June 26, 2023
Lacking either a moral compass or a consistent foreign policy, Democrats and their fellow travelers in the media have been guided in recent years by what they call “Rahm’s Rule” — in brief, “never let a serious crisis go to waste.”
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Adopting that rule came naturally to President Barack Obama. In a March 2012 meeting with outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Korea, a hot mic picked up Obama telling Medvedev, “It’s important for him to give me space. This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.”
The “him,” of course was Putin. Said Medvedev, “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.” Vlad got the message. Obama and his cronies had no real values. They were flexible enough to be played, and he was just the man to play them.
This past weekend, while most sane observers were withholding judgment on events in Russia, Democrats and their neocon allies were noisily doing backflips to exploit the seeming crisis in their political favor.
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Having no inside skinny on the fluid state of affairs in Russia, I will wait until the dust settles to venture even a preliminary comment. I do, however, know something about the Democrats’ impressively flexible relationship with Putin and Russia over the course of these last 15 years.
As it happens, the Obama White House began sucking up to Russia soon after the January 2009 inauguration. Speaking at a February 2009 conference in Munich, Vice President Joe Biden signaled Obama’s flexibility, telling the audience, “It is time to press the reset button and to revisit the many areas where we can and should be working together with Russia.”
Two years later, Biden made an unusual speech at Moscow State University. There he listed the many new areas of cooperation between Russia and the United States and cited with pride the fruits of that relationship. Just two years prior, only 17 percent of Russians held a positive view of the United States, said Biden. By the time of his speech in March 2011, that figure had increased to 60 percent.
During his 2011 speech, Biden boasted of visiting a high-tech hub on the outskirts of Moscow called “Skolkovo.” Biden thought Skolkovo held the potential to become Russia’s Silicon Valley. With a proven talent for taking care of those close to him, a talent he would hone in the Ukraine, Biden encouraged American venture capitalists to invest there.
Even apolitical observers were troubled by this exchange of capital and information. EUCOM, the American military’s leading intelligence think tank in Europe, called American involvement in Skolkovo “an overt alternative to clandestine industrial espionage — with the additional distinction that it can achieve such a transfer on a much larger scale and more efficiently.”
Bill Clinton meanwhile secured State’s permission to meet with Skolkovo honcho Viktor Vekselberg. Clinton happened to be in Russia at the time to give his infamous $500,000 speech, paid for by a Russian investment bank with ties to the Kremlin. On that same trip, Clinton met with senior Rosatom official Arkady Dvorkovich.
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Rosatom was the entity that controlled all things nuclear in Russia, including the arsenal. At the time, Rosatom was seeking the State Department’s permission to buy Uranium One, a Canadian company with vast U.S. uranium reserves.
This deal raised eyebrows even at the New York Times. As Jo Becker and Mike McIntire reported in April 2015, too late to make a difference, the Russians took control of Uranium One in three discrete transactions from 2009 to 2013, during which time “a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation.” The chairman of Uranium One alone donated $2.35 million.
For Russian President Vladimir Putin, securing Uranium One was like finding a pony under his tree on Christmas morning. As Rosatom CEO Sergei Kiriyenko told Putin in a staged interview, “Few could have imagined in the past that we would own 20 percent of U.S. reserves.”
Obama did his Russia-friendly flexing center stage during his final debate with Mitt Romney in 2012. Earlier in that year, Romney had called out Obama for his overture to Putin. During the debate, Obama countered with a scripted zinger: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for twenty years.” As Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler noted, the jab “spawned approving headlines.”
Vladimir Putin served as prime minister during Obama’s first term and was elected president eight months before Obama humbled Romney on national TV. Obama had a friendly relationship with Russia during those first four years and expected more of the same, especially with his newfound flexibility.
As should have been expected, the newly re-elected Putin read Obama’s flexibility for the weakness it was. Russia annexed the Crimea, refused to accept international inspection of its nuclear sites, and gave rogue NSA contractor Edward Snowden safe harbor.
In July 2015, whatever tensions existed between the White House and the Kremlin eased considerably when Obama called Putin thanking him for his help securing the Iran nuclear pact. Obama had reason to be grateful. No foreign leader had more influence over the mullahs than Putin.
As Obama told Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, “We would have not achieved this agreement had it not been for Russia’s willingness to stick with us and the other P5-Plus members in insisting on a strong deal.”
In July 2015, it was still respectable for an American president to collaborate with Putin. To secure the Iran deal, Obama chose to deep-six Putin’s darker deeds. These included not only his annexation of Crimea but also a string of suspected political assassinations.
In 2015, no one would have predicted that within a year Russia would emerge as a monstrously subversive country hell-bent on throwing the 2016 election to Donald Trump. No one would have predicted this scenario because it defied common sense.
Russia had a proven pawn in Obama and a friend in Hillary. It did not need an unpredictable Donald Trump. “Putin has eaten Obama’s lunch, therefore our lunch, for a long period of time,” said Trump in 2014 while slamming Obama’s failure to stand up to Putin in Crimea.
Russia was never a real concern of Obama’s, but to frame Trump, the White House had to frame Russia too. Enter Christopher Steele stage left. For the last seven years, the Democrats have been trying to convince voters that Putin-Trump collusion was real. In fact, their entire foreign policy, including the war in Ukraine, can be traced back to that one dirty trick.
Weekend talk shows were crowded with one-trick ponies. Notable among them was “Pelosi Republican” Adam Kinzinger, now a CNN senior political commentator. The same Adam Kinzinger who literally cried while lamenting the ersatz insurrection of January 6 spent the weekend urging on a real and potentially bloody insurrection in Russia.
Exploiting the crisis to his best personal advantage, Kinzinger gloated that the Prigozhin coup would be “a massive blow to the people here in the United States like, say, Tucker Carlson, who have been parroting Putin talking points.”
The even more mindless echoes from Kinzinger’s rant caused “Tucker Carlson” to trend on Twitter. Commentator John Oberlin spoke for many, saying, “Putin tool and Russian apologist Tucker Carlson has been discredited 100s of times. This is yet another example. It’s also a blow to many Republicans, MTG & Elon Musk as Russian tools.”
That Yevgeny Prighozin emerged, for the moment at least, as something of a hero on the left would probably even surprise Prighozin. A year ago, the New York Times described his group as having “targeted civilians, conducted mass executions and looted private property in conflict zones.” The name “Wagner Group,” the Times tells us in a reductio ad Hitlerum, was reportedly selected to honor the composer Richard Wagner, “a favorite of Hitler’s.”
The media’s moral flexibility did not go unnoticed. Said security expert Max Abrahms in a concise summary of the weekend madness, “The most amazing thing about the pundits this weekend isn’t that they got the situation in Russia wrong but their sadness upon realizing that a psychopathic group of prisoners critical of Putin for not arming them enough against Ukrainians didn’t seize the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal.”
“Between the swooning and cheering for the Wagner Group to take over Russia and its nukes, and the ongoing worship of the Azov Battalion,” added commentator Glenn Greenwald wryly. “I don’t think there’s been this much open cheering of actual Nazis since the Nuremberg rallies.”
Jack Cashill’s book Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities will hit the shelves on July 4. Pre-order today.
Image: Kremlin.Ru
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