Democrats Demonize the Same Russia Policies
that Obama Long Championed
By
Glenn Greenwald
March 08, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "The
Intercept"
- One of the
most bizarre aspects of the all-consuming
Russia frenzy is the Democrats’ fixation on
changes to the RNC platform concerning U.S.
arming of Ukraine. The controversy began in
July when
the Washington Post reported
that “the Trump campaign worked behind the
scenes last week to make sure the new
Republican platform won’t call for giving
weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and
rebel forces.”
Ever since
then, Democrats have used this language
change as evidence that Trump and his key
advisers have sinister connections to
Russians and corruptly do their bidding at
the expense of American interests.
Democratic Senator Ben Cardin, the ranking
member of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, spoke for many in his party when
he lambasted the RNC change in
a July letter to the New York Times,
castigating it as “dangerous thinking” that
shows Trump is controlled, or at least
manipulated, by the Kremlin. Democrats
resurrected this line of attack this weekend
when Trump advisers
acknowledged
that campaign officials were behind the
platform change.
This attempt to equate Trump’s opposition
to arming Ukraine with some sort of
treasonous allegiance to Putin masks a
rather critical fact: namely, that the
refusal to arm Ukraine with lethal weapons
was one of Barack Obama’s most steadfastly
held policies. The original Post article
that reported the RNC platform change noted
this explicitly:
Of course,
Trump is not the only politician to
oppose sending lethal weapons to
Ukraine.
President Obama decided not to authorize
it,
despite recommendations to do so from
his top Europe officials in the State
Department and the military.
Early media
reports about this controversy from
outlets such as NPR
also noted the irony at the heart of this
debate: namely, that arming Ukraine was the
long-time desire of hawks in the GOP such as
John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio,
but the Obama White House categorically
resisted those pressures:
Republicans in Congress have approved
providing arms to the Ukrainian
government but the White House has
resisted, saying that it would only
encourage more bloodshed.
It’s a rare Obama administration policy
that the Trump campaign seems to agree
with.
Indeed, the GOP
ultimately joined with the hawkish wing of
the Democratic Party to demand that Obama
provide Ukraine with lethal weapons to fight
Russia, but Obama steadfastly refused. As
the New York Times
reported in March, 2015,
“President Obama is coming under increasing
pressure from both parties and more
officials inside his own government to send
arms to the country. But he remains
unconvinced that they would help.” When
Obama kept refusing, leaders of the two
parties threatened
to enact legislation
forcing Obama to arm Ukraine.
The general
Russia approach that Democrats now routinely
depict as treasonous – avoiding
confrontation with and even accommodating
Russian interests, not just in Ukraine
but also in Syria
– was one of the defining traits of Obama’s
foreign policy. This fact shouldn’t be
overstated: Obama engaged in provocative
acts such as moves to further expand NATO,
non-lethal aid to Ukraine, and
deploying “missile defense” weaponry in
Romania.
But he rejected most calls to confront
Russia. That is one of the primary reasons
the “foreign policy elite” – which, recall,
Obama came into office denouncing and vowing
to repudiate – was so dissatisfied with his
presidency.
A
new, long article
by Politico foreign affairs correspondent
Susan Glasser – on the war being waged
against Trump by Washington’s “foreign
policy elite” – makes this point very
potently. Say what you will about Politico,
but one thing they are very adept at doing
is giving voice to cowardly Washington
insiders by accommodating their cowardice
and thus routinely granting them anonymity
to express themselves. As journalistically
dubious as it is to shield the world’s most
powerful people with anonymity, this
practice sometimes ends up revealing what
careerist denizens of Washington power
really think but are too scared to say.
Glasser’s article, which largely consists of
conveying the views of anonymous high-level
Obama officials, contains this remarkable
passage:
In
other words, Democrats are now waging war
on, and are depicting as treasonous, one of
Barack Obama’s central and most steadfastly
held foreign policy positions, one that he
clung to despite attacks from leading
members of both parties as well as the
DC National Security Community. That’s not
Noam Chomsky drawing that comparison; it’s
an Obama appointee.
The
destructive bipartisan Foreign Policy
Community was furious with Obama for not
confronting Russia more, and is now furious
with Trump for the same reason (though they
certainly loath and fear Trump for other
reasons, including the threat they believe
he poses to U.S. imperial management through
a combination of ineptitude, instability,
toxic PR, naked rather than prettified
savagery, and ideology; Glasser writes:
“‘Everything I’ve worked for for two decades
is being destroyed,’ a senior Republican
told me”).
|
Break
Free From The Matrix
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All of this demonstrates
how fundamental a shift has taken place as a
result of the Democrats’ election-related
fixation on The Grave Russian Threat. To see
how severe the shift is, just look at this
new polling data from CNN
this morning that shows Republicans and
Democrats doing a complete reversal on
Russia in the span of eight months:
The Democrats’
obsession with Russia has not just led them
to want investigations into allegations of
hacking and (thus
far evidence-free)
suspicions of Trump campaign collusion –
investigations which everyone should want.
It’s done far more than that: it’s turned
them into increasingly maniacal and
militaristic hawks – dangerous ones – when
it comes to confronting the only nation
with a larger nuclear stockpile than the
U.S., an arsenal accompanied by a sense of
fear, if not outright encirclement, from
NATO expansion.
Put another
way, establishment Democrats – with a
largely political impetus but now as a
matter of conviction – have completely
abandoned Obama’s accommodationist approach
to Russia and have fully embraced the
belligerent, hawkish mentality of John
McCain, Lindsey Graham, Bill Kristol, the
CIA and Evan McMullin. It should thus come
as no surprise that
a bill proposed by supreme warmonger Lindsey
Graham to
bar Trump from removing sanctions against
Russia has more Democratic co-sponsors than
Republican ones.
This
is why it’s so notable that Democrats, in
the name of “resistance,” have aligned with
neocons, CIA operatives and former Bush
officials: not because coalitions should be
avoided with the ideologically impure, but
because it reveals much about the political
and policy mindset they’ve adopted in the
name of stopping Trump. They’re not
“resisting” Trump from the left or with
populist appeals – by, for instance,
devoting themselves to protection of Wall
Street and environmental regulations
under attack,
or supporting the revocation of jobs-killing
free trade agreements, or demanding that
Yemini civilians not be massacred.
Instead,
they’re attacking him on the grounds of
insufficient nationalism, militarism, and
aggression: equating a desire to avoid
confrontation with Moscow as a form of
treason (just like they did when they were
the leading Cold Warriors). This
is why they’re finding such common cause
with the nation’s most bloodthirsty
militarists – not because it’s an alliance
of convenience but rather one of shared
convictions (indeed, long before Trump,
neocons were planning a re-alignment with
Democrats
under a Clinton presidency). And the most
ironic – and over-looked – aspect of this
whole volatile spectacle is how much
Democrats have to repudiate and demonize one
of Obama’s core foreign policy legacies
while pretending that they’re not doing
that.
