expansive Realism

I read your article [Owen Harries, ``The Dangers of Expansive Realism'', Winter 1997/98] with strong approval. It was in some respects a surprise because certain of your major arguments were ones I myself had made, or had wanted to make, but had not expected to see them so well expressed by the pen of anyone else. I can perhaps make this clear by commenting specifically on certain of your points. First, your reference to the implicit understanding that the West would not take advantage of the Russian strategic and political withdrawal from Eastern Europe is not only warranted, but could have been strengthened. It is my understanding that Gorbachev on more than one occasion was given to understand, in informal talks with senior American and other Western personalities, that if the USSR would accept a united Germany remaining in NATO, the jurisdiction of that alliance would not be moved further eastward. We did not, I am sure, intend to trick the Russians; but the actual determinants of our later behavior--lack of coordination of political with military policy, and the amateurism of later White House diplomacy--would scarcely have been more creditable on our part than a real intention to deceive.

Secondly, I could not associate myself more strongly with what you write about the realist case that sees Russia as an inherently and incorrigibly expansionist country, and suggest that this tendency marks the present Russian regime no less than it did the Russian regimes of the past. We have seen this view reflected time and again, occasionally in even more violent forms, in efforts to justify the recent expansion of NATO's boundaries and further possible expansions of that name. So numerous and extensive have the distortions and misunderstandings on which this view is based been that it would be hard even to list them in a letter of this sort. It grossly oversimplifies and misconstrues must of the history of Russian diplomacy of the czarist period. It ignores the whole great complexity of Russia's part in World War II. It allows and encourages one to forget that the Soviet military advances into Western Europe during the last war took place with our enthusiastic approval, and the political ones of the ensuing period at least with our initial consent and support. It usually avoids mention of the Communist period, and attributes to ``the Russians'' generally all the excesses of the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe in the Cold War period.

Worst of all, it tends to equate, at least by implication, the Russian-Communist dictatorship of recent memory with the present Russian republic--a republic, the product of an amazingly bloodless revolution, which has, for all its many faults, succeeded in carrying on for several years with an elected government, a largely free press and media, without concentration camps or executions, and with a minimum of police brutality. This curious present Russia, we are asked to believe, is obsessed by the same dreams of conquest and oppression of others as were the worst examples, real or imaginative, of its predecessors.

You, I think, were among the first, if not indeed the first, to bring some of the above to the attention of your readers; and this, in my opinion, was an important and valuable service.

George F. Kennan,

Princeton, New Jersey.

[From the New York Times, February 5, 1997]

A Fateful Error--Expanding NATO Would Be a Rebuff to Russian Democracy

By George F. Kennan

In late 1996, the impression was allowed, or caused, to become prevalent that it had been somehow and somewhere decided to expand NATO up to Russia's borders. This despite the fact that no formal decision can be made before the alliance's next summit meeting in June.

The timing of this revelation--coinciding with the Presidential election and the pursuant changes in responsible personalities in Washington--did not make it easy for the outsider to know how or where to insert a modest word of comment. Nor did the assurance given to the public that the decision, however preliminary, was irrevocable encourage outside opinion.

But something of the highest importance is at stake here. And perhaps it is not too late to advance a view that, I believe, is not only mine alone but is shared by a number of others with extensive and in most instances more recent experience in Russian matters. The view, bluntly stated, is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.

Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking. And, last but not least, it might make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to secure the Russian Duma's ratification of the Start II agreement and to achieve further reductions of nuclear weaponry.

It is, of course, unfortunate that Russia should be confronted with such a challenge at a time when its executive power is in a state of high uncertainty and near-paralysis. And it is doubly unfortunate considering the total lack of any necessity for this move. Why, with all the hopeful possibilities engendered by the end of the cold war, should East-West relations become centered on the question of who would be allied with whom and, by implication, against whom in some fanciful, totally unforeseeable and most improbable future military conflict?

I am aware, of course, that NATO is conducting talks with the Russian authorities in hopes of making the idea of expansion tolerable and palatable to Russia. One can, in the existing circumstances, only wish these efforts success. But anyone who gives serious attention to the Russian press cannot fail to note that neither the public nor the Government is waiting for the proposed expansion to occur before reacting to it.

Russians are little impressed with American assurances that it reflects no hostile intentions. They would see their prestige (always uppermost in the Russian mind) and their security interests as adversely affected. They would, of course, have no choice but to accept expansion as a military fait accompli. But they would continue to regard it as a rebuff by the West and would likely look elsewhere for guarantees of a secure and hopeful future for themselves.

It will obviously not be easy to change a decision already made or tacitly accepted by the alliance's 16 member countries. But there are a few intervening months before the decision is to be made final; perhaps this period can be used to alter the proposed expansion in ways that would mitigate the unhappy effects it is already having on Russian opinion and policy.

Kurtz interviewing Bill Barr on Media Buzz. Barr again saying he saw no widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Follows it up by saying Trump “went off the rails” with his accusations of a stolen election leading to January 6, acted irresponsibility. Has strong criticism of his former boss.

Barr is a man in the middle and his trying to endear himself to the Washington elite after serving in the Trump administration results in no one respecting him. Admits that Washington is unfair to Republicans, the media has a double standard, and says he doesn’t expect anything different.

Trump’s response was predictable - “a swamp creature, a RINO, weak, pathetic, etc.” Barr says Trump can’t sustain a dependable relationship with those around him and the only ones who stay are the ones dependent on him, and he’s not one of them.

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