Opinions

When it comes to Russia, Joe Biden you are no Ronald Reagan

Distressed Patriotic Flag Unisex T-Shirt - Celebrate Comfort and Country $11.29 USD Get it here>>


On Tuesday, a CNN reporter in Ukraine cited Russia’s bombardment of cities and the huge numbers of casualties and refugees before adding, “it feels like we’re caught in a 1940s newsreel.”

He might also have said it felt like a 1950s newsreel, which is when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to crush dissent.

Or a 1960s newsreel, when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia to snuff out the liberalizing reforms of the “Prague Spring.” 

Or a 1970s newsreel, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. 

After the Soviet Union broke apart, Vladimir Putin made sure Russia kept trying to crush its neighbors’ hunger for freedom. Hence his 2008 attack on Georgia and, in 2014, his seizure and annexation of the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine.

Mark Twain’s line about history rhyming even when it doesn’t exactly repeat itself fits the moment. The issues are different but, once again, we hear talk of a new Cold War, the emergence of an Iron Curtain and even threats of nuclear war.

Yet it’s the brutal, sweeping nature of the invasion of Ukraine, including indiscriminate attacks on apartment houses in major cities, that recalls the Soviet style of warfare. As such, Putin is teaching new generations of Americans why Ronald Reagan labeled the Soviet Union the “evil empire” and the “focus of evil in the world.”

Reagan used those phrases in a 1983 speech to counter the notion that the United States and the Soviet Communists were equally to blame for the nuclear arms race. He also wanted to explain his rejection of a proposal for a nuclear freeze because it would have locked-in a Soviet advantage in numbers of nukes and in having a more modern stockpile. 

Before the National Association of Evangelicals, Reagan quoted from the Bible and America’s Founders to argue that communism was godless and that ministers should understand the two systems of government were fundamentally at odds. Here is a key section:

President Ronald Reagan poses for a portrait in 1980 in Los Angeles, California.
President Ronald Reagan was instrumental at stopping the Soviet Union from building nuclear arms during the Cold War.
Harry Langdon/Getty Images

“So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”

Naturally, the anti-Reagan media found the speech too strident and too religious and some rejected his claim of American Exceptionalism. They were a foretaste of the current Democratic Party and its knee-jerk reaction to blame America for every problem in the world.

Thankfully, Reagan was not deterred and in 1987, stood at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin and demanded that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev “tear down this wall.”

Two years later, the wall separating the divided city came down, and two years after that, in 1991, the Soviet Union itself collapsed.

The West, led by the United States and its clear-eyed president, and with a crucial assist from Pope John Paul II’s crusade against communism, had won the Cold War. Hundreds of millions of people over generations were set free from the suffocating Communist yoke. 

WH plays catch-up

That history is relevant to the current crisis for two big reasons.

First, Putin was not among the celebrants. In 2005, he infamously called the Soviet collapse the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” and much of what he has done since shows he aims to reverse that monumental event. 

President Joe Biden
President Joe Biden’s weakness has enabled Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, just as he occupied the Crimean Peninsula in 2014.
REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

And so Ukraine, after three decades of independence, suddenly finds itself in a fight for survival. And there are fears that success there would not satisfy Putin’s thirst for conquest.

Second, Joe Biden is no Ronald Reagan. His presidency has been marked by divisive insults and his policies have been disastrous for national security and prosperity. 

Biden’s accusations of “systemic racism” in law enforcement look especially shameful at moments like this. His Green New Deal fantasies about energy have hampered the ability to sanction Russia because we import oil from it that we could and should be pumping from our own wells. 

Moreover, Biden has been slower than even the creaky welfare states of old Europe to respond to the Russian onslaught.

People look at the gutted remains of Russian military vehicles on a road in the town of Bucha, close to the capital Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, March 1, 2022.
The Biden administration has been slow at imposing sanctions as Russia continues to devastate Ukraine.
AP Photo/Serhii Nuzhnenko

As the Washington Post reported, Biden’s team was “surprised by the unusually rapid European decision” last week to punish Putin economically and “the White House scrambled over the weekend to catch up in drafting its own related measures.”

The president wasn’t at the White House, going home to Delaware. This isn’t even leading from behind. 

It is impossible to separate Biden’s weak performance in office in general, and specifically in Afghanistan, from Putin’s decision to move against Ukraine. With the Pentagon seemingly consumed by making sure our military is more “woke” than prepared, Putin was convinced he would meet little resistance. 

The historic warning that weakness begets aggression has proved prescient again. 

Similarly, it’s not rocket science to assume that other autocratic regimes, most notably China and Iran, are also calculating how far they can go in their aggressive expansion. 

Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, and Russian President Vladimir Putin talk to each other during their meeting in Beijing, Feb. 4, 2022.
The White House is too naive to believe Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping weren’t discussing anything significant at the Beijing Winter Olympics.
Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File

Most troubling of all is the agreement China and Russia signed when Putin attended the Beijing Olympics and met with president Xi Jinping. It is much more than a simple nonaggression pact in that it promises cooperation and said the countries’ friendship “has no limits.”

Running to 5,000 words, the pact amounts to “a pledge to stand shoulder to shoulder against America and the West, ideologically as well as militarily,” one analyst told the New Yorker. 

In short, as awful as events in Ukraine are, they likely signal just the start of a new wave of hot-button confrontations. Our adversaries are determined to create a new world order, and our president is . . . Joe Biden.

Heaven help us.

Mixed on man of steal 

My column urging former President Trump to move on from his constant claims the 2020 election was stolen provoked strong reactions on both sides. Here are two samples. 

Reader Barney Edelman agrees, writing “We need Trump to think like the election was a football game. Mistakes are made by coaches and the officials, very often changing the outcome.

“But you have to accept that and not drown yourself in yesterday’s maybes. People don’t like whiners.”

Reg Cornelia takes the other side, writing: “You are dead wrong and the theft of the 2020 election is the greatest crime in American political history. We would be fools to try to get it behind us. 

“I worked for the Suffolk County Board Of Elections for 15 years and I can name 10 ways Dems and their accomplices perpetrated the theft, not counting whatever criminal mischief was involved with voting machines.

If we do nothing to show the election was stolen and do not take serious measures to see it can’t happen again, we insure that it will. The election should be challenged even now.”



Source link

TruthUSA

I'm TruthUSA, the author behind TruthUSA News Hub located at https://truthusa.us/. With our One Story at a Time," my aim is to provide you with unbiased and comprehensive news coverage. I dive deep into the latest happenings in the US and global events, and bring you objective stories sourced from reputable sources. My goal is to keep you informed and enlightened, ensuring you have access to the truth. Stay tuned to TruthUSA News Hub to discover the reality behind the headlines and gain a well-rounded perspective on the world.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.