So, with the Mid-East already a smoldering ash heap thanks to “Arab Spring” and “Smart Power”, is Eastern Europe next?
Fox News reports that
Top Senate Republicans on Sunday told President Obama to send a “clear” message to Russia President Vladimir Putin to stay out of Ukraine’s political crisis, renewing criticism about the president’s foreign policy and his negotiations with the powerful Russian leader.
“I believe the president needs to up his game and send a clear unequivocal public message to Putin not to interfere in what is happening in Ukraine,” Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told “Fox News Sunday.” “This is an opportunity for the president to really be unequivocal with Putin right now.”
The months of political upheaval in Ukraine have divided some residents between aligning with Russia or Western nations, a situation now being portrayed as a de facto power struggle between Obama and Putin, who appear on opposite sides of several world issues, including the Syria crisis.
Obama vowed in June 2010 to “reset” relations with Russia in an effort to help solve international problems and improve the world economy. But four years later, little appears to have improved.
“It’s time to reset the reset,” Ayotte said.
Critics of the Obama administration’s foreign policy say Putin has had the upper hand in efforts to end Syria’s 3-year-long civil war because Russia is a major ally of Syrian President Bashar Assad, which has allowed him to remain in power and keep a large part of his chemical weapons cache.
Such critics are also bristling over Putin allowing former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked U.S. government secrets, to live in Russia.
Still, Obama said the situation in Ukraine is about residents being able to make decisions for themselves and not about “some Cold War chessboard.”
Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the president talked Friday with Putin and that they agreed that a political settlement in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, should ensure the unity of the country and the right of Ukrainians to express their free will.
This weekend, the Ukraine parliament declared President Yanukovych unable to carry out constitutional duties.
…Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, a frequent critic of Obama’s foreign policy, said the United States needs to be clear with Putin that Ukrainians must be allowed to determine their own future and that partitioning the nation would be unacceptable.
“They want to be Western,” he said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “That’s what this whole hundreds of thousands in the square was all about. They don’t want to be Eastern.”
McCain also said an array of Ukrainians in the opposition movement are overjoyed but worried about the economy. And he suggested Putin should be “a little nervous” now that the Olympics are over and his residents — “tired of crony capitalism” — might follow neighboring Ukrainians.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ind., the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, defended Obama, saying he, like every new U.S. president, has tried to negotiate with Putin, who has been a threat for many decades.
He also told “Fox News” the administration will have a challenging time in Ukraine because Russia has the “trump card” of supplying the country with natural gas.
The problem with the Senators’ wishes, is the fact that we have Neville Chamberlain in office, when we need Winston Churchill.
Or…
President Ronald Reagan, who gave a speech, concerning our relationship with Russia, on March 8 1983, which has since come to be called “The Evil Empire Speech”. His words ring as true today, as they ever have.
During my first press conference as President, in answer to a direct question, I pointed out that, as good Marxist-Leninists, the Soviet leaders have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is that which will further their cause, which is world revolution. I think I should point out I was only quoting Lenin, their guiding spirit, who said in 1920 that they repudiate all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas—that’s their name for religion—or ideas that are outside class conceptions. Morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war. And everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old, exploiting social order and for uniting the proletariat.
Well, I think the refusal of many influential people to accept this elementary fact of Soviet doctrine illustrates an historical reluctance to see totalitarian powers for what they are. We saw this phenomenon in the 1930s. We see it too often today.
This doesn’t mean we should isolate ourselves and refuse to seek an understanding with them. I intend to do everything I can to persuade them of our peaceful intent, to remind them that it was the West that refused to use its nuclear monopoly in the forties and fifties for territorial gain and which now proposes 50-percent cut in strategic ballistic missiles and the elimination of an entire class of land-based, intermediate-range nuclear missiles.
At the same time, however, they must be made to understand we will never compromise our principles and standards. We will never give away our freedom.
…It was C.S. Lewis who, in his unforgettable “Screwtape Letters,” wrote: “The greatest evil is not done now in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not even done in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.”
Well, because these “quiet men” do not “raise their voices,” because they sometimes speak in soothing tones of brotherhood and peace, because, like other dictators before them, they’re always making “their final territorial demand,” some would have us accept them at their word and accommodate ourselves to their aggressive impulses. But if history teaches anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.
So, I urge you to speak out against those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority.
While America’s military strength is important, let me add here that I’ve always maintained that the struggle now going on for the world will never be decided by bombs or rockets, by armies or military might. The real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root, it is a test of moral will and faith.
…Whittaker Chambers, the man whose own religious conversion made him a witness to one of the terrible traumas of our time, the Hiss-Chambers case, wrote that the crisis of the Western World exists to the degree in which the West is indifferent to God, the degree to which it collaborates in communism’s attempt to make man stand alone without God. And then he said, for Marxism-Leninism is actually the second oldest faith, first proclaimed in the Garden of Eden with the words of temptation, “Ye shall be as gods.”
The Western World can answer this challenge, he wrote, “but only provided that its faith in God and the freedom He enjoins is as great as communism’s faith in Man.”
President Reagan knew that, one day, the struggle against Marxist Ideology would not just be waged externally, against foreign enemies, but internally, against domestic ones, as well…bureaucrats who would give away our very sovereignty for perceived political expediency. As we have seen in the ongoing Middle East Islamic Fundamentalist Revolution, known as Arab Spring, and, more recently, President Obama and Sec. Kerry’s bungling of Syria and Iran, our enemies, like Vladimir Putin, love this present administration, who are more than willing to “negotiate” with their new-found “friends”.
And, much like the small town fellow, who gets conned into a three-card monte game on the sidewalks of New York, the deck is stacked against us.
Until He Comes,
KJ
