In the style of George McGovern, leftist Democrats are panting to give Vladimir Putin what he really wants.
By suggesting that a “minor incursion” into Ukraine would be acceptable, Drew Allen notes, it looks like Joe Biden is colluding with Vladimir Putin. Biden also has a record of collusion on the matter of nuclear weapons, a story that goes back to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
After World War II, Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union occupied approximately half of Europe and set up oppressive communist regimes. In 1953, following the death of Stalin, the Soviets crushed a worker revolt in East Germany and went on to invade Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Under the Brezhnev Doctrine, captive nations were not allowed to escape Soviet rule.
The Soviets deployed massive conventional forces in Europe and maintained a huge nuclear arsenal. The prospect of mutually assured destruction (MAD) held off the prospect of a first strike by either side. That changed under President Ronald Reagan.
He proposed a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) a high-tech system that could intercept incoming Soviet missiles. Democrats derided SDI as “Star Wars” and Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) colluded with Soviet boss Yuri Andropov in an unsuccessful attempt to defeat Reagan. By 1991 the USSR collapsed, and that troubled the composite character David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.
As Paul Kengor noted in The Communist, Obama’s beloved Frank Marshall Davis—the African American “Frank” in Dreams from My Father—spent most of his life defending the all-white dictatorship of the Soviet Union. So the composite character tended to be uncritical of communist regimes. In 2008 he gained election with a promise to fundamentally transform the United States of America.
In 2009, his first year in office, Obama scrapped a missile defense deal for U.S. allies Poland and the Czech Republic. This was a direct benefit to Russia, still hostile to the United States, and with its massive nuclear arsenal still in place. For Russia, American missile defense was a big problem.
In 2012, President Obama told Russian President Dmitri Medvedev that “missile defense” could “be solved, but it’s important for him [Putin] to give me space.” After his election, the U.S. president said, “I will have more flexibility.” Medvedev responded, “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”