March 5, 2017

After spending the last eight years pushing the notion of foreign policy as an afterthought with America needing to “lead from behind,” Democrats have suddenly recast themselves as foreign policy hawks. Particularly towards Russia.

Following last week’s report in The Washington Post regarding Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s meetings with Russia’s US ambassador last year, Democrats collectively lost their minds, calling for Sessions’s resignation with alacrity.

That story has two key points. First, Sessions’s meetings were nothing out of the ordinary (he met with over twenty-five foreign ambassadors while in the Senate), with one of the two meetings even organized by the Obama administration. Second, Sessions attended the meeting as a member of the Armed Services Committee with no ties to the Trump campaign (hence his testimony!).

Nevertheless, sharpening her tomahawk, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) tweeted, “And we need Attorney General Jeff Sessions – who should have never been confirmed in the first place – to resign. We need it now.”

The Washington Post’s’ Chris Cillizza wrote, “Jeff Sessions is in deep trouble. Bigly.”

The New York Times’s headline read: “Jeff Sessions Needs to Go.” Another of its op-ed headlines read: “What to Do With Jeff Sessions.”

Presumably, for the next four (eight, if they keep this up) years, liberals have concluded their best argument against securing the border and deporting criminal illegal aliens: THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING!

So, in light of the Democrat Party’s newfound infatuation with the former USSR, let’s briefly review the party’s history with Russia.

— WOODROW WILSON:

Near the end of the First World War, as the Bolsheviks’ rise to political prominence grew commensurate with increasing destabilization of the Romanov Dynasty, US troops were sent to Archangel, Murmansk, and Vladivostok. The campaign was called, ‘The Northern Russia Expedition.”

In 1917, as the Bolshevik revolution broke out, the Russian aristocracy was exiled and replaced with communists: Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin (or, as they’re referred to at the University of California, Berkeley; The Three Wise Men)

Once the Armistice of Compiègne was signed in 1918, Woodrow Wilson withdrew US troops from the region instead of engaging the communist uprising. As a result, the Bolsheviks prevailed, and communism spread, leading to the mass slaughter of millions.

— HARRY TRUMAN:

President Harry Truman, at the Yalta conference, agreed with Joseph Stalin that Poland – along with the rest of Eastern Europe – would have free, democratically elected governments following its liberation from Nazi control. Predictably jettisoning that promise, Stalin went on to institute a communist, USSR-controlled puppet government in Poland. The Soviets went on to do the same in Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Hungary.

Truman’s efforts to halt (or even slow down) the Soviet Union’s rapid expansion into Eastern Europe and far-reaching influence into Turkey and Iran went nowhere.

And then we have Korea. For all their banal tirades of George W. Bush’s Iraq War (which he won, handily!) liberals are quick to forget about Truman’s disastrous Korean intervention. Despite no formal obligation to intervene, Truman sent an armada of US forces to Korea, against the Soviet-backed communists in the peninsula’s north. As the war escalated and it became clear that Truman didn’t have a clue what he was doing, much less a vision for victory, his approval rating dropped so low, it just barely hovered above smallpox.

Towards the end of his presidency, the USSR (with the help of communist-sympathizing Democrats: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg) had obtained nuclear capabilities.

— JOHN F. KENNEDY:

Fast forward to the end of the Second World War, and John F. Kennedy is commander in chief.

As it turned out, Woodrow Wilson wasn’t the only Democrat president to miserably screw up in preventing a communist uprising. In 1961, President Kennedy directed the CIA to train and finance a coterie of Cuban exiles. Their plan was to invade Cuba via the Bay of Pigs (contrary to popular belief, not Lena Dunham’s vacation home) and overthrow strongman dictator Fidel Castro. Kennedy’s intervention boondoggle failed subsequently emboldened the Soviet Union, inviting its leader Nikita Khrushchev to confidently sent missiles to Cuba amid American humiliation.

— LYNDON B. JOHNSON:

Just two years (and a drive to Texas gone bad) later, Lyndon Baines Johnson was president. With (Democrat!) Harry Truman’s humiliating Korean war, and the loss of China to Soviet-backed communists in his rear-view mirror, LBJ was compelled to prove to America that Democrats can still be trusted with commanding the armed forces.

This is palpably false, and Johnson proved it by needlessly escalating the Vietnam War against USSR-funded North Vietnamese communists with no clear path to victory in sight. (Barack Obama would later adopt this rustic, Democrat recipe for his Syria policy.)

— JIMMY CARTER:

Jimmy Carter had such a firm, persistent grip on foreign policy — particularly with Russia — that when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Carter was befuddled, “This action of the Soviets, has made a more dramatic change in my own opinion of what the Soviets’ ultimate goals are than anything they’ve done in the previous time I’ve been in office.”

This was TWO YEARS into his presidency! By that time, the Soviets had already annexed East Berlin, blockading and starving West Berlin, exploded a hydrogen device, browbeaten JFK into retreating from Turkey, and invaded Czechoslovakia.

For his next trick, Jimmy Carter would abandon the Shah of Iran (a pro-American ally), allowing Islamist fanatics to take over the country.

— CLINTON (the one that won an election):

Reaping the rewards of Ronald Reagan’s erudition and foreign policy acumen (which indubitably defeated the Soviet Union), Bill Clinton inherited a post-Cold-War era presidency. With regards to the Red State, he merely had to ensure that post-Soviet Russia would cease funding fundamentalists who want to wipe us out.

Alas, while Clinton was signing off vast aid transfers to Russia (which would later be funneled into the pockets of Russian crime syndicates), and using the Oval Office for his personal — how can I put this delicately? — “affairs,” Russia was selling missiles to the Islamic zealots in Iran as they chanted “death to America!”, which loosely translates to: “elect more Democrat presidents, America!”.

— BARACK OBAMA:

When 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney argued that Russia was America’s greatest geopolitical threat, Barack Obama sneered, “the 1980s are calling, they want their foreign policy back, Mitt!” In response, Russian President Vladimir Putin – appreciably understanding that the leader of the free world is a tenuous ignoramus – proceeded to invade Ukraine, annex Crimea and aggressively expand Russia’s military. The Ukraine is calling, Obama! They want their country un-invaded by Russians!

Democrat presidents, one after another, have either (1) failed to take Russia seriously until it was too late to actually do something, or, (2) been eager to prove themselves more capable than their processors while ending up launching America into disastrous foreign policy turmoil with less vision than Monika Lewinsky under the confines of the Oval Office desk.

It’s great that Democrats have finally come to terms with the fact that Russia isn’t a pro-American ally, but rather a potential adversary with its own interests. Now, Democrats should just be grateful we have Donald Trump (a Republican!) in the White House and not another liberal naïf.