When Will Truth Prevail?

            The Trump haters are out in full force again and are blaming President Donald Trump for the invasion of Russia into Ukraine. The ironic fact of the matter is that Russia went into Crimea during the Obama administration and invaded Ukraine during the Biden administration but made no such moves during the four years that Trump was President of the United States.

            David Harsanyi also finds this fact ironic. After listing several headlines blaming Trump for the invasion, he wrote that similar comments from so-called experts can be found across social media. He suggested that Trump’s “most passionate antagonists must be slightly curious” about why Putin did not make any moves during the Trump administration. 

What better time could there have been for an invasion or annexation? Why now and not then? Then again, the notion that President Joe Biden has shown firmness or deftness on foreign policy is at odds with not only recent events – most notably the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan – but also 50 years of his history.

            Harsanyi then proceeded to give example after example of how “Biden has been relentlessly wrong” in his foreign policy.

… In 2009, Biden went to Munich and delivered the Obama’s administration’s first major foreign policy speech, arguing that it was “time to press the reset button” after eight years of purported American antagonism toward Russia.

It was Biden who then spearheaded the effort to reward Moscow by giving Russia access to the World Trade Organization….

Biden loves to take credit for Obama-era foreign policies. Well, it was the Obama administration that also spent years trying to kill the Magnitsky Act, which listed corrupt Russian officials and barred them from American financial markets, before bipartisan pressure compelled them to flip-flop.

In his book “Red Notice,” Bill Browder, the driving force behind the act, wrote that “ever since Barack Obama had become president, the main policy of the U.S. government toward Russia had been one of appeasement.”

Even before Obama was caught on a hot mic telling Putin puppet Medvedev that he would have more “flexibility” on missile defense after the 2012 presidential election, he had already canceled long-promised missile defense systems to our allies in Poland and the Czech Republic.

It was the Trump administration that approved the sale of Patriot missile system to Poland. For that matter, it was Trump who, finally, approved the sale of defensive lethal weapons to Ukraine.

            As you may remember, Democrats mocked Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012 when he said that “Russia was our top geopolitical threat.” It was Biden who went on the Sunday shows to depict “the Putin kleptocracy as a burgeoning ally and partner.” “Though ‘we have disagreements with Russia,’ Biden noted, they were ‘working closely with us’ on a slew of issues. ‘This is not 1956,’ he scoffed, a few years before Putin’s special forces dropped into Crimea.” Harsanyi was not finished with his examples.

Obama also allowed Russia to operate with impunity in Syria, almost surely to protect the prospects of the Iran nuclear deal. Trump, unencumbered by the need to kowtow to the Iranians, killed a few hundred Russian mercenaries in Syria.

            Biden bragged during the 2020 presidential election that Putin’s “days of tyranny and trying to intimidate the United States and those in Eastern Europe are over.” According to Harsanyi, Biden has “done little to uphold his promise of deterring Russian expansion” and continued to give more examples of Biden’s blunders.

In his first year in office, the president who promised to stop “rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions” killed the Keystone pipeline, which would have left us less susceptible to the vagaries of the international energy market.

Biden also strengthened Putin’s hand by waiving Trump-era sanctions on a company building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany. Last year, Biden sent Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the Arctic Council for another shot at a “reset,” in which, as Bloomberg explained it, “Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin can reinvigorate U.S.-Russia relations that have been in a deep freeze for years.

            With all Trump’s faults – and he has plenty, his foreign policy of “peace through strength” was far more successful in keeping America safe and strong than Biden’s policy of appeasement. As the facts listed above illustrate, this appeasement policy “has been a 15-year project.” Putin is no dummy, and he obviously recognized that “this is the time to strike.” The real problem is that Biden’s policies – foreign and domestic – are digging America into a hole that is getting deeper and deeper as time goes along.