Is Donald Trump to be allowed to craft a
foreign policy based on the ideas on which he ran and won the presidency in
2016?
Our foreign policy elite’s answer appears
to be a thunderous no.
Case in point: U.S. relations with Russia.
During the campaign Trump was clear. He
would seek closer ties with Russia and cooperate with Vladimir Putin in
smashing al-Qaida and ISIS terrorists in Syria, and leave Putin’s ally Bashar
Assad alone.
With this diplomatic deal in mind, President
Trump has resisted efforts to get him to call Putin a “thug” or a “murderer.”
Asked during his taped Super Bowl interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly
whether he respected Putin, Trump said that, as a leader, yes.
O’Reilly pressed, “But he’s a killer, though.
Putin’s a killer.”To which Trump replied, “There are a lot of killers. We’ve
got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”
While his reply was clumsy, Trump’s intent
was commendable.
If he is to negotiate a modus vivendi with
a nation with an arsenal of nuclear weapons sufficient to end life as we know
it in the USA, probably not a good idea to start off by calling its leader a
“killer.”
Mitch McConnell rushed to assure America he
believes Putin is a “thug” and any suggestion of a moral equivalence between
America and Russia is outrageous.
Apparently referring to a polonium
poisoning of KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko, Marco Rubio tweeted, “When has
a Democratic political activist ever been poisoned by the GOP? Or vice versa?”
Yet, as we beat our chests in celebration
of our own moral superiority over other nations and peoples, consider what
Trump is trying to do here, and who is really behaving as a statesmen, and who
is acting like an infantile and self-righteous prig.
When President Eisenhower invited Nikita
Khrushchev to the United States, did Ike denounce him as the “Butcher of
Budapest” for his massacre of the Hungarian patriots in 1956?
Did President Nixon, while negotiating his
trip to Peking to end decades of hostility, speak the unvarnished truth about
Mao Zedong — that he was a greater mass murderer than Stalin?
While Nixon was in Peking, Mao was conducting
his infamous Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that resulted in millions of
deaths, a years-long pogrom that dwarfed the two-day Kristallnacht. Yet Mao’s
crimes went unmentioned in Nixon’s toast to America and China starting a “long
march” together.
John McCain calls Putin a KGB thug, “a
murderer, and a killer.”
Yet, Yuri Andropov, the Soviet ambassador
in Budapest who engineered the slaughter of the Hungarian rebels with Russian
tanks, became head of the KGB. And when he rose to general secretary of the
Communist Party, Ronald Reagan wanted to talk to him, as he had wanted to talk
to every Soviet leader.
Why? Because Reagan believed the truly
moral thing he could do was negotiate to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
He finally met Gorbachev in 1985, when the
USSR was occupying Afghanistan and slaughtering Afghans
The problem with some of our noisier exponents
of “American exceptionalism” is that they lack Reagan’s moral maturity.
Undeniably, we were on God’s side in World
War II and the Cold War. But were we ourselves without sin in those just
struggles?
Was it not at least morally problematic
what we did to Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki where
hundreds of thousands of women and children were blasted and burned to death?
How many innocent Iraqis have perished in
the 13 years of war we began, based on falsified or fake evidence of Saddam’s
weapons of mass destruction?
In Russia, there have been murders of
journalists and dissidents. Yes, and President Rodrigo Duterte, our Philippine
ally, has apparently condoned the deaths of thousands of drug dealers and users
since last summer.
The Philippine Catholic Church calls it “a
reign of terror.”
Should we sever our treaty ties to the
Duterte regime?
Have
there been any extrajudicial killings in the Egypt of our ally Gen. Abdel
Fattah el-Sisi since he overthrew the elected government?
Has our Turkish ally, Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
killed no innocents in his sweeping repression since last summer’s attempted
coup?
Some of us remember a Cold War in which
Gen. Augusto Pinochet dealt summarily with our common enemies in Chile, and
when the Savak of our ally the Shah of Iran was not a 501(c)(3) organization.
Sen. Rubio notwithstanding, the CIA has not
been a complete stranger to “wet” operations or “terminating with extreme
prejudice.”
Was it not LBJ who said of the Kennedys,
who had arranged multiple assassination attempts of Fidel Castro, that they had
been “operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean”?
If Trump’s talking to Putin can help end
the bloodshed in Ukraine or Syria, it would appear to be at least as ethical an
act as pulpiteering about our moral superiority on the Sunday talk shows.
Patrick J. Buchanan is co-founder and editor of The American
Conservative. He is also the author of seven books, including Where the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War.
His latest book is Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?
See his website.
