Unless there is a late surge for Communist Party candidate Pavel
Grudinin, who is running second with 7 percent, Vladimir Putin will be
re-elected president of Russia for another six years on March 18.
Then we must decide
whether to continue on course into a second Cold War, or engage Russia, as
every president sought to do in Cold War I.
For our present
conflict, Vladimir Putin is not alone at fault. His actions have often been
reactions to America’s unilateral moves.
After the Soviet Union
collapsed, we brought all of the Warsaw Pact members and three former republics
of the USSR into our military alliance, NATO, to corral Russia. How friendly
was that?
Putin responded with his
military buildup in the Baltic.
George W. Bush abrogated
the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that Richard Nixon had negotiated, Putin
responded with a buildup of the offensive missiles he put on display last week.
The U.S. helped to
instigate the Maidan Square coup that dumped over the elected pro-Russian
government in Ukraine.
To prevent the loss of
his Sebastopol naval base on the Black Sea, Putin countered by annexing the
Crimean Peninsula.
After peaceful protests
in Syria were put down by Bashar Assad, we sent arms to Syrian rebels to
overthrow the Damascus regime.
Seeing his last naval
base in the Med, Tartus, imperiled, Putin came to Assad’s aid and helped him
win the civil war.
The Boris Yeltsin years
are over.
Russia is acting again
as a great power. And she sees us as a nation that slapped away her hand,
extended in friendship in the 1990s, and then humiliated her by planting NATO
on her front porch.
Yet, what is also clear
is that Putin hoped and believed that, with the election of Trump, Russia might
be able to restore respectful if not friendly relations with the United States.
Clearly, Putin wanted
that, as did Trump.
Yet, with the Beltway
hysteria over hacking of the DNC and John Podesta emails, and the Russophobia
raging in this capital, we appear to be paralyzed when it comes to engaging
with Russia.
The U.S. political
system, said Putin this week, “has been eating itself up.” Is his depiction
that wide of the mark?
What is the matter with
us?
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Three years after Nikita
Khrushchev sent tanks into Budapest to drown the Hungarian revolution in blood,
Eisenhower was hosting him on a 10-day visit to the USA.
Two years after the
Berlin Wall went up, and eight months after Khrushchev installed missiles in
Cuba, Kennedy reached out to the Soviet dictator in his widely praised American
University speech.
Lyndon Johnson met with
Russian President Alexei Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey, just weeks after we
almost clashed over Moscow’s threat to intervene in the Arab-Israeli War of
1967.
Six months after Leonid
Brezhnev sent tank armies to crush the Prague Spring in August 1968, an
inaugurated Nixon was seeking detente.
In those years, no
matter who was in the White House or Kremlin, the U.S. establishment favored
engagement with Moscow. It was the right that was skeptical or hostile.
Again, what is the
matter with this generation?
True, Vladimir Putin is
an autocrat seeking a fourth term, like FDR.
But what Russian leader,
save Yeltsin, has not been an autocrat? And Russians today enjoy freedoms of
speech, assembly, religion, travel, politics, and the press that the
generations before 1989 never knew.
China, not Russia, has
the more repressive single-party Communist state.
Indeed, which of these
U.S. allies shows greater tolerance than Putin’s Russia? The Philippines of
Rodrigo Duterte, the Egypt of Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, the Turkey of
President Erdogan, or the Saudi Arabia of Prince Mohammad bin Salman?
Russia is nowhere near
the strategic or global threat the Soviet Union presented. As Putin conceded
this week, with the breakup of the USSR, his nation “lost 23.8 percent of its
national territory, 48.5 percent of its population, 41 percent of its gross
domestic product and 44.6 percent of its military capacity.”
How would Civil War
Unionists have reacted if the South had won independence and then, to secure
the Confederacy against a new invasion, Dixie entered into an alliance with
Great Britain, gave the Royal Navy bases in New Orleans and Charleston, and
allowed battalions of British troops to deploy in Virginia?
Japan negotiates with
Putin’s Russia over the southern Kuril Islands lost at the end of World War II.
Bibi Netanyahu has met many times with Putin, though he is an ally of Assad,
whom Bibi would like to see ousted, and has a naval and air base not far from
Israel’s border.
We Americans have far
more fish to fry with Russia than Bibi.
Strategic arms control.
De-escalation in the Baltic, Ukraine and the Black Sea. Ending the war in
Syria. North Korea. Space. Afghanistan. The Arctic. The war on terror.
Yet all we seem to hear
from our elite is endless whining that Putin has not been sanctioned enough for
desecrating “our democracy.”
Get over it.