The Really Big Money? Not the Kochs

Harry Reid surely must have meant the unions when he complained about buying elections.

By Kimberly Strassel

Harry Reid is under a lot of job-retention stress these days, so Americans might forgive him the occasional word fumble. When he recently took to the Senate floor to berate the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch for spending "unlimited money" to "rig the system" and "buy elections," the majority leader clearly meant to be condemning unions. 

It's an extraordinary thing, in a political age obsessed with campaign money, that nobody scrutinizes the biggest, baddest, "darkest" spenders of all: organized labor. The IRS is muzzling nonprofits; Democrats are "outing" corporate donors; Jane Mayer is probably working on part 89 of her New Yorker series on the "covert" Kochs. Yet the unions glide blissfully, unmolestedly along. This lack of oversight has led to a union world that today acts with a level of campaign-finance impunity that no other political giver—conservative outfits, corporate donors, individuals, trade groups—could even fathom. 

Mr. Reid was quite agitated on the Senate floor about "unlimited money," by which he must have been referring to the $4.4 billion that unions had spent on politics from 2005 to 2011 alone, according to this newspaper. The Center for Responsive Politics' list of top all-time donors from 1989 to 2014 ranks Koch Industries No. 59. Above Koch were 18 unions, which collectively spent $620,873,623 more than Koch Industries ($18 million). Even factoring in undisclosed personal donations by the Koch brothers, they are a rounding error in union spending. 

Mr. Reid was similarly heated over the tie-up between outside groups and politicians, by which he surely meant the unions who today openly operate as an arm of the Democratic Party. The press may despise the Kochs, but even it isn't stupid enough to claim they are owned by the GOP. Most outside conservatives groups, including the Koch-supported Americans for Prosperity, back candidates and positions that challenge the Republican line. And in any event, every conservative 501(c)(4) is so terrified of the hay the media and regulators would make over even a hint of coordination with the GOP, they keep a scrupulous distance.

Unions, as 501(c)(5) organizations, are technically held to the same standards against coordination with political parties. Yet no Democrat or union official today even troubles to maintain that fiction. Hundreds upon hundreds of the delegates to the 2012 Democratic convention were union members. They were in the same room as party officials, plotting campaign strategies. The question therefore is how much of that $4.4 billion in union spending was at the disposal of the Democratic Party—potentially in violation of a bajillion campaign-finance rules? 

As for Mr. Reid's complaint that some "rig the system to benefit themselves," that was undoubtedly a reference to the overt, transactional nature of union money. Nobody doubts the Kochs and many corporations support candidates who they hope will push for free-market principles. Though imagine the political outcry if David or Charles Koch openly conditioned dollars for a politician on policies to benefit Koch Industries?

In the past months alone, unions demanded an exemption to a tax under ObamaCare; the administration gave it. They demanded an end to plans to "fast track" trade deals; Mr. Reid killed it. They wanted more money for union job training; President Obama put it in his budget. Everybody understands—the press matter-of-fact reports it—that these policy giveaways are to ensure unions open their coffers to help Mr. Reid keep the Senate in November. The quid pro quo is even more explicit and self-serving at the state level, where public-sector unions elect politicians who promise to pay them more. If the CEO of Exxon tried this, the Justice Department would come knocking. The unions do it daily. 

Democrats hope to make a campaign theme out of conservative "dark" money, something else Mr. Reid knows about. In addition to other spending, unions have been aggressively funneling money into their own "dark" groups. One of these is the heavyweight 501(c)(4) Patriot Majority USA. Patriot Majority doesn't disclose its donors, though a Huffington Post investigation found it had been "fueled" in 2012 by $2.3 million in union donations. Amusingly, Patriot Majority used its undisclosed money on a campaign to expose the Koch brothers' "front" groups. Oh, and Patriot Majority is run by Craig Varoga, a former aide and close ally of . . . Harry Reid.

