By Jonah Goldberg
Thursday, March 06, 2014
Things are moving far too fast in Kiev, Moscow and Crimea
to write about events there. But the past isn't going anywhere. Though you
wouldn't know that from the way the Obama administration talks about it.
Throughout this crisis -- indeed, throughout all of
Barack Obama's presidency -- the White House has been eager to insist that our
long, unpleasant history with the Russians is behind us.
Obviously, every administration wants a fresh start with
long-time rivals. That's why there have been four "resets" with the
Russians since 1991, including George W. Bush's famous soul-searching gaze into
Vladimir Putin's eyes and Hillary Clinton's comic effort to give the Russians a
"reset" button (that actually said "overcharge" on it).
Fresh starts are fine. But when Obama came into office,
his administration implicitly blamed our poor relationship with Russia on Bush,
as if Russia's misdeeds were provoked by America.
In 2012, Obama mocked Mitt Romney for his claim that the
Russians are our "No. 1 geopolitical foe," and scoffed: "The
1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back."
That scorn looks embarrassing enough given recent events.
But the truth is Obama's hostility to Romney's policies had little to do with
them being outdated. Obama didn't like America's Cold War policies during the
Cold War.
In 1983, then-Columbia University student Obama penned a
lengthy article for the school magazine placing the blame for U.S.-Soviet
tensions largely on America's "war mentality" and the "twisted
logic" of the Cold War. President Reagan's defense buildup, according to
Obama, contributed to the "silent spread of militarism" and reflected
our "distorted national priorities" rather than what should be our
goal: a "nuclear free world."
Of course, it's unfair to put too much weight on anyone's
youthful writings. Except there's precious little evidence his views have
changed over the years.
In his first term, President Obama's biggest priority
with Russia was to get the two countries on the path to that "nuclear free
world." One of his -- and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's -- first
actions in office was to betray our commitments to Poland and the Czech
Republic on missile defense.
Indeed, across a wide range of areas, it has been Obama
who has been, in the words of The Washington Post's Jackson Diehl, in a
1980s-soaked "foreign policy time warp."
Two weeks ago, in response to tensions in Ukraine, the
president explained that "our approach ... is not to see (events in
Ukraine) as some Cold War chessboard in which we're in competition with
Russia." This is a horrible way to talk about the Cold War because it
starts from the premise that it was all just a game conducted between two
morally equivalent competitors.
Similar comments about "Cold War rivalries" and
the like are commonplace of late, particularly during the Sochi Olympics, when
NBC commentators were desperate to portray the entire Soviet chapter as nothing
more than a "pivotal experiment."
My old boss, William F. Buckley, responding to claims
that the U.S. and the Soviets were morally equivalent, said that if one man
pushes an old lady into an oncoming bus and another man pushes an old lady out
of the way of a bus, we should not denounce them both as the sorts of men who
push old ladies around.
While America surely made mistakes during the near
half-century "twilight struggle," the simple fact is that there was a
right side and a wrong side to that conflict, and we were on the right side of
it. The Soviet Union murdered millions of its own people, stifled freedom in
nearly every form, enslaved whole nations and actively tried to undermine
democracy all around the world, including in the U.S. President Putin, a former
KGB agent, has said that the collapse of the evil empire was "the greatest
geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century. That alone should have been
a clue to this White House that misspelled reset buttons weren't going to cut
it. But they were too stuck in the past to see it.
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