I grew up in the Cold War when we spent considerable time and treasure-and sometimes shed blood-ferreting out Soviet spies and other Kremlin “assets” in our midst.
All the while, Republican Cold Warriors slimed the Democrats as “soft on communism.”
Never in my 75 years did I dream that a GOP-majority Senate would one day vote to put a potential Russian asset in a president’s cabinet. It happened on Wednesday when 52 of 53 Republicans voted to confirm Tulsi Gabbard as Donald Trump’s pick for director of National Intelligence.
Russian TV once praised Gabbard as “our girlfriend.”
Back in the day, Mitch McConnell did his share of Cold War red baiting. But Kentucky’s senior senator joined the chamber’s 47 Democrats in turning thumbs down on Gabbard.
“Even before Gabbard left the Democratic Party, ingratiated herself with Donald Trump, and secured his nomination to become director of National Intelligence, she was known as a prolific peddler of Russian propaganda,” wrote Richard Hall and Andrew Feinberg in the U.S. online edition of the British Independent newspaper.
“In almost every foreign conflict in which Russia had a hand, Gabbard backed Moscow and railed against the US. Her past promotion of Kremlin propaganda has provoked significant opposition on both sides of the aisle to her nomination.”
The “significant opposition” turned out to be a single vote shy of unanimously one-sided. Republicans who “expressed reservations” before the vote, joined the Senate’s top Trump sycophants in marching smartly to the beat of the president’s drum. In the GOP, feckless fealty to Trump is what counts the most.
No doubt the champagne corks are ricocheting off Kremlin walls. It’s easy to imagine Putin poking more fun at his bleach blonde only-his-hairdresser-knows-for-sure orangey puppet.
Gabbard and Pete Hegseth make two more marionettes. On Wednesday at NATO HQ in Brussels, Trump’s defense secretary said “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective.” In other words, Trump is way cool with Putin keeping whatever turf he’s stolen at gunpoint from his sovereign neighbor.
Hegseth also said Trump didn’t view “NATO membership for Kyiv as part of the war triggered by Russia’s invasion,” wrote Andrew Gray and Lili Bayer of Reuters. Putin vehemently opposes Ukraine joining NATO.
Also on Wednesday, Trump announced that he and Putin “had a lengthy and highly productive phone call” and “agreed to work together ‘very closely’ on a diplomatic resolution to the war in Ukraine and to visit one another’s countries,” Eli Stokols wrote in Politico.
On Thursday, Trump said Ukraine would have a seat at the negotiating table. But having a seat doesn’t necessarily mean having input.
Stokols added that, on Truth Social, Trump “spoke of initiating negotiations in bilateral terms between the U.S. and Russia, treating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a lesser party.”
The parallels are strong – and disturbing
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain supposedly said.
A little over 87 years ago, two big countries gave a chunk of a small country to another big country to stave off war. War came anyway.
In 1938, Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler — to whom Trump is sometimes likened in more than a few ways — was keen on expanding his German Reich. After annexing his native Austria, he demanded the Sudetenland, the mostly German-speaking region of Czechoslovakia.
The Czechs, figuring on British and French military support, prepared to fight to keep what was theirs.
Alarmed that World War II was imminent, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Premier Eduard Daladier hurried to Hitler in Munich to cut a deal. The Czechs weren’t invited.
Hitler promised, Honest Nazi, that if he could have the Sudetenland, he’d take no other territory in Europe. Chamberlain and Daladier caved.
After Chamberlain went home, Hitler reportedly ridiculed him, supposedly exulting: “If ever that silly old man comes interfering here again with his umbrella, I’ll kick him downstairs and jump on his stomach in front of photographers.”
Hitler took the rest of Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939, invaded Poland on Sept. 1, and started World War II.
Why does Trump do this?
As woefully misguided as appeasing Hitler turned out to be, the Anglo-French policy was based on a noble desire to avoid another world war.
Why Trump appeases Putin is a mystery. But you can bet it’s ignoble.
“Eight years after the FBI first began probing Trump’s Russia connections in mid-2016, national security officials are still puzzled by the former U.S. president’s unrelenting deference to Putin, as well as the enduring mystery of Trump’s decades-old relationship with Russian and former Soviet investors and financiers, some of whom helped save his failing businesses years ago,” Michael Hirsh wrote in Foreign Policy online last October.
“So we’re asking the same questions we were asking eight years ago. Is Trump some sort of Manchurian candidate — or in this case, perhaps a Muscovian candidate — controlled by or beholden to Moscow in ways that we don’t know and likely will never know? Or is Trump’s persistently fawning treatment of Putin mainly just a manifestation of his often-expressed admiration of autocrats around the world, including Chinese President Xi Jinping and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban?”
So here we are. Putin’s wish is Trump’s command. Trump’s wish is Gabbard and Hegseth’s command.
The Czechs called the Munich agreement a sellout. It looks like a Ukrainian sellout is in the offing.
Republican charges that the Democrats were “soft on communism” were bogus. But Trump and his pliant party almost daily provide more proof that the GOP really is “soft on Russia.”
--30--