The unions have had a special interest in funding attacks on conservative groups, since it has led to the IRS's regulatory muzzling of 501(c)(4) speech. Under the new rule, conservative 501(c)(4)s are restricted in candidate support; unions can do what they want. Conservative groups are stymied in get-out-the-vote campaigns; unions can continue theirs. Conservative outfits must count up volunteer hours; not unions. 

So now, in addition to a system in which organized labor spends "unlimited money" to "rig the system to benefit themselves" and "buy elections," (to quote Mr. Reid), Mr. Obama's IRS has made sure to shut up anyone who might compete with unions or complain about them.

Supporters of campaign-finance rules never want to acknowledge that their maze of regulations serve primarily as a tool for savvy politicians to manipulate and silence opponents. For proof, they need only listen to Mr. Reid—who is pretty savvy, and who didn't misspeak after all. 

Related Reading:

The Destroyer Cometh

The Destroyer Cometh

 

A dumbed-down Democratic party runs out of ideas.

 

By Kevin D. Williamson 

Here is a selection of recent headlines: “Jon Stewart Destroys Megyn Kelly,” “Jon Stewart Destroys Fox News’ ‘Spite-Driven Anger Machine,’” “Jon Stewart Destroys What’s Left of Peggy Noonan’s Credibility,” “Jon Stewart Destroys Fox News Over Syria Coverage,” “Jon Stewart Destroys Glenn Beck’s Utopia,” “Jon Stewart Destroys Bill O’Reilly” — there are about 520,000 more — and, not to be missed, “Jon Stewart Destroys Chicago-Style Pizza.”

The sound of terrors is in his ears at 11 p.m. on Comedy Central, and in prosperity the destroyer cometh upon him.

Mr. Stewart is the host of a fake news show, the genesis of which probably was a conversation that went approximately like this:  Brother-in-Law: “There’s nothing funny on Saturday Night Live except the ‘Weekend Update.’ They should really just do that for the whole show.” Jon Stewart: “Hey . . . !” Mr. Stewart is among the lowest forms of intellectual parasite in the political universe, with no particular insights or interesting ideas of his own, reliant upon the very broadest and least clever sort of humor, using ancient editing techniques to make clumsy or silly political statements sound worse than they are and then pantomiming outrage at the results, the lowbrow version of James Joyce giving the hero of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man the unlikely name of Stephen Dedalus and then having other characters in the novel muse upon the unlikelihood of that name. His shtick is a fundamentally cowardly one, playing the sanctimonious vox populi when it suits him, and then beating retreat into “Hey, I’m just a comedian!” when he faces a serious challenge. It is the sort of thing that you can see appealing to bright, politically engaged 17-year-olds.

His audience is not made up of bright, politically engaged 17-year-olds. But Mr. Stewart has pulled off a pretty neat trick: He has, as the half-million or so headlines mentioned above indicate, made fake news into real news, and it is not an accident that the verb “destroys” so often follows his name. Mr. Stewart is the leading voice of the half-bright Left because he is a master practitioner of the art of half-bright vitriolic denunciation. His intellectual biography is that of a consummate lightweight — a William and Mary frat boy who majored in psychology, which must have been a disappointment to his father, a professor of physics — and his comedy career has been strictly by-the-numbers, from the early days on the New York City comedy-club scene to changing his name (Mr. Stewart began life as Mr. Leibowitz) and a career-boosting stint on MTV, where he was second only to Beavis and Butt-Head in the ratings. He subsequently may have matched Beavis and Butt-Head’s popularity, but he has never risen to comparable heights of social insight. 

