AMERICA’S UKRAINIAN BURDEN
BECAUSE WITHOUT AMERICA THERE IS NO FREE WORLD
In a private meeting we had with Danny Ayalon, Israel’s foreign minister and former Ambassador to the United States, Ayalon related a story during the time he accompanied the no-nonsense Ariel Sharon, then Prime Minister of Israel, to meet Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
From the moment the two deplaned, Putin kept nagging the Israelis to give land “back” to the Palestinians. He started with “give it back,” and ended with “give it back,” adding, “Israel doesn’t need all that land.” This, insisted Putin, the leader of the world’s largest country, to the state one can barely find on a map, one of the smallest.
By the end of the meeting, fed up, Sharon glared at Putin and said, “Instead of lecturing us, why don’t you stop grabbing the islands to your east not yours, but are five times the size of Israel?” (These Russia-controlled western Pacific islands are called the Northern Territories in Japan and Southern Kuriles in Russia.) Arik added: “What’s good for Russia is good for Israel!”
Putin paused, leaned back in his chair, chuckled and replied, pointing to the huge map of Russia on the wall behind him, “How do you think we got this big?”
RUSSIA IS THE WORLD’S LARGEST COUNTRY. REF: REDKALINKA
(Israel is seen in green between Africa and Asia.)
There are two sides to any story.
The Russians demand of the West to not encircle Ukraine and Russia and not allow Ukraine into NATO and the European Union, and the diplomatic-treaty side underwritten in the Budapest Memorandum covering Russia’s, Europe’s and NATO’s obligations and security, which says Ukraine is a sovereign nation that decides it’s own course, is a distraction and legally unenforceable.
We decide our foreign policy and who will ally with us, not Putin.
Reagan’s PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH policy and domestic military spending collapsed the Soviet Union and ended global communism. An epic success that prevented WWIII by using strength, not hope.
“The foundation of Reagan’s foreign policy, known as the Reagan Doctrine, was the support of freedom for all people around the world.”
“We win, they lose,” said RR.
I covered the Russian advantage in Build it Back Better – After the Nuclear War.
The American Advantage is covered in NATIONAL INTEREST’S Russia Has Twice as Many Tanks as America (But Does It Matter?)
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THREE TIMES IS A CHARM
For the Russians the first two wars were indeed, a charm.
We remember these as BORODINO and STALINGRAD.
In both campaigns the Russians fought a domestic war on their own turf.
In the first, Napoleon lost a half million troops. Hitler 200,000 and 100,000 captured.
Foreign invaders, the French, later the Germans, lost.
These wars were disastrous for the Russians…and more so for the French and Germans.
For the Russians, the sacrifice was worthwhile. Before both wars were brought on them by foreigners, Russia was a backward, minor player on the world stage. Today it is a nuclear superpower and a global gas station that, from the days after WWII, put its footprint not just on Europe, but the near and far east, Asia, Africa, central and south America, the north and south poles, and in space.
Russia didn’t just stamp a foot on German soil.
They are standing on a feckless Germany’s throat!
And America’s.
Backed by forward planning to defend the homeland and to secure territory, defensive space, adjacent to it. For example Russia’s game changing T14.
Germany did in 2020 exactly what Obama and Biden have (in 2014 Ukraine). Surrendered. Germany decommissioned its nuclear reactors and is wholly dependent on Russian energy. NATO was formed, led by Germany, to keep the Russians at bay. Do you see the problem?
America was an exporter of its excess energy resources when Trump stepped down. His successor shut down and literally destroyed American energy exploration and production. And, just like Germany, is now begging Putin for oil.
In other words, the Russians have Europe, and America, literally over a barrel!
Saber rattling will not replace the Reaganite threat of sheer power and a monopoly of violence. Reluctant allies Germany and France will not replace masculine fortitude with Merkel’s feminine wiles. It won’t matter if Donald Trump rebuilt America’s military if America has no will to use it. Or if the American people won’t fight a war, when the Russian people do.
America didn’t want to fight Jihad either, but the Jihad fought America anyway.
The United States became an industrial, financial, and military superpower by WWI, and the world’s foremost leader on every front after the fall of the Soviet Empire. That collapse formed Vladimir Putin, Russia’s path forward, and our story now unfolding in Ukraine.
CRIMEA IS A ‘FAIT ACCOMPLI,’ I WROTE IN 2014.
