by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher | Washington Examiner
Working with Russia when our interests align is the right course for America. (AP Photo/Lauren Victoria Burke)
In the 20th Century, the United States advanced its national interests by pragmatically cutting deals with regimes regarded as morally reprehensible.
We forged an alliance with Joseph Stalin during World War II. We tilted toward Maoist China to shift the balance of power in our favor during the Cold War. We did this despite Stalin and Mao slaughtering some 100 million of their own citizens. As morally objectionable as the two Communist tyrants were, few Americans questioned the soundness of cooperating with them. After all, our objectives were to defeat Hitler and win the Cold War.
Today, such pragmatic thinking is forgotten. We see this most clearly in the matter of Russia. Today’s Russia is not Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s People’s Republic. But forge a working relationship with Moscow to confront radical Islam and an emerging China? Not permitted by respectable society.
After World War II, American vision and leadership made the post-war Axis Powers our allies. It was a good move. But post-Cold War thinking is bereft of such vision and leadership. Rather than foster improved relations between Japan and Russia to develop the Russian Far East, for example, we cling to an outdated Cold War mindset.
Russia shares our concerns over radical Islam and a Chinese powerhouse casting its shadow over large swaths of largely unpopulated territory in the Russian Far East. We already cooperate with Russia on some matters pertaining to outer space and on nuclear non-proliferation.
Beyond confronting radical Islam and China, Russia could be helpful in dealing with North Korea, clearing orbiting space debris, developing next-generation nuclear technology, and cooperating in the exploitation of Arctic resources. Absent the current levels of vitriol and hostility, we might just be able to resolve our differences over Syria, Iran, Ukraine, and other trouble spots.
Instead, we have driven Russia and China closer together. Their strategic cooperation is unprecedented and growing deeper all the time. I do not know what strategic concepts they teach at our war colleges these days, but a strategy that causes our two main rivals to forge a deep alliance, and drives both farther and farther away from us, does not strike me as smart.
Diplomats, the Democratic Party, academia, and the mainstream media embrace with dogmatic fervor the narrative that President Trump somehow worked with the Russians to fix or at least alter the results of the recent election. Anyone who questions the dogma is shunned as an apostate or ridiculed as a conspiracy theorist.
The problem with this hysteria is that, after more than a year of fevered investigation, there is no publicly available proof of collusion between Trump and Russia. Nevertheless, a negative cycle of action and reaction is roiling our bilateral relations with Moscow, plunging them to their lowest level in decades. This represents a real threat to our national security.
In 1898, the Spanish-American war broke out after a still-unexplained explosion sank the USS Maine in Havana Harbor. Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, and other “yellow journalists” blamed Spain despite a lack of evidence.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 involving the USS Maddox, which served as a justification for the use of force in Vietnam, turned out to rest on inaccurate reports. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 enjoyed a consensus, now vanished, that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Could it be the Trump-Russia narrative is also spurious, perhaps intended to mask an as-yet-unrevealed agenda?
If the Trump-Russia narrative acquired the status of holy writ for so many in the U.S. establishment, perhaps it is because internal documents of the Democratic National Committee emerged last summer that exposed corruption in Democratic ranks. This included the rigging of Hillary Clinton’s nomination. We cannot exclude the possibility that the DNC invented the Russian bogeyman to allow it to pose as the victim of a crime rather than the perpetrator of one.
As a political strategy, it has worked perfectly well. There is no formal investigation of Hillary Clinton’s collusion with Russian and other ex-Soviet oligarchs, going back years, which enriched her family and its shady foundation to the tune of millions. Instead, the myriad of investigations underway all seem to be looking exclusively at Trump’s business with the Russians.
Elements of the Republican Party do buy into the narrative and hold to it with the same religious zeal as the Democrats. Nevertheless, the Republicans have the advantage of being the descendants of Ronald Reagan, who famously ended the Cold War without firing a shot.
The fortieth president strolled arm-in-arm with Mikhail Gorbachev through Red Square, declaring the “evil empire” over. He inked the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with the USSR, dramatically enhancing European security by removing an entire class of nuclear weapons from the heart of the continent.
Recognizing how unilateral deployment of an Anti-Ballistic Missile system might destabilize the peaceful order, he offered to share our Strategic Defense Initiative with the USSR. He extolled the great Russian patriot Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his call for the moral regeneration of Russia on the basis of that nation’s authentic spiritual traditions.
I knew and worked for Reagan as a speechwriter and a special assistant. I am convinced he would have been a strong proponent of constructive engagement with Russia in today’s geostrategic circumstances. His rich legacy can and should guide the Republican Party now – maybe even today’s Democrats.
Donald Trump is president because he stood up for the interests of working Americans. Elites on the left and the right have condemned his agenda as “nationalist.” I beg to differ. I call it a patriotic agenda that goes to bat for the American people rather than the interests of the globalist elite.
All Americans, regardless of their political views, should consider the Trump-Russia narrative on its merits and ask themselves if this is a legitimate, factually sound issue, or a politically motivated contrivance designed to further the interests of some.
We should be tough on Russia when our interests are in conflict.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats, represents California’s 48th District.
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http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/dana-rohrabacher-the-case-for-working-with-russia/article/2635538