Why It’s Hard to Take Democrats Seriously on Russia
Why It’s Hard to Take Democrats Seriously on Russia
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Democrats [...] are wholly lacking in self-awareness as to their own record regarding Russia. This helps explain why conservatives have so much trouble taking liberal outrage about Russia seriously: Most of the people lecturing them for being “Putin’s pawns” spent the better part of the past eight years blindly supporting a Democratic president, Barack Obama, whose default mode with Moscow was fecklessness. To Republicans, these latter-day Democratic Cold Warriors sound like partisan hysterics, a perception that’s not entirely wrong.
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Yet for all the newfound righteous indignation in defense of the Magnitsky Act being expressed by former Obama officials and supporters, it wasn’t long ago that they tried to prevent its passage [1], fearing the measure would hamper their precious “reset” with Moscow. In 2012, as part of this effort, the Obama administration lobbied [2] for repeal of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, a Cold War-era law tying enhanced trade relations with Russia to its human rights record. Some voices on Capitol Hill proposed replacing Jackson-Vanik with Magnitsky, a move the administration vociferously opposed. Shortly after his appointment as ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul (today one of the most widely cited critics on the subject of Trump and Russia) publicly stated that the Magnitsky Act would be “redundant” and that the administration specifically disagreed with its naming and shaming Russian human rights abusers as well as its imposition of financial sanctions.
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Despite administration protestations, Congress passed the Magnitsky Act and Obama reluctantly signed it into law. Reflecting on the legislative battle two years later, Bill Browder, [...] “The administration, starting with Hillary Clinton and then John Kerry, did everything they could do to stop the Magnitsky Act.”

Today’s liberal Russia hawks would have us believe that they’ve always been clear-sighted about Kremlin perfidy and mischief. They’re displaying amnesia not just over a single law but the entire foreign policy record of the Obama administration. From the reset, which it announced in early 2009 just months after Russia invaded Georgia, to its removal of missile defense systems in the Czech Republic and Poland later that year, to its ignoring Russia’s violations of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (while simultaneously negotiating New START) and its ceding the ground in Syria to Russian military intervention, the Obama administration’s Russia policy was one, protracted, eight-year-long concession to Moscow. Throughout his two terms in office, Obama played down the threat Russia posed to America’s allies, interests and values, and ridiculed those who warned otherwise.
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When it abandoned missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic that same year—announcing the decision on the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Poland,
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Three years later, in the midst of what he thought was a private conversation about arms control with then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, Obama was famously caught on an open microphone promising that he would have “more flexibility” (that is, be able to make even more concessions to Moscow) after the presidential election that fall. [...] Later that year, after Mitt Romney suggested Russia was America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe,” Obama ridiculed his Republican challenger. “The 1980s are now calling and they want their foreign policy back,” Obama retorted, in a line that has come back to haunt Democrats. An entire procession of Democratic politicians, foreign policy hands and sympathetic journalists followed Obama’s lead and repeated the critique. According to soon-to-be secretary of state John Kerry, Romney’s warning about Russia was a “preposterous notion.” His predecessor Madeleine Albright said Romney possessed “little understanding of what is actually going on in the 21st century.”

This wasn’t merely a debate talking point. Downplaying both the nature and degree of the Russian menace constituted a major component of mainstream liberal foreign policy doctrine until about a year ago—that is, when it became clear that Russia was intervening in the American presidential race against a Democrat. [3]

Even after Putin annexed Crimea in 2014, the first violent seizure of territory on the European continent since World War II, Obama continued to understate the severity of the Russian threat. Just a few weeks after the annexation was formalized, asked by a reporter if Romney’s 2012 statement had been proven correct, Obama stubbornly dismissed Russia
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For now, the newfangled Democratic hawkishness on Russia seems motivated almost entirely, if not solely, by anger over the (erroneous) belief that Putin cost Clinton the election—not over the Kremlin’s aggression toward its neighbors, its intervention on behalf of Assad in Syria, its cheating on the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force Treaty, or countless other malfeasances. Most Democrats were willing to let Russia get away with these things when Obama was telling the world that “alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War” are obsolete, or that Russia was a mere “regional power” whose involvement in Syria would lead to another Afghanistan, or when he was trying to win Russian help for his signal foreign policy achievement, the Iran nuclear deal. [..] had Trump ran for president and won with the assistance of Russia but as a Democrat instead of a Republican, [Democrats would be OK with that]
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Are liberals willing to admit the reset was a giant miscalculation from the start? Are they willing to support sending arms to Ukraine? To redeploy missile defense systems to allies in Eastern Europe? Are they willing to concede that Obama’s Syria policy was an epic disaster that paved the way for Russia’s reemergence as a Middle Eastern military power? Are they, in other words, willing to renounce the foreign policy legacy of one of their most popular leaders? Because only that will demonstrate they’re serious about confronting Russia.
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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/24/why-its-hard-to-take-democrats-seriously-on-russia-215415
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/24/why-its-hard-to-take-democrats-seriously-on-russia-215415

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

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