The thing is, people actually get their news from his show. Fans, many of whom cannot quite spell his name, swear that the program is “more accurate than any other news show.” Ignore, for the moment, the judgment exhibited in that quotation and focus on the word “other.” In the minds of many of his admirers — and in the minds of those news-site editors who report on Mr. Stewart’s fake news as part of the real news — there is no substantive difference between what Mr. Stewart does and what, e.g., Ezra Klein does (“Ezra Klein Destroys Romney,” “Ezra Klein Destroys David Brooks,” “Ezra Klein Destroys Republican Opposition to Temporary Payroll Tax Cut,” etc.) because for the Left the point of journalism is not to criticize politics or to analyze politics but to be a servant of politics, to “destroy” such political targets as may be found behind one’s crosshairs. For the Left, the maker of comedy and the maker of graphs perform the same function. It does not matter who does the “destroying,” so long as it gets done. 

“Destroying” is more of an aspiration than a reality, of course. If Megyn Kelly has been destroyed by anybody, she is not showing any sign of it. What it communicates is the Left’s politics of vilification, a longstanding preference that has recently become extremely pronounced, substituting a good-guys-and-bad-guys narrative for the discussion of complex ideas. Mr. Klein, for all his empiricist posturing, is very much a practitioner of that shallow art — writing, among other things, that a Democratic opponent of the Affordable Care Act was “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.” (Shockingly, I was unable to locate a headline reading: “Ezra Klein Destroys Joe Lieberman.”) 

Senator Reid’s recent obsession with denouncing Charles and David Koch from his congressional perch is of a piece with that: Never mind the merits of the things the Kochs endorse politically — from liberalizing energy markets to gay marriage — they are a handy bogeyman. And, given the politics of the situation, Senator Reid surely would prefer to talk about the Koch brothers’ allegedly nefarious plans for world domination (the great “libertarian conspiracy to take over the world and leave you the hell alone”) than about Democrats’ recent meandering energy policies, which would hold hostage U.S. producers in order to appease the Birkenstocks-and-white-boy-dreadlocks set. 

The Koch brothers are patrons of Big Ideas, interested in the institutions of a free society and what makes them work. Say what you like about the organizations they donate to — Cato, Mercatus, the Institute for Humane Studies (my employer for about a year) — they are oriented toward ideas. I do not expect any Mercatus scholar to host a highly rated cable comedy show in the near future, not even the telegenic Veronique de Rugy.

 I do not much blame the Left for hesitating to talk about Big Ideas. The Left has been losing the Big Idea debate for a generation or more, in no small part because its last Big Idea killed 100 million people, give or take, and not in Mr. Klein’s projecting-abstractly-from-a-CBO-study way but in the concentration-camps-and-hunger-terror way. Marxism was the Left’s Big Idea for the better part of a century, and its collapse — which was moral, economic, political, and complete — left a howling void in the Left’s intellectual universe. Nothing has quite managed to fill it: In the immediate wake of the collapse of Communism, the anticapitalists sought shelter in a variety of movements, few of which grew to be of any real consequence, with the exception of the environmentalist movement. But the lenten self-mortification implied by a consistent environmentalist ethic has limited that movement’s appeal as a governing philosophy and an individual ethic both, hence its fragmentation into a motley sprawl of mini-crusades. It is easy to be anti-fracking when that does not require you to give up anything, easy to oppose the expansion of the Keystone pipeline network when you can be confident that the gas pumps in your hometown will always be full, easy for well-off Whole Foods shoppers to abominate varieties of grain that are possessed by evil spirits or cooties or whatever it is this week.

The intellectual decline of the Left has been something to see. I am reminded of a joke that P. J. O’Rourke once made about my hometown: “There’s also a whiff of highbrow in Siberia. For a hick town, Irkutsk had too many opera houses, theaters, museums, and academic institutes. This is because, for hundreds of years, the smarty-pants reformers, annoying idealists, and know-it-all do-gooders were sent here for life. It’s as though everyone who voted for George McGovern was packed off to Lubbock, Texas.” You could not make the same joke about Obama voters or Occupiers — or, especially, about Jon Stewart’s audience — because nobody expects any of them to start an opera house or an academic institute. They are busy watching an ersatz Beavis and Butt-Head for psychology majors who enjoy having their modest intellects flattered and their perceived enemies “destroyed.” 

