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| Chris Murphy |
In respect of diplomacy with nations like Iran, which regards the United States as “The Great Satan,” diplomatic blather can never be more than an incitement to retaliatory action, and Iran, during the past few decades, has shown itself to be an active enemy of Western interests. The same may be said of Putin The Terrible and Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping of China, all enemies of the United States. If diplomacy really is war by other means, Putin, the Imams in Iran, and China’s inscrutable Great Leader, mean to win the diplomatic war by other means.
The Iranian “revolution” opened on November 4, 1979, when
Iranian students, during the last days of the diplomatically inclined administration
of President Jimmy Carter, seized the American Embassy and detained as hostages
more than 50 Americans, ranging from the Chargé d’Affaires to the most junior
members of the staff.
The soft diplomacy of Democrat Presidents such as Carter,
Barack Obama, and now progressive insurgent Joe Biden seeks friendly faces in
every enemy’s camp and supposes, fatally, that it may soften ideological spines
through diplomacy. Unable to learn from history, diplomatists foolishly pretend
to themselves that resolute enemies may be won over by sweet talk or, in
Obama’s case, sweet talk seasoned with loads of cash delivered to Iran at
midnight in planes stuffed with money hidden from the U.S. Congress and the
editorial boards of the New York Times and the Washington Post. Iran used the
cash provided by Obama to secure a paper deal in which the mullahs promised to
curtail their nuclear weapon production. Having received the cash, they used it
to pay for the services of their terrorist hirelings and reaffirmed their sworn
oaths to defeat the Great Satan and its handmaiden, Israel.
Former President Ronald Reagan artfully pursued diplomacy by other means. Most Americans are little aware that Reagan made a side deal with Saudi Arabia to cripple the Russian economy, over reliant, then as now, on oil and gas, its most exportable products other than weapons. Saudi Arabian princes agreed to sharply reduce the price of their oil, sending the Russian economy into a dizzying tailspin.
Putin, then a low level KGB agent under sometimes sober Russian
President Boris Yeltsin, witnessed the dismantling of the Soviet Union – to be
sure, not solely owing to Reagan’s realpolitik – and he never forgot the
indignity, or the lesson, or his enemy and principal oil competitor, Saudi
Arabia. Diplomatically, Iran, which has Middle East hegemonic ambitions, is a
client state of Putin’s Russia.
Recent history is telling. Putin’s annexation of Crimea, a
part of Ukraine, provided Russia, historically a landlocked nation, with an
important port and military presence on the Black Sea. When a disfigured Ukraine
howled in protest, diplomats in both the United States and Europe pawed the
ground and huffed, but did little else to dissuade Putin to abandon his
aggressive military measures.
Pursuing an erratic and reckless diplomacy, Biden has given
the nod to Putin’s Nord
Stream 2 gas pipeline running from Russia to Germany below the Baltic
Sea, at the same time bringing to a screeching halt completion of the nearly
completed Keystone Pipeline running from Canada to refineries in Illinois,
Texas and Oklahoma that, when completed, would have reduced the cost of energy
in the United States. Republicans quickly and correctly accused Biden of
placating German Chancellor Angela Merkel while giving Putin a major geopolitical
victory. Biden’s generous and highly unmerited gift to Putin occurred while
Russian hackers shutdown U.S. energy supply throughout the northeast by means
of a ransomware attack on another major U.S. pipeline.
This is not realpolitik. It is not even rational diplomatic
policy. It is political and ideological misadventure that cannot distinguish properly between
the permanent friends and permanent enemies of the United States.
A Bismarckian realpolitiker would have tapped Putin on the
shoulder and reminded the Russian post-modern Czar of the stark choice that
lies before him.
Putin, no fool, would be foolish indeed if he did not
realize that the real threat to Russia, teetering since Lenin between a European
and an Asiatic future, comes not from the United States but rather from China, a
massive landmass lying at the foot of Russia. Unlike China, Russia contains within
itself Whitmanesque multitudes, including thus far placated Muslims. China has
solved its own Muslim problem through the adoption of Stalinist methods
unavailable to Putin, which include mass cultural extermination camps.
Instead of realpolitikers, the Democrat U.S. Congress will
now send U.S.
Senator Chris Murphy, an amateur Metternich, to Ukraine to snuff out
corruption and make straight the path of Baltic diplomacy for a clueless Biden administration
that has become a laughing stock among nations that do not regard borders as little
more than permeable demarcation lines on a map.
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