Who Started Cold War II?

Who Started Cold War II?
by Patrick J. Buchanan
Tuesday, August 19, 2008

The American people should be eternally grateful to Old Europe for
having spiked the Bush-McCain plan to bring Georgia into NATO.

Had Georgia been in NATO when Mikheil Saakashvili invaded South
Ossetia, we would be eyeball to eyeball with Russia, facing war in
the Caucasus, where Moscow's superiority is as great as U.S.
superiority in the Caribbean during the Cuban missile
crisis.

If the Russia-Georgia war proves nothing else, it is the insanity
of giving erratic hotheads in volatile nations the power to drag
the United States into war.

From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, as Defense Secretary Robert
Gates said, U.S. presidents have sought to avoid shooting wars with
Russia, even when the Bear was at its most beastly.

Truman refused to use force to break Stalin's Berlin blockade. Ike
refused to intervene when the Butcher of Budapest drowned the
Hungarian Revolution in blood. LBJ sat impotent as Leonid
Brezhnev's tanks crushed the Prague Spring. Jimmy Carter's response
to Brezhnev's invasion of Afghanistan was to boycott the Moscow
Olympics. When Brezhnev ordered his Warsaw satraps to crush
Solidarity and shot down a South Korean airliner killing scores of
U.S. citizens, including a congressman, Reagan did -- nothing.

These presidents were not cowards. They simply
would not go to war
when no vital U.S. interest was at risk to justify a war. Yet, had
George W. Bush prevailed and were Georgia in NATO, U.S. Marines
could be fighting Russian troops over whose flag should fly over a
province of 70,000 South Ossetians who prefer Russians to Georgians.

The arrogant folly of the architects of U.S. post-Cold War policy
is today on display. By bringing three ex-Soviet republics into
NATO, we have moved the U.S. red line for war from the Elbe almost
to within artillery range of the old Leningrad.

Should America admit Ukraine into NATO, Yalta, vacation resort of
the czars, will be a NATO port and Sevastopol, traditional home of
the Russian Black Sea Fleet, will become a naval base for the U.S.
Sixth Fleet. This is altogether a bridge too far.

And can we not understand how a Russian patriot like Vladimir Putin
would be incensed by this U.S. encirclement after Russia shed
its
empire and sought our friendship? How would Andy Jackson have
reacted to such crowding by the British Empire?

As of 1991, the oil of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan
belonged to Moscow. Can we not understand why Putin would smolder
as avaricious Yankees built pipelines to siphon the oil and gas of
the Caspian Basin through breakaway Georgia to the West?

For a dozen years, Putin & Co. watched as U.S. agents helped to
dump over regimes in Ukraine and Georgia that were friendly to
Moscow.

If Cold War II is coming, who started it, if not us?

The swift and decisive action of Putin's army in running the
Georgian forces out of South Ossetia in 24 hours after Saakashvili
began his barrage and invasion suggests Putin knew exactly what
Saakashvili was up to and dropped the hammer on him.

What did we know? Did we know Georgia was about to walk into
Putin's trap? Did we not see the
Russians lying in wait north of
the border? Did we give Saakashvili a green light?

Joe Biden ought to be conducting public hearings on who caused this
U.S. humiliation.

The war in Georgia has exposed the dangerous overextension of U.S.
power. There is no way America can fight a war with Russia in the
Caucasus with our army tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor
should we. Hence, it is demented to be offering, as John McCain and
Barack Obama are, NATO membership to Tbilisi.

The United States must decide whether it wants a partner in a
flawed Russia or a second Cold War. For if we want another Cold
War, we are, by cutting Russia out of the oil of the Caspian and
pushing NATO into her face, going about it exactly the right way.

Vladimir Putin is no Stalin. He is a nationalist determined, as
ruler of a proud and powerful country, to assert his nation's
primacy in its own sphere, just as U.S.
presidents from James
Monroe to Bush have done on our side of the Atlantic.

A resurgent Russia is no threat to any vital interests of the
United States. It is a threat to an American Empire that presumes
some God-given right to plant U.S. military power in the backyard
or on the front porch of Mother Russia.

Who rules Abkhazia and South Ossetia is none of our business. And
after this madcap adventure of Saakashvili, why not let the people
of these provinces decide their own future in plebiscites conducted
by the United Nations or the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe?

As for Saakashvili, he's probably toast in Tbilisi after this
stunt. Let the neocons find him an endowed chair at the American
Enterprise Institute.

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