Alan Simpson’s partisan taxonomy — the Stupid (Republican) party vs. the Evil (Democratic) party — no longer holds, if it ever did. At CPAC this week, you will find students of Robert George debating students of Robert Nozick about the subject of gay marriage, and Governor Rick Perry of Texas, among others, arguing that mandatory-minimum-sentence laws are a failure, while Chuck Grassley and others support them. (How many members of Mr. Stewart’s audience know that Senator Michael Lee of Utah and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas in January introduced a bill to reduce mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug offenders and to make retroactive the 2010 reforms relating to crack-cocaine sentences?) There is no CPAC of the Left, because the Left is not interested even in its own ideas, much less those of Professor George or the late Professor Nozick. 

Jon Stewart’s act is a pretty good one, and it takes a real talent to anchor a long-running television show. It takes something else to anchor a long-running constitutional republic, and that something else includes intelligence and ideas. Mr. Stewart’s half-bright following is now the dominant tendency on the Left. We’d have been better off with Beavis and Butt-Head.

Addendum: 

In my piece on lefty anti-intellectualism today, I related an observation from P. J. O’Rourke:

“There’s also a whiff of highbrow in Siberia. For a hick town, Irkutsk had too many opera houses, theaters, museums, and academic institutes. This is because, for hundreds of years, the smarty-pants reformers, annoying idealists, and know-it-all do-gooders were sent here for life. It’s as though everyone who voted for George McGovern was packed off to Lubbock, Texas.”

And added:

You could not make the same joke about Obama voters or Occupiers — or, especially, about Jon Stewart’s audience — because nobody expects any of them to start an opera house or an academic institute.

In the comments, there was a lot of lefty haw-hawing to the effect that nobody on the right gives a damn about things like opera.

I suppose I should have noted that the New York City ballet performs in the David Koch Theater.

  

 

Related Reading:

The Really Big Money? Not the Kochs

 

Russia Blows Past Obama’s “Off Ramp”

Yet another western plan for Ukraine ended in failure today. Will this hurt Obama’s standing in the Middle East?*

By Walter Russell Mead

Yet another western plan for Ukraine went down in flames today as the Russians blew past the ‘off-ramp’ Washington and its allies had prepared as a way to defuse the crisis. It’s the third western plan to flame out since November. 

First came plan A: Get Yanukovych, a leader based in the east, to sign an EU trade agreement that would set a united Ukraine on a westward path. Putin disrupted that plan by getting Yanukovych to switch and go east.

Then came Plan B: When unrest swept Kiev and Yanukovych’s government reacted with blind and brutal thuggishness, western diplomats decided to help the protestors replace the Yanukovych regime with a new government that could unite the country and bring it toward the West. That plan failed when Russia took advantage of the chaos in Ukraine to occupy Crimea and demonstrate its ability to threaten the east.

 

Plan C, which Putin shot down in the last 24 hours, was apparently based on the hope among some policy makers that a confused and misguided President Putin had made a dreadful blunder in Crimea. The plan was to offer the poor, trapped Russians a graceful way out of their predicament that would ultimately restore Ukrainian unity as the country moved West. The plan collapsed when Lavrov blew off the West and refused to even meet with Ukraine’s foreign minister and now the Russians are kicking the fragments to bits as the Crimean regional authorities announce plans for a referendum on annexation by Russia.

Far from thinking that its incursion was a foolish blunder, Russia appears to be acting in the belief that it has inflicted a humiliation on the West and made solid gains on the ground in Ukraine. It is doubling down on the policy, and as far as one can read the mixed signals from the Kremlin, appears to be saying that the West must swallow the annexation of Crimea or watch as Russia further destabilizes eastern Ukraine.

Putin cares much less than many westerners seem to think about any sanctions that the West is likely to impose. Russia isn’t part of the West and things work differently there. Western commentators pointed breathlessly to large declines in Russian stock markets after the invasion, for example, to show how Putin must be feeling the errors of his ways.

