Trump is right on Crimea

The mainstream media fell silent last Friday when Donald Trump made comments on Crimea. His answer to a reporter’s question sent shockwaves through the 70-year-old bipartisan military industrial complex.

“Europe’s problem,” he said.

“But why isn’t Germany leading this one?” Trump added. “You know Germany is a very rich, very powerful nation. Why aren’t they dealing on it moreso? Everything’s the United States — we’re like the policeman of the world.”

{mosads}This is the advantage of sending a businessman or CEO to solve the problem. He or she is free from the blinders of partisan-ized generations which pass on dogma as if it were religion, generation after generation, kept in lockstep with outrageous and even half-mad policies. Please view PBS’s recent documentary, “The Bomb,” with new eyes 70 years after Hiroshima and Bikini Atoll to experience the dangerous and pathological past that still haunts and shackles us today.

Next year, we celebrate the 70th anniversary of the publication of the “long telegram.” It was a plan for the future with America at center, designed by the legendary policy adviser George Kennan, from which came the domination of world culture by American initiatives. NATO rose from this and the wall of containment of the Soviet Union.

But Dwight Eisenhower, the first Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe in 1951, did not see American dominance as a perennial condition. “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 [NATO] will have failed,” he said.

Trump exhibits that he, and quite possibly he alone in the long lineup of those who want to be president in 2016, can step away the past. And for the very next charge sure to follow, that “this is isolationism,” it is not. The world is multifaceted with varied needs, various threats, various friends and enemies. One approach does not fit all. The knee-jerk “isolationist” charge is a classic, mnemonic slander of mainstream media tied at the hip to government and military policy.

And for a second time, Trump trumps the former governor of Massachusetts and 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney. He did so recently when Romney used the word “severe” in reference to Trump’s commentary on the presence of “rapists” among illegal immigrants. But when Trump fought back, his poll numbers advanced. Previously, presidential candidate Romney had declared the greatest national threat to America today to be Russia with resounding authority in a single one-word declarative sentence. “Romney was right,” was repeated endlessly by partisan stalwarts and conservatives everywhere — in dentist offices; at the dinner table.

But Romney was wrong. Trump is right. Conservative culture turns increasingly now on Trump. But can America exist without viewing Russia as our enemy; can we live by ourselves, can we look East to West equally? Or do we remain prisoners of our long-dead past?

When Russian troops moved into Ukraine, many in the mainstream media reactively turned to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) “We are all Ukrainians,” he tweeted “#Ukraine — straight out of the Soviet playbook.” And Trump supporter Sarah Palin, McCain’s 2008 running mate and not one to say I told you so, was there within seconds to say, “I told you so.”

Interestingly enough, Trump here is not that far away from the former congressman from Texas, Ron Paul (R), who might be considered the Hawthornian “Gray Champion” and creative visionary of the Tea Party movement before it descended into adolescent arrogance and globalist militarism.

“The former Republican congressman and three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul has launched a scathing attack on what he calls a US-backed coup in Ukraine, insisting the Crimean people have the right to align their territory with Moscow and characterising sanctions against Russia as ‘an act of war.’ … ‘Our hands are not clean,’ said Paul,” The Guardian reported in March 2014.

And incidentally, son Rand Paul, the Republican senator from Kentucky who, like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and some of the other young mini-McCains who want to be president, has pretty much signed up with the foreign policy establishment. “[Russian President Vladimir] Putin must be punished,” he wrote in TIME magazine.

“It is America’s duty to condemn these actions in no uncertain terms. It is our role as a global leader to be the strongest nation in opposing Russia’s latest aggression,” he wrote.

Calling to mind the classic Cold War observation of the immortal character Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper from “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”: “Mandrake, have you ever seen commie drink a glass of water?”

But what I want to know is this: How does Trump feel about the Oslo Accords, the first actions of the first Clinton co-presidency which split Israel in half, cost thousands of lives and led a benign and indifferent world in opposition to Israel? They might bring it up in the debate.

Prediction: The Oslo Accords will not survive a Trump presidency. Nor will the recent Obama-Kerry Iran agreement.

Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children. Contact him at quigley1985@gmail.com.