Another Never-Trump Fifth Columnist Giving aid and comfort to a party assaulting our Constitution and freedoms. by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/another-never-trump-fifth-columnist/
Another Trump election, another shameful display of so-called Republican moral preening about Donald Trump being “unfit” for office, a “threat to democracy,” and an “abuser of our allies.” This time it’s William S. Cohen in the Wall Street Journal, an erstwhile Congressman, Senator, and Secretary of Defense between 1973 and 2001.
His tissue of Democrat campaign clichés and smears accompanies a preposterous panegyric to Kamala Harris’s make-believe foreign policy prowess, despite nearly four years of Biden’s and her abject failures abroad. Once again, a Potemkin conservative is carrying water for a party that has moved dangerously leftward as it continues the progressives’ long march to dismantle our Constitution, and with it our unalienable rights and political freedom.
Cohen’s second sentence makes clear his foreign-policy ideology: “Vice President Kamala Harris is an internationalist who believes in the rule of law and in a rules-based system that strives for global order and stability.” In other words, a proselyte of the “rules-based international order” that privileges “diplomatic engagement,” multinational institutions, and international law over a realist policy predicated on conflicting global national interests.
As such, Cohen extols Harris’s “commitment to help Ukraine defend its freedom and independence from Vladimir Putin’s criminal onslaught,” a New World Order project par excellence. That is, she supports a foreign policy that privileges the globalist elite technocrats and their interests over our national sovereignty, and our own citizens’ security and interests. Worse yet, Cohen can’t tell us what specific strategy Harris has for resolving this bloody and expensive war.
As for Harris’s loyalty to the “rule of law,” how does that square with Joe Biden’s usurping Congress’s Article One power to make the laws, and instead giving it to unelected and unaccountable federal agency clerks? Or his failure to fulfill his obligation “to take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”?
He certainly didn’t do that with his border policies, nor is there any evidence that Harris has disagreed with Biden and her party’s aim to create an open border and, to paraphrase Brecht’s sardonic advice, “dissolve” the American “people” and welcome in “another.” Or how about Biden’s blowing off the Supreme Court ruling that his forgiveness of $400 billion in student loans was unconstitutional? Did Harris stand up for the “rule of law” then?
But Cohen’s theme is foreign policy and the “rules-based international order” that even as we speak is failing––in Ukraine, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific––to provide “global stability.” Nato, of course, is a major part of that order, and hence globalist make-believe “citizens of the world” who despise national sovereignty and are “a steady patriot of the world alone, the friend of every country but his own,” as British PM George Canning said. Harris, Cohen assures us, “believes in securing alliances with nations that share America’s ideals and interests as we deal with competitors or adversaries.”
Really? How has that worked out for the past year as Israel, one of our allies that “shares our ideals and interests,” has been bullied and threatened, and had materiel intermittently embargoed by Biden’s foreign policy team––all of which Cohen calls “unqualified support”–– even as Israel battles for its life against a genocidal gang of savage murderers and their patrons in Iran, which, by the way, is with impunity currently supplying Russia materiel for its assault on Ukraine.
A more dangerous blunder is the Biden-Harris foreign policy allowing––and subsidizing with billions of dollars––the Mullahs to grow closer and closer to producing nuclear weapons to use against Israel, and for leverage against the “Great Satan,” their name for the leader of the infidels’ “rules-based international order.” Meanwhile, Israel is the only Western power that is actively defending that order, while the E.U. buys Russian and Iranian oil, and Biden sends even more billions to Iran and its genocidal proxies.
Does Cohen know whether or not Vice President Harris supports these appeasing policies? Or the shameful skedaddle from Afghanistan that cost billions of dollars in weapons, and 13 U.S. soldiers murdered by an ISIS terrorist? Then there’s Ukraine, which Cohen talks a lot about the importance of defending, while he excoriates Trump for wondering, as do many American taxpayers, just how and when this expensive intervention will end. But for Cohen, Trump’s “approach is rooted in isolationism, xenophobia and white nationalism under the banner of ‘America first,’ with fascist historical overtones.” Lining up three shop-worn, question-begging epithets bespeaks cheap propaganda, not a coherent argument.
Trump’s legitimate question, however, about how it all ends may be answered sooner than we think. As the Wall Street Journal’s Walter Russel Mead recently pointed out, “Despite draconian sanctions, a hobbled economy, a corrupt state, and poorly trained officers and troops, Mr. Putin’s forces are driving Ukraine’s army back step by step while Russian air attacks cripple Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.”