Not really; Putin does not worry nearly as much about the Russian stock market as western leaders worry about financial markets in their own countries. Putin broke the oligarchs as a political force years ago; in Russia, corporations exist to serve the state and not the other way round. He is not worried that business leaders will lose confidence in him; in Putin’s Russia, it is business leaders who worry about losing the trust of the country’s political master.

As for banking crackdowns and visa limits, it will help Putin, not hurt him, if powerful Russians are unable to leave the country or move their money around in the West. One of his worries is that various oligarchs and power brokers can put enough money in the west to be able to get out from under his thumb. He would like all of his backers to be dependent on him for continued enjoyment of wealth and property. If the West wants to fence his backers in, so be it. (If the west goes after Putin’s own golden horde of ill-gotten simoleons, estimated by many to be north of $50 billion, the calculation might change.)

As for the value of the ruble, Putin probably thinks of this as a problem for the technocrats to solve. In any case, global political instability, in which there is a bull market these days, tends to drive up the price of Russia’s gas and oil exports, and this is the bottom line the Russian president probably watches most closely. Trouble in Europe and trouble in the Middle East brings more money into Russia’s coffers, not less.

Putin cares about the economy, and Russia’s economic weakness is one of the permanent disadvantages that hobbles Russia at every turn—but the effect of any of the likely western sanctions on Russia is probably less serious than many of his opponents would wish.

As for other trade sanctions, the disunity and economic selfishness of the western response has made the West look ridiculous. France will deliver warships, Germany will buy gas, and Britain’s banks are open for Russian business. Putin must be quaking in his boots at this awesome display of resolve.

Far from agreeing with the line that he’s fallen into a clever western trap, Putin probably thinks that he’s still got a shaky US administration pretty much where he wants it. Wrecking three western plans for Ukraine in a row has left him with what he probably sees as a stronger position than he had three months ago. He’s blocked his worst case outcome—a united Ukraine moving to the West with the eastern political leadership backing the move. The West is largely stuck with the financial support for Ukraine (meaning that US and EU taxpayers will be paying Ukraine’s back bills to Gazprom and other Russian entities), and now that he has Crimea in hand, the divisions between east and west can be exploited by Russia down the road.

Looking at the bigger picture, Putin probably also thinks the United States needs him more than he needs us at the moment. The Obama administration, he likely believes, is desperate to avoid further trouble in the Middle East. In Syria, in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and in the Iranian negotiations, it is out on a limb, engaged in very high stakes diplomacy where the odds don’t favor it. Russia can’t do a lot about the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, but it can probably spoil the Iran negotiations and make Syria an even more horrible diplomatic and political problem for the Obama administration than it already is. Indeed, Samantha Power is now stating that Syria is dragging its feet in negotiations over the destruction of chemical weapons facilities. The U.S. should not expect any help from Russia as it searches for progress in Syria.

Putin can therefore inflict a great deal of pain on President Obama and American diplomacy if he chooses, and one suspects that he likes that. It’s possible that in happier times there were people in the Obama administration who believed that Putin would help them out diplomatically either because Russia and the US have common interests win Syria or over the Iranian issue or because he would prefer to help liberal, presumably more dovish Democrats consolidate power in Washington rather than making them look bad and easing the path for Republicans back into the White House.

Putin, however, doesn’t look at things that way. He appears to believe that under its dovish rhetoric the Obama administration was trying to detach Ukraine from Russia—a mortal threat to Russia’s vital interests as the Kremlin sees them. The Obama administration’s human rights rhetoric and its habit of making irritating though not genuinely wounding gestures (like sending gay delegates to the Sochi Olympics) angered the Russians without weakening them, and we can be sure that Putin believes in his gut that if some kind of Kiev style protest movement rose up in Moscow to drive him from office, that the United States would give it as much help as we dared.

