2016 March 31^st

Yesterday came a column from Pat Buchanan who used some 70 year old advice from General Eisenhower to bolster his isolationist argument. Eisenhower was speaking of NATO when he said, “If in ten years, all American troops stationed in Europe have not been returned to the United States then this project will have failed.” NATO did not intervene in several instances of Soviet aggression against the rise of democratic movements in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland. A nuclear war was possibly averted by their forbearance.

The Soviet Union is no more but Russia still lives under a dictator, an iron fisted ex KGB agent bent on expanding Russian influence. He has been effective because this expansion has come in communities that are largely ethnic Russian and Russian speaking. Most are enthusiastic about rejoining the Russian strongman. His continuing expansionist moves, however, will be limited by Russia’s disastrous economic problems. Those will continue as long as oil is cheap.

But then there is a 76 year old history lesson: In 1940 another dictator was annexing countries with populations ethnically congruent with his own. There was the Sudetenland, there was Austria and there were others and no one cried foul…and then there was Poland and that was the trigger for Buchanan’s “The Unnecessary War.” Buchanan knows history but his politics keep him from understanding it.