What does the kooky libertarian see in the authoritarian Putin regime?
Senator Rand Paul has been making the rounds in recent days touting deeper U.S. engagement with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It’s often the case when Senator Paul talks about foreign policy his pronouncements are a curious admixture of odd conspiracy theories, pacifist banalities, and ahistorical analogies—all delivered with the confident condescension of someone who doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about.
So it is with Paul’s lonely effort to provide intellectual backing for Donald Trump’s instinctive desire to make nice with the increasingly provocative regime run by the anti-American former KGB agent. Examples of Paul’s foolishness are legion but the most revealing came in an interview that the senator conducted on August 16, 2018, with The Liberty Report, an internet television show hosted by his father, libertarian gadfly and former congressman Ron Paul.
Senator Paul has lately made a cause of conciliation by concession—seeking to reverse sanctions on Russian lawmakers, blocking proposed sanctions on Russian oil interests, and more broadly, preventing punitive measures on Putin’s Russia in favor of dialogue and conversation. These efforts build on his past work downplaying Putin’s aggression and attacking those who highlight it.
In late February 2014, with Russian troops on “high alert” and amassed on the border with Ukraine, Paul spoke out not against the Russian strongman who’d put them there, but against conservatives who warned about Putin’s expansionism and the possibility of an imminent invasion. “Some on our side are so stuck in the Cold War era that they want to tweak Russia all the time and I don’t think that is a good idea,” he said. For good measure, he echoed Russian propaganda messaging at the time, that “Ukraine has a long history of being, you know, either part of the Soviet Union or within that sphere—common language, etcetera, so I don’t think it behooves us to tell the Ukraine what to do.”
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If logic isn’t Senator Paul’s strength, neither is history. In arguing for leniency on Putin’s Russia, Paul invoked Ronald Reagan’s nuclear talks with Mikhail Gorbachev, whom he met during his recent visit. Trump needs to buck the remnants of Cold War orthodoxy if he’s to have any hope of forging better relations with Russia, Paul argues. This means, first, rejecting the kind of punitive measures favored by the hawks in both political parties. And, second, it means ignoring the kinds of criticism that Ronald Reagan got for his meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev. To make his point, Paul turns to his favorite villain: the neocons.
“For Reagan and Gorbachev to come together, Reagan had to defy some neoconservative criticism, the Bill Kristols and a whole, you know, ah, group of the neoconservatives who criticized Reagan for talking to Gorbachev. Reagan had to rise above that, rise out of the orthodoxy of the Cold War to meet with Gorbachev.”
Set aside the rather significant fact that no one was more responsible for the “orthodoxy of the Cold War” than Ronald Reagan. Ignore the fact that the Cold War “orthodoxy” Paul rejects—the kind of confrontational rhetoric Reagan preferred and the aggressive anti-Communist policies that defined his foreign policy—gave the United States precisely those advantages that allowed diplomacy to succeed. And focus instead on Bill Kristol.
Bill Kristol wasn’t leading criticism of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy in the 1980s. He was working in Reagan’s administration.
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Excellent piece by @stephenfhayes, with a killer ending. I understand the sympathy that nationalists, populists, and authoritarian-minded people have for Vladimir Putin. But Libertarians for Putin is just weird. It's like Vegetarians for Lamb Chops. https://t.co/VZ3RehNEOS
— Jay Nordlinger (@jaynordlinger) August 23, 2018
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