From a Russian point of view, there already was a cold war between Moscow and Washington, and the West’s effort to snatch Ukraine last fall was a unilateral escalation of that conflict and an existential threat to the foundations of both the Putin government and the Russian national project. Putin believes he is fighting back and it looks as if his interest in punishing Obama over Ukraine is greater than his (limited and conditional) desire to keep working with Obama on issues like arms control.

From Putin’s point of view, there is much less difference between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans than narcissistic westerners might think. He sees the whole United States as his geopolitical arch-rival and sees differences between liberals and conservatives as arguments about the best sauce to cook Russia with. Reagan brought the Soviets down and George H. W. Bush reunified Germany and anchored it in NATO, but the Clinton administration rammed NATO expansion down a weak Yeltsin’s throat and Obama was ready to scoop Ukraine into the western swag bag if Russia hadn’t stopped him.

Just as Jimmy Carter did not understand that his human rights advocacy ruined his hopes for a new era of detente and arms negotiations with the Soviet Union, the Obama administration’s policy makers don’t seem seem to understand that their Ukraine policy (which they don’t ever seem to have thought much about one way or the other) contradicted their reset policy in a way that would alienate and enrage the Russians. 

Now, from the Kremlin’s point of view, it may be the Obama administration that has fallen into a trap. Domestic political pressures are meshing with the President’s own sense of legality and morality in international affairs to push the United States towards trying to make it look as if our sanctions and other responses are imposing. In fact, they will and must be fairly ineffective, and Russia can use its influence over events in Syria and Iran to cause more pain to Obama and more damage to America’s international standing.

Russian diplomats expect to be getting urgent calls for help from desperate American diplomats trying to get Iran to an acceptable agreement and perhaps also to keep the Syrians within some kind of bounds. They are probably also expecting some interesting calls from Saudis, and from Egyptian generals with Saudi money in their bank accounts, looking to punish the Obama administration by creating the appearance of a new Russian role in Egyptian military affairs. It’s quite possible that the value of some Saudi backed arms deals with Egyptians and maybe Pakistanis could more than offset the cost of western sanctions to the Russian economy. In any case, Russia thinks it has some running room in foreign policy now, and we should expect it to take advantage where it can.

There may still be some people in Washington who think Putin has blundered into a weak position, but from Tokyo and Beijing to Teheran and Damascus, Putin is probably looking like a stronger horse today, and Uncle Sam like a weaker one.

We shall see, but the most important question now probably isn’t what happens next in Ukraine. The question is how does the breakdown of the Obama administration’s Russia policy affect America’s position in the Middle East. Will Iran now assume that it can have more backing from Russia and will that harden its stance in the nuclear talks? Will Assad now conclude that he has less to fear from the Americans than ever before? Will that be reflected in a continual hardening of his stance on chemical weapons?

If those things happen, how will the Obama administration reshape its stance in the Middle East? If Iran and Syria negotiations deteriorate, and Russia is being the reverse of helpful, what is America’s next move?

Meanwhile, let’s see what the West comes up with for Plan D in Ukraine.

* Must be a rhetorical question. :-)

Obama’s Fantasy-Based Foreign Policy

The “uncontested arrival” of Russian troops in Ukraine, presumably “helping to deal with the economic transition."

By STEPHEN F. HAYES

On February 23, five days before Russia invaded Ukraine, National Security Adviser Susan Rice appeared on Meet the Press and shrugged off suggestions that Russia was preparing any kind of military intervention: “It’s in nobody’s interest to see violence returned and the situation escalate.” A return to a “Cold War construct” isn’t necessary, Rice insisted, because such thinking “is long out of date” and “doesn’t reflect the realities of the 21st century.” Even if Vladimir Putin sees the world this way, Rice argued, it is “not in the United States’ interests” to do so.  

It was a remarkably transparent case of pretending the world is what we wish it to be, rather than seeing it as it is. 

