I’ve finally figured out why so many pundits and journalists are signing on
to the new cold war with Russia: they weren’t alive during the last one. They
have no memory of the Cuban missile crisis, they didn’t grow up in the era of
backyard bomb shelters: for them, Fail Safe and On the Beach are
just old movies.
Take Greg
Sargent, an opinion columnist with the Washington Post, who was a
twinkle in his parents’ eyes when John F. Kennedy put American nukes in Turkey
and the Russians responded by installing nuclear missiles in Cuba. So eager
is he for a confrontation with Vladimir Putin that he tweeted
this the other day. I responded with this.
And he fired back with this –
I must be a Trump supporter! As I told him,
I hope he’s alive after the next missile crisis with Russia – which will be
coming real soon after Hillary Clinton takes office.
Or take Josh Rogin,
who writes about foreign policy for the Washington Post: he’s upset that
Trump won’t risk World War III by facing off with Putin over Ukraine. Trump
must be “in lockstep with Putin.” Yet Rogin didn’t dispute the merits of what
Trump had to say – that he’d consider recognizing the Crimean referendum – only
implying that Trump was some kind of Manchurian candidate. I answered him here,
and he soon fled back into the nether reaches of the Twittersphere. And I’d
make the same point about him that I made about Sargent: these people are children.
They have no memory of the cold war. They never lived under the threat of nuclear
annihilation., To them it’s all a game.
We are living in an age when George Stephanopoulos can start off an
interview with the GOP presidential candidate by demanding to know: “What
is your relationship with Vladimir Putin?” It was an astonishing interview,
one in which the former spokesman for the (Bill) Clinton administration could
accusingly ask why the Trump campaign softened a GOP platform plank calling
for the shipment of lethal weapons to Ukraine.
Little Georgie was born in 1961 – a year before the Cuba missile crisis. Ukraine
was a part of the USSR, and no one then living had the faintest conception that
it would ever be an independent state, never mind that people – Very Serious
People – would one day be telling us we had to send them arms to fight off a
Russian “invasion” (that never happened and won’t happen). To Stephanopoulos,
and Sargent, and Rogin, “standing up to Putin” is as easy and as morally uncomplicated
as invading Iraq “standing up to Saddam Hussein.”
Except it isn’t.
There is, indeed, nothing to stand up to: quite the opposite, as the geo-strategists
of the West know full well. NATO has been expanding steadily eastward since
the end of the cold war and the implosion of the Soviet empire. Today Western
armies are at…