Who’s got Moscow’s Back?
August 20 | Posted by mrossol | Liberal Press, Middle East, Obama, Russia, The LeftYes, let’s not forget to tell the whole story…
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WSJ 8/18/2016
By Sohrab Ahmari
Donald Trump’s fondness for Vladimir Putin emerged during the GOP primary, when he refused to condemn the Russian dictator for murdering dissident journalists. Since then the New Yorker hasn’t backed away from positions on NATO, Ukraine and Syria that have no doubt gone down well in Moscow.
Then again, so have President Obama’s policies over the past eight years.
The Trump campaign’s Putinist rhetoric has the liberal press corps alarmed, and rightly so. “Vladimir Putin has a plan for destroying the West—and that plan looks a lot like Donald Trump,” Franklin Foer wrote in Slate. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg called Mr. Trump a “de facto agent” of Moscow. Vox’s Zack Beauchamp said Trump “made World War III—the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in nuclear holocaust—plausible.”
Moscow’s hegemonic ambitions in Eastern Europe and the Middle East and Mr. Putin’s efforts to promote illiberal, far-right politics in the West are among America’s top security challenges. So it’s good to see the journalistic left waking up. Too bad the same crowd was often asleep over the past eight years as Mr. Obama allowed that threat to metastasize to its current scale.
It wasn’t Mr. Trump, after all, who in 2014 announced deep cuts to the U.S. strategic arsenal, disabling 56 submarine- based nuclear-launch tubes, converting 30 B-52 bombers to conventional use, and removing 50 missiles from underground silos—all well ahead of the 2018 deadline set by the New Start Treaty with Moscow and without any reassurance that Mr. Putin would reciprocate. That was Mr. Obama.
Nor was it the New York developer who refused to supply the democratic government in Kiev with defensive weapons after Russian regulars and Kremlin-backed thugs illegally annexed Crimea and carved up territory in eastern Ukraine. The White House still refuses to sell Kiev the weapons it needs to defend itself, even as Mr. Putin threatens more aggression. The betrayal of Ukraine wasn’t Mr. Trump’s doing.
Nor, finally, was it Mr. Trump whose inaction in Syria created an opportunity for Moscow to outmaneuver Washington and downgrade U.S. prestige in the Middle East. The Syrian civil war has proved a humanitarian catastrophe, resulting in some half a million dead and millions displaced. It has flooded Europe with refugees, destabilized Turkey and added the phrase “barrel bomb” to the lexicon of human depravity.
But the war has also been a strategic boon to Moscow and its chief regional client, Iran. Mr. Putin and the mullahs have deepened their military ties, as most recently evidenced by Russia’s use of an Iranian air base to target Syrian-rebel positions on Tuesday. Mr. Putin’s goal is to edge out Washington as the principal outside power in the Middle East and he is succeeding. America’s long-term retreat from the region wasn’t conceived in Trump Tower.
If polls prove right, Donald Trump is headed for defeat in November—in part because of his apparent affinity for the Russian dictator. But that doesn’t excuse the historical amnesia and bad faith in the press over U.S.-Russian relations in the age of Barack Obama.
Mr. Ahmari is a Journal editorial writer based in London.
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