On February 28, Russian troops poured into Ukraine. As they did, Secretary of State John Kerry spoke to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart. Kerry briefed reporters after their talk, plainly unaware of the developments on the ground. Kerry said that Russia wants to help Ukraine with its economic problems. Lavrov had told him “that they are prepared to be engaged and be involved in helping to deal with the economic transition that needs to take place at this point.”

Hours later, television screens across the world displayed images of Russian soldiers infiltrating Crimea and Russian artillery rolling through Sevastopol. Obama administration officials told CNN’s Barbara Starr that the incursion was not “an invasion” but an “uncontested arrival” and that this distinction was “key” to understanding the new developments. 

But euphemism can’t alter reality. So, President Obama delivered a statement: “The United States will stand with the international community in affirming that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine.” The White House wasn’t quite ready to lead the international community in a response to an intervention that was underway, but with the snarl of a puppy, the president announced we would “stand with” others if the uncontested arrival somehow turned into real military intervention. (Thirty minutes after his warning, no doubt meant to convey toughness and resolve, Obama appeared at a Democratic National Committee pep rally and declared the opening of “happy hour.”)

Four days later, with Russia in effective control of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, Vladimir Putin held a press conference—a rambling series of claims and statements that sometimes contradicted each other and often contradicted reality. Putin maintained, for instance, that there were no Russian troops on the ground in Ukraine, and that the Russian-speaking soldiers who often identified themselves as Russian soldiers were probably local defense groups who may well have bought their uniforms from military surplus stores. 

Where others saw the agitprop of an emboldened authoritarian, the White House chose to see hope. Administration officials seized on one sentence of his blather and expressed optimism. “Regarding the deployment of troops, the use of armed forces so far, there is no need for it.  .  .  . Such a measure would certainly be the very last resort,” Putin said. Obama national security officials saw this claim—which came days after Russian troops had been deployed—as evidence that Putin was looking for an “off-ramp.” And soon we had a name for this new Obama approach to the crisis: “de-escalation.”

It’s not de-escalation, it’s delusion. And it’s dangerous. The public seems to understand this. In a Fox News poll released March 6, Obama’s foreign policy approval rating fell to a new low—at just 33 percent (56 percent disapprove). 

For five years, the Obama administration has chosen to see the world as they wish it to be, not as it is. In this fantasy world, the attack in Fort Hood is “workplace violence.” The Christmas Day bomber is an “isolated extremist.” The attempted bombing in Times Square is a “one-off” attack. The attacks in Benghazi are a “spontaneous” reaction to a YouTube video. Al Qaeda is on the run. Bashar al-Assad is a “reformer.” The Iranian regime can be sweet-talked out of its nuclear weapons program. And Vladimir Putin is a new, post-Cold War Russian leader.

In the real world, it was a pen pal of the late jihadist Anwar al-Awlaki who opened fire on soldiers at Fort Hood. The Christmas bomber was dispatched from Yemen, where he was instructed by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The Times Square bomber was trained and financed by the Pakistani Taliban. Benghazi was a deliberate attack launched by well-known terrorist groups. Al Qaeda is amassing territory and increasing its profile. Assad is a brutal dictator, responsible for the deaths of more than 100,000 Syrians. The Iranian regime is firmly entrenched as the world’s foremost state sponsor of terror and remains determined to lead a nuclear state. And in Russia we face a Cold War throwback willing to use force to expand Russian influence. 

And Vladimir Putin, it turns out, is who we thought he was. Unfortunately, so is Barack Obama.

Ukraine,Venezuela and the Lessons of History & U.S. Power

By David Abshire and Maxmillian Angerholzer III 

The protests in Ukraine and Venezuela have laid bare a new fault line in the 21st century. Along this fault line sit an increasingly globalized middle class, eager to link themselves with the West and modernity, and a corrupt ruling class that seeks to maintain ill-gotten privileges that are vestiges of a discredited past. 

