* * *
I am “not isolationist, but I am ‘America First,'” Donald
Trump told The New York times last weekend. “I like the expression.”
* AS DO I, PAT; AS DO I!
Of NATO, where the U.S. underwrites three-fourths of the
cost of defending Europe, Trump calls this arrangement “unfair, economically,
to us,” and adds, “We will not be ripped off anymore.”
* GOD BLESS DONALD TRUMP!
Beltway media may be transfixed with Twitter wars over wives
and alleged infidelities. But the ideas Trump aired should ignite a national
debate over U.S. overseas commitments — especially NATO.
For the Donald’s ideas are not lacking for authoritative
support.
The first NATO supreme commander, Gen. Eisenhower, said
in February 1951 of the alliance: “If in 10 years, all American troops
stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the
United States, then this whole project will have failed.”
* YOU GETTING THIS, FOLKS?
As JFK biographer Richard Reeves relates, President
Eisenhower, a decade later, admonished the president-elect on NATO.
“Eisenhower told his successor it was time to start
bringing the troops home from Europe. ‘America is carrying far more than her
share of free world defense,’ he said. It was time for other nations of NATO to
take on more of the costs of their own defense.”
No Cold War president followed Ike’s counsel.
But when the Cold War ended with the collapse of the
Soviet Empire, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and the breakup of the
Soviet Union into 15 nations, a new debate erupted. The conservative coalition that
had united in the Cold War fractured. Some of us argued that when the Russian
troops went home from Europe, the American troops should come home from Europe.
Time for a populous prosperous Europe to start defending itself.
* ONE WOULD THINK...!!!
Instead, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush began handing
out NATO memberships, i.e., war guarantees, to all ex-Warsaw Pact nations and
even Baltic republics that had been part of the Soviet Union.
* F--KING MORONS...
In a historically provocative act, the U.S. moved its
“red line” for war with Russia from the Elbe River in Germany to the
Estonian-Russian border, a few miles from St. Petersburg.
* YEP. WE DID.
We declared to the world that should Russia seek to
restore its hegemony over any part of its old empire in Europe, she would be at
war with the United States. No Cold War president ever considered issuing a war
guarantee of this magnitude, putting our homeland at risk of nuclear war, to
defend Latvia and Estonia.
Recall. Ike did not intervene to save the Hungarian
freedom fighters in 1956. Lyndon Johnson did not lift a hand to save the
Czechs, when Warsaw Pact armies crushed “Prague Spring” in 1968. Reagan refused
to intervene when Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, on Moscow’s orders, smashed
Solidarity in 1981.
These presidents put America first.
* YES. THEY DID...
All would have rejoiced in the liberation of Eastern
Europe. But none would have committed us to war with a nuclear-armed nation
like Russia to guarantee it. Yet, here was George W. Bush declaring that any
Russian move against Latvia or Estonia meant war with the United States. John
McCain wanted to extend U.S. war guarantees to Georgia and Ukraine.
* MCCAIN IS A LUNATIC.
This was madness born of hubris.
* YES. YES IT WAS. YES IT IS!
And among those who warned against moving NATO onto
Russia’s front porch was America’s greatest geo-strategist, the author of
containment, George Kennan:
“Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of
American policy in the post-Cold War era. Such a decision may be expected to
impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”
* WHICH IT DID...
Kennan was proven right.
By refusing to treat Russia as we treated other nations
that repudiated Leninism, we created the Russia we feared, a rearming nation
bristling with resentment.
The Russian people, having extended a hand in friendship
and seen it slapped away, cheered the ouster of the accommodating Boris Yeltsin
and the arrival of an autocratic strong man who would make Russia respected
again.
We ourselves prepared the path for Vladimir Putin.
While Trump is focusing on how America is bearing too
much of the cost of defending Europe, it is the risks we are taking that are
paramount, risks no Cold War president ever dared to take.
Why should America fight Russia over who rules in the
Baltic States or Romania and Bulgaria?
When did the sovereignty of these nations become
interests so vital we would risk a military clash with Moscow that could
escalate into nuclear war?
Why are we still committed to fight for scores of nations
on five continents?
* ALL VERY GOOD QUESTIONS!
Trump is challenging the mindset of a foreign policy
elite whose thinking is frozen in a world that disappeared around 1991.
He is suggesting a new foreign policy where the United
States is committed to war only when are attacked or U.S. vital interests are
imperiled.
[Trump believes that] when we agree to defend other
nations, they should bear a full share of the cost of their own defense. Trump
believes The era of the free rider should be over.
Trump’s phrase, “America First!” has a nice ring to it.
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