Guest Post by Patrick J. Buchanan
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.
It is my sincere desire to provide readers of this site with the best unbiased information available, and a forum where it can be discussed openly, as our Founders intended. But it is not easy nor inexpensive to do so, especially when those who wish to prevent us from making the truth known, attack us without mercy on all fronts on a daily basis. So each time you visit the site, I would ask that you consider the value that you receive and have received from The Burning Platform and the community of which you are a vital part. I can't do it all alone, and I need your help and support to keep it alive. Please consider contributing an amount commensurate to the value that you receive from this site and community, or even by becoming a sustaining supporter through periodic contributions. [Burning Platform LLC - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal
-----------------------------------------------------
To donate via Stripe, click here.
-----------------------------------------------------
Use promo code ILMF2, and save up to 66% on all MyPillow purchases. (The Burning Platform benefits when you use this promo code.)
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.”
Have something to say about this column?
Visit Pat’s FaceBook page and post your comments….
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.
Americans, the leftist ones in particular, tend to be like naive children when it comes to recognizing how the real world really works.
The righties seem just as gullible to me – and I are one, of sorts. ‘Merica
“Our foreign policy elite’s answer appears to be a thunderous no.”
These “new world orderlies” are the reason we find ourselves in our current situation. This is one of thereasons I voted for President Trump.
I’m trying to love Trump. I really am. He comes out one day and thrillingly tells the brutal truth about this government’s ambivalence to killing innocent people and then goes to MacDill the next and talks of supplying “beautiful” new weapons to the military.
Supplying new weapons to the military is a valid part of the national defense of our country, an obligation of Article 4, Section 4 of the Constitution among others.
If, when and why they are put to use, if they are, is a different subject.
O’Reilly’s nothing but another generic, neo-con mouth piece, bought and paid for.
Why anyone lends him any credibility at all is beyond me.
Flashman, you’re being generous. I’d have called him an idiot.
As someone with a commitment to democracy of a sincerity and consistency which I now recognise to be completely abnormal I find this cosying up to Putin utterly depressing. It isn’t based on principle, it is a manifestation of the human folly of looking to support either one side or the other in a dispute. Very often both sides are wrong and indefensible.
Putin is refreshingly different from the disastrous Western elites in that he is a nationalist of sorts (but like every previous Russian tyrant he puts the Russian state first, not the Russian people). The Ukrainian border is in the wrong place due to a series of historical accidents which needed to be resolved. But Vladimir Putin is a KGB thug who presides over a kleptocratic gangster state, and personally one of the most corrupt people on the planet. He is implacably hostile to the West and to democracy. His propaganda outlets are full of lies and vindictiveness that make the NYT seem balanced and reasonable. He is allied with the remnants of the Western hard left and is constantly working to weaken and divide the West (not very difficult nowadays!)
The Russian-Ukrainian border should have been adjusted peacefully, under international supervision, on the basis of self-determination. Simply grabbing the territory was an act of lawlessness which cannot be ignored, and the vilification of Ukraine, a nation which has been horribly abused ever since the Mongol invasions, to burnish the reputation of a dictator is outrageous.
By constrasting Putin favourably with the misdeeds of U.S. elites you bring into question not the latter’s moral quality, but your own.
PS. Nixon’s trip to China was possibly the greatest foreign policy blunder in world history. Nothing has done more to undermine democracy or the West and it doesn’t seem likely that the damage will ever be repaired.
Nixon’s trip to China (technically – sending Kissinger there to meet with Chou-en-lai) saved the world from WWIII. Anyone who doesn’t understand that is an historical illiterate.
I’ve never heard that-elaborate on it if you will please.
To grossly simplify – China and the soviet Union were allies and we were the enemy of both. This alignment freed Russia to seriously consider a “conventional” invasion of West Germany – utilizing its overwhelming superiority in ground forces at that time. With the US ground forces still heavily involved in Vietnam the odds of a successful defense of West Germany (and therefore Western Europe as a whole), without resorting to tactical nuclear weapons, were not good. By greatly lessening the enmity between the US and China the available US military forces (not otherwise involved in Vietnam) were made available to reinforce the NATO forces in West Germany (and elsewhere in Western Europe), thereby greatly reducing the chances of a successful Soviet “blitzkrieg” and thus the odds of escalation from tactical “nukes” to WWIII (see Kahn – “On Thermonuclear War”). Nixon never gets credit from the lamestream media for this because of their continued deranged hatred of him.
