“Only Donald Trump (among the Presidential candidates) has said
anything meaningful and critical of U.S. foreign policy.” No, that is not
Reince Priebus, chair of the RNC, speaking up in favor of the presumptive
Republican nominee. It is Stephen F. Cohen, Emeritus Professor of Russian
History at Princeton and NYU, a contributing editor for The Nation, that most liberal of political journals.
Cohen tells us here that: “Trump’s questions are fundamental and urgent, but instead
of engaging them, his opponents (including President Obama) and the media
dismiss the issues he raises about foreign policy as ignorant and dangerous.
Some even charge that his statements are like ‘Christmas in the Kremlin’ and
that he is ‘the Kremlin’s Candidate’ — thereby, further shutting off the debate
we so urgently need.” (Cohen’s comment about the lack of a meaningful
critique of U.S. foreign policy also covers the statements of Sen. Bernie
Sanders.)
Cohen first enunciated Trump’s five questions during one of his
weekly discussions on relations between Russia and the West on The John
Batchelor Show, on WABC-AM (also onpodcasts).
On April 6, 2016, broadcast, Cohen says:
Let me just rattle off the five questions he (Trump) has asked.
(First) why must the
United States lead the world everywhere on the globe and play the role of the
world’s policeman, now, for example, he says, in Ukraine? It’s a
question. It’s worth a discussion.
Secondly, he said, NATO
was founded 67 years ago to deter the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union
ended 25 years ago. What is NATO’s mission? Is it obsolete?
Is it fighting terrorism? No, to the last question, it’s not.
Should we discuss NATO’s mission?
Thirdly, he asks, why
does the United States always pursue regime changes? Iraq, Libya,
Ukraine, and now it wants a regime change in Syria, Damascus. When
the result is, to use Donald Trump’s favorite word, the result is always
“disaster.” But it’s a reasonable question.
Fourthly, why do we treat
Russia and Putin as an enemy when he should be a partner?
Fifth Trump asks, about
nuclear weapons – and this is interesting. You remember he was asked,
would he rule out using nuclear weapons – an existential question. He
thought for a while and then he said, “No, I take nothing off the table.”
And everybody said he wants to use nuclear weapons! In fact, it is the
official American nuclear doctrine policy that we do not take first use off the
table. We do not have any first use of nuclear weapons doctrine. So all
Trump did was a state in his own way what has been official American nuclear
policy for, I guess, 40 or 50 years.
…It seems to me that
these five questions, which are not being discussed by the other presidential
candidates, are essential. ….
Batchelor then turns the discussion to the question of
NATO. Cohen replies:
When we say NATO, what are we talking about? We are not
talking only about the weapons and soldiers on land and sea. We’re
talking about a vast political bureaucracy with hundreds of thousands of
employees and appointees, that is located in Brussels. It’s a political
empire. It’s an institution. It’s almost on a par with our
Department of Defense, though it gets its money from the Department of Defense,
mainly, as Trump points out, so therefore it doesn’t have quite the swat
(sic). But it has many propaganda organs. If you look at the
bylines of people who write op-ed pieces in many American papers, they are
listed as working for the public relations department of NATO or they formerly
did so. No, I would say along with the Kremlin and Washington, NATO is
probably the third largest propagator of information, in this information war,
in the world.
But look, here’s the reality. And Trump came to this
late. When they were discussing expanding NATO in the 1990s in the
Clinton administration, it was George Kennan who was then the most venerable
American diplomat scholar on relations with Russia who said: Don’t do it; it
will be a disaster; it will lead to a new Cold War.
Since George spoke his words – and I knew him well when I taught
at Princeton where he lived – we have taken in virtually all of the countries
between Berlin and Russia. NATO now has 28 membership states. But
if you sit in the Kremlin and you see NATO coming at you over 20 years, country
by country like PAC-man, gobbling up countries that used to be your allies, who
appears to be the aggressor?
So – the expansion of NATO has been a catastrophe. And
that has been, in some ways, apart from fighting the war in Afghanistan – from
which I believe it has now withdrawn, it is now solely American (I may be wrong
about that) – and in addition taking on the American project of missile
defense, expanding toward Russia has been NATO’s only mission since the end of
the Soviet Union.
So people can ask themselves, if they ask calmly and apart from
the information war,..,do we have less security risks, less conflict, today
after this expansion to Russia’s borders, bearing in mind that the Ukrainian
crisis is a direct result of trying to bring Ukraine into NATO as was the
Georgian war, the proxy war with Russia in 2008. Are we, as Reagan would
say, are we better off today? We are not! So easily at a minimum, we have to
rethink what it is NATO is doing.
So get thee to the website for the American Committee
on East-West Accord and listen to the weekly Batchelor-Cohen
podcasts. They are an ideal antidote to the avalanche of Russia-bashing
and Putin demonizing that we must endure. While you are at it, check out
the other leading members of ACEWA, a superb and badly needed organization –
and make a contribution.
