It was no surprise that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize less than a year after taking office as President of the United States in 2008. After all, he had, as a Senator, already made the world (he claimed) safer by forcing Ukraine to rid itself of its store of conventional weapons. He arranged American funding of approximately $48 million, as part of the Nunn-Lugar Partnership, to destroy thousands of tons of weaponry. It is “peaceful” initiatives such as this, pursued by the “peace-loving” American Left, that define our world today. As Obama said at the time, Ukraine’s continued possession of such conventional weapons might “provoke” Russia. It is such soft-headed thinking that has greatly endangered our modern world.
In 1979, the smiling, pious President Jimmy Carter pursued what he termed a peaceful and harmonious world by giving away America’s Panama Canal to the country of Panama, even though the U.S. owned the property under treaty and had spent a fortune to hack this essential waterway out of dense and unforgiving jungle-covered mountains.
In response to conservative Senator Jesse Helms’ sounding the alarm on China’s ability to potentially seize the canal, Newsweek caricatured Helms as “a world champion redneck” and a “pied piper to the blind” in its March 16, 1981, article, “The Senate’s Mr. Right.”
Today, it is beyond argument that China has made great inroads into the control of the Panama Canal, with ostensibly “commercial” entities controlling much of the real estate on either end of the waterway, alarming Trump’s foreign policy team. So much for this “peaceful” act of President Carter.
With unrest directed against the Shah of Iran, Carter could have intervened with but a few thousand troops to ensure moderate democratic succession and avoid theocracy. How did his “peaceful” restraint help the world today?
And, of course, in the process, the United States appeared emasculated by its failure to rescue the American hostages, which had been taken from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
A brief mention should be made of President Bill Clinton’s role in pushing Ukraine to give up its nuclear arsenal of approximately 1,900 warheads in 1994. The warheads were sent to Russia, on the apparent thinking that non-state terrorist actors like Al Qaeda would not be able to buy them. Seemingly, Clinton’s administration did not consider that the world might be safer if Ukraine was not dispossessed.
The accompanying May 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances for Ukraine, signed by Ukraine, Russia, and the United States, would behoove the United States to come to the aid of Ukraine if it were to be invaded, especially if Russia did so, in violation of its own signed pledge.
In 2009, President Obama immediately canceled the installation of missiles pointed at Russia because, he claimed, to do so would have been “provocative.” Obama then pursued a “Russian Reset” and provided what the Defense Department warned was dual-use technology as part of American support for Skolkovo, Russia’s “Silicon Valley.”
In 2010, Obama pushed Ukraine to surrender its stockpile of 234 kilos of weapons-grade enriched uranium, of course, to be transferred to the peace-loving Vladimir Putin. Obama again offered direct security assurances to Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.
By 2013, Yanukovych had pronounced himself ready to sign an EU Association Agreement (a Nato precursor and trade agreement), weaning the country away from Russian support. However, Yanukovych wanted financial support from the EU, the U.S., and/or the IMF to make up for the lost benefits provided by Russia.
But Obama was too languid to push for financial support of Ukraine, whereupon Yanukovich refused to sign the agreement and, eventually, upon popular protest, fled to Russia. Immediately, Putin invaded and took over the Crimea, in violation of the Budapest Memorandum. Putin also installed ill-disguised Russian “separatist” troops in the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk to take them over by proxy.
When new Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko personally traveled to Washington, D.C. to address a joint session of Congress seeking aid to fight the Russians, he decried the pitiful, non-weaponry aid that Obama was promising to provide: “Blankets and night-vision goggles are important, but one cannot win a war with blankets.”
Suffice it to say, as written elsewhere, the appointment of Vice President Joe Biden as “point man” on Ukraine did far more to promote corruption in Ukraine, which American policy abjured, than to fight it, especially given that two of the most corrupt actors in Ukraine, oligarchs Igor Kolomoisky and Mykola Zlochevsky of Burisma Holdings, were major clients of Hunter Biden. A U.S.-backed anti-corruption agency, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (“NABU”), heavily influenced by the U.S. FBI Director James Comey, cheaply settled the claims against Burisma after Biden had the honest prosecutor fired.
The Trump Administration sought and received Congressional approval for a large package lethal weapon for Ukraine. State Department policy required that Ukraine could not receive such weaponry until it was certified non-corrupt, which it was so certified under President Petro Poroshenko. However, when the new President Volodymyr Zelensky (supported by Igor Kolomoisky) came into office, it was perfectly proper for Trump to require Zelensky to pursue corruption investigations in his country. Trump’s blunt allusion to potential corruption of Joe Biden, inelegant but correct, earned him an impeachment, while insuring that much of American military aid in the future would be embezzled.
Putin refrained from invading Ukraine during the four years of the Trump administration, but after Joe Biden was elected president, he quickly amassed troops along Ukraine’s border in the fall of 2021. Biden publicly announced that he would not take action if there were only a “minor incursion” by Russia and later pronounced that there would be no “boots on the ground” in the event of such an invasion. Putin now had a green light, while the U.S. then spent far more in aid than had Obama in 2013 financially supported the EU Association Agreement.
Back to Iran. Immediately upon acceding to office in 2009, the “Green Revolution” in Iran was going full swing, with a significant portion of the population prepared to take up arms. Both Israel and, reportedly, the CIA, encouraged President Obama to provide arms to destabilize the theocratic regime. Obama not only resisted, but also restrained Israel’s entreaties to allow it to strike nuclear development sites in Iran, requiring no U.S. involvement.
Instead, Obama naively sought to rid Iran of nuclear weaponry through negotiation. After two years of begging, Secretary of State John Kerry, desperate for a deal – any deal – agreed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (“JCPOA”), which essentially gave Iran a sanctions-free pass to develop enriched uranium. As part of this wrongheaded deal, the Obama Administration also flew pallets of cash to the Iranian regime, thereafter to fund proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.
After Biden took office in 2021, his inflationary policies impelled him to turn a blind eye to Iran’s newly developed sanctions-evasion network, tripling its oil exports through a parallel global supply chain with China and other non-Western countries. Biden thereby purposefully allowed Iran to increase funding of terrorist groups who, among other atrocities, attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, murdering approximately 1,200 Israeli citizens and foreign nationals and abducting 251 people.
It does not take a genius to see that Presidents Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden have made our world a more dangerous place in the name of keeping the peace. Luckily for the United States, Ukrainian citizens cherish their freedom and are weakening our enemy, Russia, not withstanding the foolish policies of past U.S. administrations. As we speak, despite hand-wringing from the major media and Democratic politicians, the world is also presently being made safer by our actions against the Iranian theocratic regime. Indeed, the desperation of the regime’s present actions speaks loudly and predicts, to a metaphysical certainty, that the regime would have used this weaponry in the very near future, perhaps in weeks, certainly months.
The eighty days of present hostilities have made our world safer after 47 years of weakness. And thanks to the heroism of Ukrainian patriots, whom the Biden Administration had given up as conquered, the Russian Bear no longer looms as menacingly.
The jury of public opinion now has been presented sufficient evidence to decide which policies make us more secure: those of “peaceful” progressives, or those of “realists” both on the right and left, who believe in peace through strength?
Oh, yes, a corollary question: how astute have our media been for the past 47 years?
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