Pat Buchanan has the answer:
The American people should be eternally grateful to Old Europe for having spiked the Bush-McCain plan to bring Georgia into NATO.
Had Georgia been in NATO when Mikheil Saakashvili invaded South Ossetia, we would be eyeball to eyeball with Russia, facing war in the Caucasus, where Moscow’s superiority is as great as U.S. superiority in the Caribbean during the Cuban missile crisis.
If the Russia-Georgia war proves nothing else, it is the insanity of giving erratic hotheads in volatile nations the power to drag the United States into war.
From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, U.S. presidents have sought to avoid shooting wars with Russia, even when the Bear was at its most beastly.
Truman refused to use force to break Stalin’s Berlin blockade. Ike refused to intervene when the Butcher of Budapest drowned the Hungarian Revolution in blood. LBJ sat impotent as Leonid Brezhnev’s tanks crushed the Prague Spring. Jimmy Carter’s response to Brezhnev’s invasion of Afghanistan was to boycott the Moscow Olympics. When Brezhnev ordered his Warsaw satraps to crush Solidarity and shot down a South Korean airliner killing scores of U.S. citizens, including a congressman, Reagan did—nothing.
These presidents were not cowards. They simply would not go to war when no vital U.S. interest was at risk to justify a war. Yet, had George W. Bush prevailed and were Georgia in NATO, U.S. Marines could be fighting Russian troops over whose flag should fly over a province of 70,000 South Ossetians who prefer Russians to Georgians.
The arrogant folly of the architects of U.S. post-Cold War policy is today on display. By bringing three ex-Soviet republics into NATO, we have moved the U.S. red line for war from the Elbe almost to within artillery range of the old Leningrad.
Should America admit Ukraine into NATO, Yalta, vacation resort of the czars, will be a NATO port and Sevastopol, traditional home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, will become a naval base for the U.S. Sixth Fleet. This is altogether a bridge too far.
And can we not understand how a Russian patriot like Vladimir Putin would be incensed by this U.S. encirclement after Russia shed its empire and sought our friendship? How would Andy Jackson have reacted to such crowding by the British Empire?
As of 1991, the oil of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan belonged to Moscow. Can we not understand why Putin would smolder as avaricious Yankees built pipelines to siphon the oil and gas of the Caspian Basin through breakaway Georgia to the West?
For a dozen years, Putin & Co. watched as U.S. agents helped to dump over regimes in Ukraine and Georgia that were friendly to Moscow.
If Cold War II is coming, who started it, if not us?
The swift and decisive action of Putin’s army in running the Georgian forces out of South Ossetia in 24 hours after Saakashvili began his barrage and invasion suggests Putin knew exactly what Saakashvili was up to and dropped the hammer on him.
What did we know? Did we know Georgia was about to walk into Putin’s trap? Did we not see the Russians lying in wait north of the border? Did we give Saakashvili a green light?
Joe Biden ought to be conducting public hearings on who caused this U.S. humiliation.
The war in Georgia has exposed the dangerous overextension of U.S. power. There is no way America can fight a war with Russia in the Caucasus with our army tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor should we. Hence, it is demented to be offering, as John McCain and Barack Obama are, NATO membership to Tbilisi.
The United States must decide whether it wants a partner in a flawed Russia or a second Cold War. For if we want another Cold War, we are, by cutting Russia out of the oil of the Caspian and pushing NATO into her face, going about it exactly the right way.
Vladimir Putin is no Stalin. He is a nationalist determined, as ruler of a proud and powerful country, to assert his nation’s primacy in its own sphere, just as U.S. presidents from James Monroe to Bush have done on our side of the Atlantic.
A resurgent Russia is no threat to any vital interests of the United States. It is a threat to an American Empire that presumes some God-given right to plant U.S. military power in the backyard or on the front porch of Mother Russia.
Who rules Abkhazia and South Ossetia is none of our business. And after this madcap adventure of Saakashvili, why not let the people of these provinces decide their own future in plebiscites conducted by the United Nations or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe?
As for Saakashvili, he’s probably toast in Tbilisi after this stunt. Let the neocons find him an endowed chair at the American Enterprise Institute.
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You're a Pat Buchanan fan, then?
ReplyDeleteThanks for introducing me to the wonderful Taki magazine. You should link to this excellent piece in it.
ReplyDeleteDavid, the post Umbongo links to is utterly obscene.
ReplyDeleteI don't do fanning, if that is the word.
ReplyDeleteBut Buchanan sees the neocons for what they are, and he says so.
He is right about family values, right about strictly limited and strictly legal immigration, right about "free" trade, right about constitutional checks and balances, right about real national security, right about energy independence, right about real environmental responsibility, right about Second Amendment rights and responsibilities, right about Civil Rights (not "affirmative action"), right about America as an English-speaking country, right about foreign policy realism, and at least open to the Biblico-Patristic critique of Americanism itself.
He is, however, wrong about the protection of workers and consumers (although he is not terribly badly wrong on that one), wrong about fair tax (likewise), wrong about universal health care, wrong about Social Security, and wrong about Civil Rights (in the sense that he still makes occasional rhetorical flourishes towards the remaining George Wallace Tendency, not they are ever going to get anywhere now).
Umbongo, the voluntary behaviour of the Gypsies is a serious problem in Italy and in many other places, including Britain. Stealing, littering, vandalism, tax evasion, child marriages, and total disregard for borders and for planning laws are not acceptable cultural practices. They are just crimes, and should be punished as such. Anyone genuinely of the Left can only insist on such equality.
I am not at all convinced that the British Gypsies, at least, are an ethnic group in the way that those in some Continental countries really do appear to be, or in Eastern Europe undoubtedly are. One might as well say that the landed gentry are French and that their farm hands are German.
Researchers at Durham are looking for the "five or six families in Wales" that are usually said still to speak British Romany. They have been looking for a very long time.
And even if they ever found them, so what? Stealing, littering, vandalism, tax evasion, child marriages, and total disregard for borders and for planning laws are not acceptable cultural practices. They are just crimes, and should be punished as such. Anyone genuinely of the Left can only insist on such equality.
Not at all. It expresses very mixed feelings about them (between romance and reality, admittedly).
ReplyDeleteAs it concludes:
"Lots of luck to anyone trying to assimilate Gypsies into bourgeois civilization. In the meantime, a wise nation with good control of its ports and borders would keep Gypsies out as far as possible."
I'm afraid so.
Their behaviour is chosen. They can choose to accept the equal rights and equal responsibilities of the rest of us (and could do so while remaining nomadic, if they wnated to). No one truly of the Left can want, or tolerate, their anything less.
So you agree with this?
ReplyDelete"They are exceptionally antisocial, and cultivate high levels of skill in the small-criminal arts — pickpocketing, burglary, fast confidence tricks, and so on. They seem also to be striving to keep alive their ancient reputation for baby-snatching."
Yes.
ReplyDeleteIf you don't, then you've either never lived in Europe or never lived in the European countryside.
People are hung up on this ridiculous idea that the Gypsies are an ethnic group, a "race". Only Hitler ever said that they were. Why rely on him, of all people?
And even if they were, that would not excuse them from the civic responsibilities of the rest of us.