“The problem with some of our noisier exponents of “American exceptionalism” is that they lack Reagan’s moral maturity.”
That is putting it mildly. I would say more like warmongers of the highest order.
Philip, how would you suggest we deal with Putin? When there is a Hornets nest in your yard, do you wack it with a shovel and stand there? Or, would you approach it as a professional, and use smoke to calm the nest, slowly moving closer with a bag, then cover it. What if the Hornets nest is too large to scoop in to a bag?
My point is, Russia is not going away, they are just as large as we are, and continuing to kick them is not going to do either side any good – with the exception of the “defense” industry. If Trump can blunt the stupid rhetoric of the McCains in the GOP, we have a shot at maybe a steady state with Russia. Yes, Putin is not exactly a cozy, innocent person, but you have to look at the bigger picture, and OUR interests. What they do, is of little concern to us UNLESS it effects us within our borders, or OUR citizens or long term interests in other countries. We are not the worlds police, and these other countries need to deal with their own problems themselves.
Nixon was not the problem with China. Our own opportunistic politicians allowing corporations to sell out our country is what turned China in to a disaster for us. They would still be making decisions from rice fields if WE did not give them all of our money, and did not fall for the trap of environmental / labor arbitrage with a communist nation.
It amazes me that people today just can’t fathom that the war on terror is nothing more than a replacement for the cold war.
the only thing different is the psyops being performed on the population today.
and it is clear to me that the population is being manipulated by the highest level of propaganda, and the left actually believes every single word.
The war on terror was misnamed.
It’s like calling WWI the war on poison gas.
Reemphasizing it as the war on terrorist organizations would be more appropriate, and would encourage naming the specific responsible organizations and nations as enemies instead of diluting it out to rhetorically generic meaninglessness where we have no real intent to win.
Does anyone doubt that the US intelligence community would kill Snowden if they had the chance? They probably wouldn’t use polonium 210, but otherwise same/same. Litvinenko converted to Islam while Russia struggled with Chechnya. I don’t care about him.
The first four replies are valid and correct responses. Poor Philip must get his news from Neocon Today. Does he even read this site on a regular basis? If so, he wouldn’t be “naive” as Anon said, as the US has been on the wrong side on both Ukraine and Syria. Neocons McCain and Graham got us in deep and dirty both places. Putin may not be the kind of man we’d prefer to deal with, but most of the world leaders are scum politicians. Trump, as our President, has to deal with them politically and in a statesman-like fashion. That will be a very hard job, no doubt.[img
[/img]
I believe I read a post from Philip that he is from England-perhaps he gets most of his news from different sources then most of us in the US.
Keep posting Philip,we love ya.
This might be off-topic, but not entirely. Tonight PBS News Hour ran a story about Ammesty International’s claim that “up to 13,000” dissidents were killed at a prison in Syria. The methodology of the A.I. report seems, at best, flimsy. Given known USAID support of tens of millions of dollars for the bogus “white helmets” in Syria, it’s quite possible that the entire A.I. report could be manufactured rubbish. The western obsession with toppling Assad would surely countenance more fake news.
I can’t vouch for this site, but it has documented that many of the videos of “child victims of war in Syria” have been staged by the Sunni jihadis. They have a good write-up on this amnesty international report. http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/02/amnesty-report-hearsay.html
I also await the “take” of Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett. https://mobile.twitter.com/evakbartlett?lang=en
Iska,is she the one that Ron Paul had on his show a month or so back who was giving on the ground info about the true situation in Aleppo?
Yes.
There are legions of State Dept. “experts” who can tell you all about the atrocities committed by whichever country they oppose. There are legions of contractors and MIC companies who can sell you the latest weapons. There are legions of “journalists” who can tell you why So-and-so is a dictator, tyrant, strongman, evil, and needs to be replaced.
There’s not one expert, contractor or journalist who can tell you what will happen if you kill / depose the strongman, invade / begin war with the country, or unleash the latest weapons with unknown side effects (see: “Depleted uranium munitions”). The last guy I remember that was deposed (relatively peacefully) with minimal side-effects was Idi Amin, and Uganda is still a basket case, but it was with him running it too, so no real change.
Why do we let anyone talk us into foreign wars anymore?
Because there are trillions of dollars at stake. To both sides of the UniParty.