I’ve finally figured out why so many pundits and journalists are signing on to the new cold war with Russia: they weren’t alive during the last one. They have no memory of the Cuban missile crisis, they didn’t grow up in the era of backyard bomb shelters: for them, Fail Safe and On the Beach are just old movies.
Take Greg Sargent, an opinion columnist with the Washington Post, who was a twinkle in his parents’ eyes when John F. Kennedy put American nukes in Turkey and the Russians responded by installing nuclear missiles in Cuba. So eager is he for a confrontation with Vladimir Putin that he tweeted this the other day. I responded with this. And he fired back with this – I must be a Trump supporter! As I told him, I hope he’s alive after the next missile crisis with Russia – which will be coming real soon after Hillary Clinton takes office.
Or take Josh Rogin, who writes about foreign policy for the Washington Post: he’s upset that Trump won’t risk World War III by facing off with Putin over Ukraine. Trump must be “in lockstep with Putin.” Yet Rogin didn’t dispute the merits of what Trump had to say – that he’d consider recognizing the Crimean referendum – only implying that Trump was some kind of Manchurian candidate. I answered him here, and he soon fled back into the nether reaches of the Twittersphere. And I’d make the same point about him that I made about Sargent: these people are children. They have no memory of the cold war. They never lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation., To them, it’s all a game.
We are living in an age when George Stephanopoulos can start off an interview with the GOP presidential candidate by demanding to know: “What is your relationship with Vladimir Putin?” It was an astonishing interview, one in which the former spokesman for the (Bill) Clinton administration could accusingly ask why the Trump campaign softened a GOP platform plank calling for the shipment of lethal weapons to Ukraine.
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Little Georgie was born in 1961 – a year before the Cuba missile crisis. Ukraine was a part of the USSR, and no one then living had the faintest conception that it would ever be an independent state, never mind that people – Very Serious People – would one day be telling us we had to send them arms to fight off a Russian “invasion” (that never happened and won’t happen). To Stephanopoulos, and Sargent, and Rogin, “standing up to Putin” is as easy and as morally uncomplicated as invading Iraq“standing up to Saddam Hussein.”
Except it isn’t.
There is, indeed, nothing to stand up to: quite the opposite, as the geostrategists of the West know full well. NATO has been expanding steadily eastward since the end of the cold war and the implosion of the Soviet empire. Today Western armies are at the very gates of Moscow – and it is for Putin to stand up to us.
Through our “NGOs” and government-subsidized “democracy promotion” programs, Washington has been angling for regime change in Moscow. Every since their puppet, the drunken Yeltsin, was succeeded by someone who had Russia’s interests at heart, they’ve been plotting and scheming to get rid of him. Yet Putin just gets more popular with the Russian people as time goes on. And so they are resorting to external pressure – military pressure – in order to squeeze the Russian bear until he collapses – or lashes out.
Economic sanctions, relentless propaganda, meddling in Ukraine, and now a presidential election in which the demonization of Russia has become the central issue of the campaign – all this is building toward a climax that could turn deadly at a moment’s notice.
