Posted by
Patrick Baldwin on Thursday, March 05, 2009 11:00:00 PM
As I read the newswires this morning, Yogi Berra's old saying, "It's like deja vu all over again", sprang to mind.
President Obama, under a veil of secrecy, sent a letter to Vladimir Putin's puppet, Medvedev, offering to drop our missile defense system plans if the Russians would assist us in preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. This naive quid pro quo offer is absurd on so many levels it is hard to know where to start.
This Carteresque bumble at diplomacy makes me think that Obama drank the same Kool-Aid that President Bush did when he ridiculously said he had looked into Putin's eyes and saw a good man. So, we drop the missile shield and trust in the former KGB agent to flip 180 degrees and turn on his long-time pal Achmadinejad? Yeah that's going to happen. The Russians have been working overtime, and making huge money, helping the Iranians along with their nuclear program, which everyone can rest easy and believe is only meant for peaceful energy production. Sure, they are just suddenly going to turn on a dime and walk away from those paydays, especially when they perceive that the United States is willing to negotiate from a position of weakness. We have been here before, facing down thugs who were threatening us and our allies, I know I was there. Didn't we learn anything?
Nearly a quarter century ago, while in the Army, I was in Germany and participated in providing security as we deployed Pershing II missiles all over the country. President Reagan took this action, even as he negotiated for a reduction in nuclear arms, because he understood that we could only be successful in dealing with the hard-line Russians when speaking from a position of strength. Obama should take a lesson from this.
Not only would we be weakening ourselves, but we would also be throwing Poland, the Czech Republic and our other eastern European allies under the bus. Sending the signal to Putin that we won't take a strong stance, also telegraphs that we may well be willing to allow him to act on his aggressive urges towards all the former Soviet satellite nations. Since suffering no serious repercussions from his incursion into Georgia, he is already emboldened. It is not wise to encourage him further by getting mealy mouthed with a non-starter like Obama's offer. He has bullied Ukraine and Europe this winter with his cutting off of natural gas, and he stuck a thumb in our eye with his pressuring the government of Kyrgyzstan to close our military base there. The Obama-Hillary Clinton foreign policy direction appears to view Putin's intentions as something far different that what it is. Perhaps they should consider what Mikhail Gorbachev has to say, that Putin and his ilk are like the old-school communists of the Soviet era and Putin has designs on recreating what once was. I think we can trust Gorbachev's evaluation on this, he should know better than anyone, he was one of these guys.
At a time when we are already economically vulnerable, especially to China, it is lunacy to unilaterally disarm and put ourselves at the mercy of those who have, time and again, proven that they cannot be trusted. This is a pivotal moment in history, Iran and Russia are serious and growing threats. We cannot come to the table softly quoting Rodney King, "Can't we all just get along?" We must enter the room with Teddy Roosevelt's big stick and we need to make everyone understand that if necessary the stick will be used.