General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: What is the "hard left"? [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)And there are things we do now that we really don't have to do...like continue to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia, a regime that is morally indistinguishable from Saddam's Iraq in terms of the way it treats its own people.
As to Russia, I didn't say we had to get rid of ALL nukes in Europe...but did we essentially have to keep them all and to act as though, even under Yeltsin, nothing had changed?
The connection between our hardline policies on Russia in the Nineties was that those policies led to Yeltsin appointing Putin as his successor. DO you really think there's any chance Yeltsin would have done that if we'd begun to pull back, if we'd accepted at that point that Russia was simply another country rather than simply being a weakened enemy?
Why couldn't we say "The Soviet Union is gone...let's just let work together now in an equal global partnership for prosperity and freedom"? Why did our message to Russia have to be "we won-you lost-you're nothing now and we won't ever let you forget it"?
Those choices put Putin into the situation he is in now, and in so doing, they created much of the current world situation.
The big stick was the cause.