Glenn Greenwald
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Democrats Now Demonize the Same Russia Policies that Obama Long Championed
Glenn Greenwald
March 6 2017, 8:37 a.m.
One of the most bizarre aspects of the all-consuming Russia frenzy is the
Democrats’ fixation on changes to the RNC platform concerning U.S. arming of
Ukraine. The controversy began in July when the Washington Post reported that
“the Trump campaign worked behind the scenes last week to make sure the new
Republican platform won’t call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian
and rebel forces.”
Ever since then, Democrats have used this language change as evidence that
Trump and his key advisers have sinister connections to Russians and corruptly
do their bidding at the expense of American interests. Democratic Senator Ben
Cardin, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spoke for
many in his party when he lambasted the RNC change in a July letter to the New
York Times, castigating it as “dangerous thinking” that shows Trump is
controlled, or at least manipulated, by the Kremlin. Democrats resurrected this
line of attack this weekend when Trump advisers acknowledged that campaign
officials were behind the platform change.
This attempt to equate Trump’s opposition to arming Ukraine with some sort of
treasonous allegiance to Putin masks a rather critical fact: namely, that the
refusal to arm Ukraine with lethal weapons was one of Barack Obama’s most
steadfastly held policies. The original Post article that reported the RNC
platform change noted this explicitly:
Of course, Trump is not the only politician to oppose sending lethal weapons to
Ukraine. President Obama decided not to authorize it, despite recommendations
to do so from his top Europe officials in the State Department and the military.
Early media reports about this controversy from outlets such as NPR also noted
the irony at the heart of this debate: namely, that arming Ukraine was the
long-time desire of hawks in the GOP such as John McCain, Lindsey Graham and
Marco Rubio, but the Obama White House categorically resisted those pressures:
Republicans in Congress have approved providing arms to the Ukrainian
government but the White House has resisted, saying that it would only
encourage more bloodshed.
It’s a rare Obama administration policy that the Trump campaign seems to agree
with.
Indeed, the GOP ultimately joined with the hawkish wing of the Democratic Party
to demand that Obama provide Ukraine with lethal weapons to fight Russia, but
Obama steadfastly refused. As the New York Times reported in March, 2015,
“President Obama is coming under increasing pressure from both parties and more
officials inside his own government to send arms to the country. But he remains
unconvinced that they would help.” When Obama kept refusing, leaders of the two
parties threatened to enact legislation forcing Obama to arm Ukraine.
The general Russia approach that Democrats now routinely depict as treasonous –
avoiding confrontation with and even accommodating Russian interests, not just
in Ukraine but also in Syria – was one of the defining traits of Obama’s
foreign policy. This fact shouldn’t be overstated: Obama engaged in provocative
acts such as moves to further expand NATO, non-lethal aid to Ukraine, and
deploying “missile defense” weaponry in Romania. But he rejected most calls to
confront Russia. That is one of the primary reasons the “foreign policy elite”
– which, recall, Obama came into office denouncing and vowing to repudiate –
was so dissatisfied with his presidency.
A new, long article by Politico foreign affairs correspondent Susan Glasser –
on the war being waged against Trump by Washington’s “foreign policy elite” –
makes this point very potently. Say what you will about Politico, but one thing
they are very adept at doing is giving voice to cowardly Washington insiders by
accommodating their cowardice and thus routinely granting them anonymity to
express themselves. As journalistically dubious as it is to shield the world’s
most powerful people with anonymity, this practice sometimes ends up revealing
what careerist denizens of Washington power really think but are too scared to
say. Glasser’s article, which largely consists of conveying the views of
anonymous high-level Obama officials, contains this remarkable passage:
In other words, Democrats are now waging war on, and are depicting as
treasonous, one of Barack Obama’s central and most steadfastly held foreign
policy positions, one that he clung to despite attacks from leading members of
both parties as well as the DC National Security Community. That’s not Noam
Chomsky drawing that comparison; it’s an Obama appointee.
The destructive bipartisan Foreign Policy Community was furious with Obama for
not confronting Russia more, and is now furious with Trump for the same reason
(though they certainly loath and fear Trump for other reasons, including the
threat they believe he poses to U.S. imperial management through a combination
of ineptitude, instability, toxic PR, naked rather than prettified savagery,
and ideology; Glasser writes: “‘Everything I’ve worked for for two decades is
being destroyed,’ a senior Republican told me”).
All of this demonstrates how fundamental a shift has taken place as a result of
the Democrats’ election-related fixation on The Grave Russian Threat. To see
how severe the shift is, just look at this new polling data from CNN this
morning that shows Republicans and Democrats doing a complete reversal on
Russia in the span of eight months:
The Democrats’ obsession with Russia has not just led them to want
investigations into allegations of hacking and (thus far evidence-free)
suspicions of Trump campaign collusion – investigations which everyone should
want. It’s done far more than that: it’s turned them into increasingly maniacal
and militaristic hawks – dangerous ones – when it comes to confronting the only
nation with a larger nuclear stockpile than the U.S., an arsenal accompanied by
a sense of fear, if not outright encirclement, from NATO expansion.
Put another way, establishment Democrats – with a largely political impetus but
now as a matter of conviction – have completely abandoned Obama’s
accommodationist approach to Russia and have fully embraced the belligerent,
hawkish mentality of John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Bill Kristol, the CIA and
Evan McMullin. It should thus come as no surprise that a bill proposed by
supreme warmonger Lindsey Graham to bar Trump from removing sanctions against
Russia has more Democratic co-sponsors than Republican ones.
This is why it’s so notable that Democrats, in the name of “resistance,” have
aligned with neocons, CIA operatives and former Bush officials: not because
coalitions should be avoided with the ideologically impure, but because it
reveals much about the political and policy mindset they’ve adopted in the name
of stopping Trump. They’re not “resisting” Trump from the left or with populist
appeals – by, for instance, devoting themselves to protection of Wall Street
and environmental regulations under attack, or supporting the revocation of
jobs-killing free trade agreements, or demanding that Yemini civilians not be
massacred.
Instead, they’re attacking him on the grounds of insufficient nationalism,
militarism, and aggression: equating a desire to avoid confrontation with
Moscow as a form of treason (just like they did when they were the leading Cold
Warriors). This is why they’re finding such common cause with the nation’s most
bloodthirsty militarists – not because it’s an alliance of convenience but
rather one of shared convictions (indeed, long before Trump, neocons were
planning a re-alignment with Democrats under a Clinton presidency). And the
most ironic – and over-looked – aspect of this whole volatile spectacle is how
much Democrats have to repudiate and demonize one of Obama’s core foreign
policy legacies while pretending that they’re not doing that.
