|
Moral Supremacy
and Mr. Putin
By Patrick J.
Buchanan
February 07,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- Is Donald Trump to be allowed to craft a foreign
policy based on the ideas on which he ran and won the
presidency in 2016?
Our foreign
policy elite’s answer appears to be a thunderous no.
Case in point:
U.S. relations with Russia.
During the
campaign Trump was clear. He would seek closer ties with
Russia and cooperate with Vladimir Putin in smashing al-Qaida
and ISIS terrorists in Syria, and leave Putin’s ally
Bashar Assad alone.
With this
diplomatic deal in mind, President Trump has resisted
efforts to get him to call Putin a "thug" or a
"murderer."
Asked during
his taped Super Bowl interview with Fox News’ Bill
O’Reilly whether he respected Putin, Trump said that, as
a leader, yes.
O’Reilly
pressed, "But he’s a killer, though. Putin’s a killer."
To which Trump
replied, "There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of
killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?"
While his reply
was clumsy, Trump’s intent was commendable.
If he is to
negotiate a modus vivendi with a nation with an arsenal
of nuclear weapons sufficient to end life as we know it
in the USA, probably not a good idea to start off by
calling its leader a "killer."
Mitch McConnell
rushed to assure America he believes Putin is a "thug"
and any suggestion of a moral equivalence between
America and Russia is outrageous.
Apparently
referring to a polonium poisoning of KGB defector
Alexander Litvinenko, Marco Rubio tweeted, "When has a
Democratic political activist ever been poisoned by the
GOP? Or vice versa?"
Yet, as we beat
our chests in celebration of our own moral superiority
over other nations and peoples, consider what Trump is
trying to do here, and who is really behaving as a
statesmen, and who is acting like an infantile and
self-righteous prig.
When President
Eisenhower invited Nikita Khrushchev to the United
States, did Ike denounce him as the "Butcher of
Budapest" for his massacre of the Hungarian patriots in
1956?
Did President
Nixon, while negotiating his trip to Peking to end
decades of hostility, speak the unvarnished truth about
Mao Zedong – that he was a greater mass murderer than
Stalin?
While Nixon was
in Peking, Mao was conducting his infamous Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution that resulted in
millions of deaths, a years-long pogrom that dwarfed the
two-day Kristallnacht. Yet Mao’s crimes went unmentioned
in Nixon’s toast to America and China starting a "long
march" together.
John McCain
calls Putin a KGB thug, "a murderer, and a killer."
Yet, Yuri
Andropov, the Soviet ambassador in Budapest who
engineered the slaughter of the Hungarian rebels with
Russian tanks, became head of the KGB. And when he rose
to general secretary of the Communist Party, Ronald
Reagan wanted to talk to him, as he had wanted to talk
to every Soviet leader.
Why? Because
Reagan believed the truly moral thing he could do was
negotiate to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
He finally met
Gorbachev in 1985, when the USSR was occupying
Afghanistan and slaughtering Afghan patriots.
The problem
with some of our noisier exponents of "American
exceptionalism" is that they lack Reagan’s moral
maturity.
Undeniably, we
were on God’s side in World War II and the Cold War. But
were we ourselves without sin in those just struggles?
Was it not at
least morally problematic what we did to Cologne,
Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki where
hundreds of thousands of women and children were blasted
and burned to death?
How many
innocent Iraqis have perished in the 13 years of war we
began, based on falsified or fake evidence of Saddam’s
weapons of mass destruction?
In Russia,
there have been murders of journalists and dissidents.
Yes, and President Rodrigo Duterte, our Philippine ally,
has apparently condoned the deaths of thousands of drug
dealers and users since last summer.
The Philippine
Catholic Church calls it "a reign of terror."
Should we sever
our treaty ties to the Duterte regime?
Have there been
any extrajudicial killings in the Egypt of our ally Gen.
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi since he overthrew the elected
government?
Has our Turkish
ally, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, killed no innocents in his
sweeping repression since last summer’s attempted coup?
Some of us
remember a Cold War in which Gen. Augusto Pinochet dealt
summarily with our common enemies in Chile, and when the
Savak of our ally the Shah of Iran was not a 501(c)(3)
organization.
Sen. Rubio
notwithstanding, the CIA has not been a complete
stranger to "wet" operations or "terminating with
extreme prejudice."
Was it not LBJ
who said of the Kennedys, who had arranged multiple
assassination attempts of Fidel Castro, that they had
been "operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean"?
If Trump’s
talking to Putin can help end the bloodshed in Ukraine
or Syria, it would appear to be at least as ethical an
act as pulpiteering about our moral superiority on the
Sunday talk shows.
Patrick J.
Buchanan is the author of the new book "The Greatest
Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create
the New Majority." To find out more about Patrick
Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and
cartoonists, visit the Creators website at
www.creators.com.
The views
expressed in this article are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of
Information Clearing House. |