Now all the Nato Nations’ earlier bravado and bluster, or Cohen’s pat on the head for Harris’ “commitment to help Ukraine defend its freedom and independence” from Putin, are being exposed as Falstaffian valor or wishful thinking. The Nato Nations, Mead reports, now want “an off-ramp from Mr. Putin. A compromise peace in which Ukraine surrenders territory to Russia but gains NATO and European Union membership would, they hope in Washington and Berlin, be acceptable to Kyiv and bring a not-too-humiliating end to a costly and dangerous war.”
But as Mead continues, “Mr. Putin, unfortunately, isn’t in the business of offering easy off-ramps.” And, one could add, the Nato Nations do not have the political will or adequate troops and materiel to compel Putin’s compliance. Predicating Harris’ foreign policy chops on lip-service to the “rule-based international order’s” continued shaky support for Ukraine, without a viable strategy for ending the conflict, is as feckless as the Biden-Harris administration’s abandonment of Afghanistan and despicable treatment of Israel.
Having no empirical evidence to support his claim of Harris’s superior fitness to be Commander-in-Chief, then, Cohen has only ad hominem slurs comprising stale insults and lies about Trump. One of the stalest of these is Trump’s alleged dismissal of Nato: “Mr. Trump has called into question the value of NATO, promising not to defend any NATO member that fails to pay its ‘dues’ by spending 2% of gross domestic product on defense. He has hinted that he might pull the U.S. out of NATO and let European members fend for themselves.”
Once again, Trump Derangement Syndrome prevents commentators from recognizing Trump’s trademark hyperbole and tactical bluster that signal his seriousness to our enemies and allies. Does Cohen really believe that any president can “pull the U.S. out NATO” without significant pushback from the other two branches of government? And did Cohen miss the success of Trump’s earlier tough talk in concentrating the Nato Nations’ minds, many of whom have increased their defense spending? Even Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s Secretary General, credited Trump for “showing leadership on defense spending.”
Like many Never-Trumpers who make a fetish out of Nato, Cohen writes as though American complaints about freeloading Nato Nations are some novel bad manners? Nato was in its infancy when General Eisenhower stressed the limits of the treaty. As Farah Stockman of the New York Times wrote recently, “Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, NATO’s first supreme allied commander Europe [sic], felt strongly that his mission was to get Europeans ‘back on their military feet’ — not for American troops to become the permanent bodyguard for Brussels and Berlin. ‘If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States,”’ he wrote of NATO in 1951, ‘then this whole project will have failed.’”
Twenty years later, Montana Democratic Senator Mike Mansfield wrote a column calling for the “Europeanization” of Nato in order to reduce the costs of American troops stationed in Europe. And more recently, even European heart-throb and uber-globalist Barack Obama in 2016 complained about Nato “free riders.”
Thanks to Trump’s prodding, extra defense spending increased by billions of dollars. But without Trump’s pressure, Nato Nations are still lagging, with only 10 of 32 meeting the 2% of GDP requirement. And all those except the U.S. and the United Kingdom are Eastern European nations. Shamefully, Germany, the 4th largest economy in the world, at 2.1% barely scrapes by the low-bar 2% requirement. Does Cohen think it’s just a coincidence that during Trump’s first term, not only did some Nato Nations increased defense spending, but Iran lowered its aggression profile, Russia didn’t invade Ukraine, and our troops were in Afghanistan keeping things calm until we could execute an orderly withdrawal predicated on strength rather than a political stunt?
This argument for Kamala Harris’ foreign policy record––which means her boss Joe Biden’s record of appeasement, Potemkin diplomacy, “new world order” happy talk, and the erosion of our deterrent power––is facially preposterous. It reminds us that the Republican political elite’s hatred of Donald Trump for eight years has been predicated on the snobbery of credentialed insiders who dismiss and attack someone who ignores and mocks their political guild’s protocols, received wisdom, and class-bound “norms.”
As such, for eight years they have “objectively,” in Orwell’s sense, been fifth columnists, giving aid and comfort to a party that has degenerated into leftist inspired assaults on the Constitution and our freedoms. As Aristotle said about tyranny, no truly free citizen should endure such policies no matter how many political guildsmen shill for the Dems.
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