While no one wants to return to a Cold War era of confrontation and brinksmanship, the United States can benefit from the wisdom of some of the great Cold War presidents in confronting divides. First and foremost, they would advise that America and its allies cannot remain passive in the face of provocations by those who seek to oppress their people and their neighbors.

No one should be surprised that Viktor Yanukovych, the deposed Ukrainian president, chose an authoritarian alliance with his overseers in the Kremlin instead of opening his nation to the European Union. As the once closed doors of his ostentatious mansion are flung open, and the extent of his ill-gotten gains is revealed to his impoverished people, it becomes clear just how much Yanukovych had to lose from political and fiscal transparency. 

This same dynamic exists in Venezuela, where protests have pitted middle-class students and urban dwellers against the Chavez-inspired government of Nicholas Maduro. Similar to Yanukovych and Vladimir Putin, Maduro and the heirs of the Chavez regime continue to enrich and empower themselves while the Venezuelan people suffer shortages of basic necessities, including food, medicine, and fuel—ironic for a hydrocarbon rich nation. The level of cronyism is evidenced by the fact that the Chavez children still occupy the Caracas presidential palace, living in luxury while many of their countrymen go hungry.

In both Ukraine and Venezuela—and Russia as well—the societies are thus divided between a political elite built around patronage and corruption, and an increasingly globally aligned middle class who yearn for economic reform and a voice in decisions regarding own destiny. This is the fault line of our times. The great Cold War presidents would be clear that America must stand firm on the side of those seeking freedom and dignity. 

President Eisenhower also understood that economic strength was the wellspring of American power. For him, U.S. military might flowed from our fiscal vitality. Similarly, the United States can show power today by emphasizing why our free and open markets are superior to cronyism and corruption. While economic sanctions appear to be an easy tool for confronting these nations, there is more to gain through economic exchange that empowers middle classes and intellectual elites.

President Kennedy insisted on a flexible U.S. military and the full spectrum of options it afforded. He felt it was important to demonstrate that the United States could conduct military operations that went beyond the deployment of massive U.S. conventional or strategic nuclear forces. In today’s environment, he might advise the Pentagon to use U.S. Special Forces, training missions, and military assistance to build the capabilities of allied nations. During the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy learned the limitations of covert action, but he continued to support tools like the Green Berets. He would likely applaud Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s current defense budget and guidance, which emphasizes Special Forces and nonconventional capabilities such as cyber-warfare. There is also wisdom for the ages in Kennedy’s pledge, in his 1961 inaugural address, to both allies and the oppressed: 

“To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United, there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided, there is little we can do—for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder. To those peoples … across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required.”

Finally, President Reagan understood the importance of balancing strength with the flexibility to exploit political openings presented by rivals. While the beginning of his administration was marked by a military and diplomatic effort to push back against Soviet expansion and nuclear blackmail, when Mikhail Gorbachev presented an opening for reform and negotiation, Reagan seized the opportunity. 

In doing so, he set in motion the events that led to victory in the Cold War, successfully breaching the divide of Reagan’s time that kept hundreds of millions of Eastern Europeans enslaved by Soviet tyranny. Reagan also set up the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a grant-making semi-independent organization under USAID that promotes democracy. Reagan might have advised that Putin be given a face-saving opportunity to roll back his oppression and rejoin the community of nations.

Reagan might also have favored encouraging the use of NED as an independent organization, to give the United States the flexibility to act proactively in a changing strategic environment to bring Venezuela and Ukraine back into the American orbit. 

In addressing the challenge presented by Putin and his erstwhile comrades, it is most important for the United States to reestablish its leadership. Our allies do not want a return to Cold War geopolitics, but they still look to Washington as the one capital that can rally the West to collective action against a common threat.

The American people are tired of war and recession, but we cannot retreat from our responsibilities and our role as a global leader. If the collective voices of our greatest Cold War presidents could impart one lesson of history, it would likely be that when people anywhere stand up and fight for freedom and justice, the United States, and American power, must stand with them.