Don’t Be A Neocon Puppet

Don’t Be A Neocon Puppet

By Patrick J. Buchanan
RINF.com
July 7, 2017

President Donald Trump flew off for his first meeting with Vladimir
Putin — with instructions from our foreign policy elite that he get
into the Russian president’s face over his hacking in the election of
2016.

Hopefully, Trump will ignore these people.

For their record of failure is among the reasons Americans elected
him to the office.

What president, seeking to repair damaged relations with a rival
superpower, would begin by reading from an indictment?

President Eisenhower did not begin his summit with Nikita
Khrushchev by berating him for crushing the Hungarian freedom
fighters in 1956 — a more grievous crime then hacking the emails
of John Podesta.

President Kennedy did not let Russia’s emplacement of missiles in
Cuba in 1962 prevented him from offering an olive branch to
Moscow in his widely praised American University address of June
1963.

President Nixon, in first meeting Leonid Brezhnev, did
not denounce him for extinguishing the Prague Spring.

Were Trump to start his first summit with Putin
by dressing him down, why meet with him at all?

Trump would do better to explore where we can work together,
as in ending Syria’s civil war and averting a new war in Korea.

Moreover, when it comes to interference in the internal politics
of other nations to bring about “regime change,” understandably,
Putin might see himself as more sinned against than sinning.

Should Trump bring up the email hacking in 2016, Putin could ask
him to explain U.S. support for the violent coup d’etat that
overthrew a democratically elected pro-Russian government in
Ukraine, a land with which Russia has been intimately associated
for 1,000 years.

Consider the behavior of post-Cold War America, after Moscow
gave up its empire, pulled all its troops out of Europe, let the
USSR dissolve into 15 nations and held out a hand in friendship.

We gathered all the Warsaw Pact nations and three former Russian
Federation republics into a NATO alliance targeted at Russia.

We put troops, ships and bases into the Baltic on the doorstep
of St. Petersburg.

We bombed Russia’s old ally Serbia for 78 days, forcing it to
surrender its birth province of Kosovo.

Among the failings of America’s post-Cold War foreign policy elites
are hubris, arrogance and an utter absence of that greatest of gifts
that the gods can give us — “to see ourselves as others see us.”

Can we not see why the Russian people, who saw us as friends
in the 1990s, no longer do so, and why Putin, a Russia-First
nationalist, has an 80 percent approval rating on the issue of
standing up for his country?

Looking about the world today, do we really need any more
crises or quarrels?

Do we not have enough on our plate?

As the Buddhist saying goes, “Do not dwell in the past …
concentrate the mind on the present moment.”

Americans are rightly angry that Russia hacked the presidential
election of 2016.

But what was done cannot be undone.

And Putin is not going to return Crimea to Kiev, the annexation of
which was the most popular action of his long tenure as Russian
resident.

As D.C.’s immortal Mayor Marion Barry once said to constituents
appalled by his latest episode of social misconduct: “Get over it!”

We have other fish to fry.

In Syria and Iraq, where the ISIS caliphate is in its death rattle,
Russia and the U.S. both have a vital interest in avoiding any
military collision, and in ending the war.

This probably means the U.S. demand that Syrian President Assad
be removed will have to be shelved.

Consider China.

Asked by Trump to squeeze Pyongyang on its nuclear missile
program, China increased trade with North Korea 37 percent
in the first quarter.

The Chinese are now telling us to stop sailing warships within
13 miles of its militarized islets and reefs in the South China Sea
that they claim belongs to them, and demanding that we cancel
our $1.4 billion arms sale to Taiwan.

Hong Kong’s 7 million people have been told their democratic
rights, secured in Great Britain’s transfer of the island to China,
are no longer guaranteed.

Now China is telling us to capitulate to North Korea’s demand for
an end to U.S. military maneuvers with South Korea and to remove
the THAAD missile system the U.S. has emplaced.

And Beijing is imposing sanctions on South Korea for accepting
the U.S. missile system.

Meanwhile, the dispute with North Korea is going critical.

If Kim Jong Un is as determined as he appears to be to build an
ICBM with a nuclear warhead that can hit Seattle or San Francisco,
we will soon be down to either accepting this or exercising a
military option that could bring nuclear war.

Trump cannot allow this Beltway obsession with Putin to prevent us
from closing, if we can, this breach.

If we do not bring Russia back into the West, where do we think she
will go?

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