The fate of Crimea was sealed not by Vladimir Putin and Russian troops, but by a feckless Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Biden, his point man on Ukraine. Also, the WOKE generals after Obama purged the Pentagon of testosterone, will power, and competency. Bad policy followed bad advice. As it were, Joe has never made a good decision in his entire fifty-year political career, according to Bob Gates, Obama’s SecDef. Neither has Obama. Now Joe is trying to reverse his greatest mistakes by making more of them.
In the very time of need for effective commitment, weaponry, medical and other supplies, Obama-Biden sent Ukraine blankets. In 1956 the United States sent Hungary condolences. In 2013 Obama-Biden sent the Kurds in Syria and Iraq…..ISIS.
The pattern became predictable. A mistake will be followed by disaster.
In the time of need to root out Ukranian corruption exemplified by the large energy exploration company well known for corruption, Burisma, Joe Biden, Obama’s point man on Ukraine, set up his own son and the Biden Crime Family to profit from the corruption. With no shame whatsoever, Joe even threatened Ukraine with a billion dollar penalty when Ukraine refused to fire a prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden.
After having established the Russia Collusion Hoax with his weaponized intel services, with Obama advising them, Hillary and Biden got busy with the Mueller Probe, joined by the media-entertainment complex already in the tank for the Democrats. Later this same cabal had Democrats impeach President Trump for Joe Biden’s crimes. The strategy? To prevent a future Trump-centric DOJ from investigating the Bidens, Pelosis and Democrats sleeping with Chinese spies and making insider trading deals at America’s expense.
Earlier Obama colluded with the Russians by withdrawing Europe’s defensive missiles. Hillary Clinton presented the Russians with a red Reset Button instead of sanctions and demands, and for later Russian favors that will have panned out to help win Obama’s second term (and Hillary’s path to the presidency Obama will surely endorse - as he has.)
THEIRS WAS THE AMERICA LAST POLICY.
Obama’s three acts paved the way for the 2014 invasion of Dombas in the Crimea.
Obama and Biden’s egregious self-dealing brought us, and Ukraine, to where we are now.
Every decision and act of self-dealing was to enable and enrich their own, the Clintons, Kerrys, Bidens and Obamas - to profit themselves only, and to damage global security. Otherwise known as Fundamental Change.
This is how we arrived with BUILD IT BACK BETTER – AFTER THE NUCLEAR WAR. This being the other side of that story.
America cannot afford, financially, to fight more extended wars.
Not in one place, and certainly not in three – South China Seas and the Persian Gulf.
More importantly, America cannot afford not to fight these wars.
Unless we’ve failed to learn from history and ignore the invasion of any sovereign nation the way we had ignored Poland’s plight October 6, 1939, and Hungary’s November 4, 1956.
Nor can our partners refuse to join: NATO (including the UK, Australia, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines, Japan, potentially Turkey and Israel, Egypt and the Sunni Arab world) – all of whom experienced WWII, if not WWI.
You can speculate: are the Obamas, Clintons and Bidens the Chamberlains of the 21st Century?
Or insist, as Tucker Carlson has: We have no American interests in Ukraine.
The Soros cabal Obama, Clinton, Kerry and Biden are merely self-dealing cowards, failed incompetents, successful profiteers who got us into this mess. They were in it only for themselves. They are arguably traitors in the best definition of that term, and obviously not up to the task.
Chamberlain was a far better man than these three blended together.
Chamberlain and appeasement did not cause WWII, contrary to popular belief.
Failed diplomacy did not cause WWII.
WWII was caused by men who substituted violence for diplomacy.
A violent lawless leader will not stop with taking your hand and arm once you’ve given him your fingers.
It is what Vladimir Putin has done in the invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and may do again, much deeper into that sovereign nation, because he already knows what a feckless Obama and feckless Biden will do, by what they have already done.
Nothing.
America cannot afford another war. But more importantly…The Russians did not invade under Trump. They have under Obama-Biden. Leave an area of conflict, and the bad guys will move in to fill the vacuum.
FOX NEWS’ Tucker Carlson is dead wrong.
America cannot afford to not wage any war in defense of our allies who happen to constitute our national interests as defined by Ronald Reagan.
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Andrew G. Benjamin is in finance, real estate and equities, a former advisor to New York City mayor ‘s office (Subcommittee on Taxation, Finance and the Budget). Benjamin wrote extensively about politics, transnational and domestic, intelligence and military affairs, security and strategy, economic issues, Mideast, terrorism, technology and high end audio.
Reprint rights are available from the author.