One of the most striking changes in American politics in the past decade has been the slide from peaceful coexistence with Russia to outright antagonism of the world’s second-largest nuclear military power.
What’s even more surprising is that the antagonism is being carried out by Baby Boomers who lived through the Cold War and reaped the benefits of the fall of the Soviet Union. These are people who experienced the costs of hostility with Russia and experienced the benefits of peace with Russia. They should know better.
While traveling to Australia recently, Baby Boomer extraordinaire and 2008 Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain described Russian President Vladimir Putin as a bigger threat to world peace than the Islamic terrorist organization ISIS.
The amount of chutzpah it takes to make that allegation is staggering.
Let’s look at the facts.
ISIS, alternately known as the Islamic State (IS), the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), rose out of a 1999 group loyal to Al-Qaeda. It took part in the insurgency against U.S. forces during Operation Iraqi Freedom as Al-Qaeda in Iraq. It continued to operate lethally against Westerners despite losing several leaders in military actions. It spawned the “moderate rebels” jihadist Al-Nusra Front that Syrian Christians and Syrian President Bashar Assad have courageously fought during the ongoing Syrian Civil War.
Most importantly, ISIS captured a huge chunk of Iraq in 2014, including the city of Mosul, which Iraqi forces (with assistance from American advisors) had been working to recapture for months. ISIS was so successful that the U.S. felt compelled to militarily reengage in Iraq after withdrawing all troops at the close of 2011, for fear that all of Iraq would fall into the hands of the overtly jihadist, Islamist group known for beheading opponents, crucifying Christians, and selling captured girls as sex slaves.
ISIS lacks the sort of ground, naval, or aviation hardware needed to wage direct assaults on neighboring countries, so its danger has been in its treatment of subject peoples and its ability to fight or overthrow weak Arab governments through popular support, such as in Iraq, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia. Wherever ISIS has gained power and control, it has put that power into practice to the fullest of its capacity — perhaps foolishly so, as Al-Qaeda did a decade before in Iraq — and established a reputation for ruthlessness.
As for Vladimir Putin, he controls thousands of nuclear warheads and could obliterate every major city in the world. He governs one-sixth of the Earth’s land mass and huge amounts of the world’s oil, natural gas, precious metals, and other natural resources. He controls ground, naval and air forces that are second only to the United States in strategic firepower.
He has helped bring his country back from financial and moral ruin in the 1990s to its rightful status as one of the great powers of the Earth. In so doing, he has endured Western aggression through NATO expansion across Eastern Europe — an expansion that curiously took place in the absence of any threat of Russian expansion during that period of time. He has withstood the temptation to overtly get involved in the Ukrainian civil war next door to his country, despite the great pro- and anti-Russian sentiment motivating that war. More importantly for pro-white Christians, Putin has revived one of the historically great Christian nations of the world, stood up to Jewish-led globalism, stood up to sodomy, and taken a leading military role against Islamists in Syria.
So whereas ISIS has ruthlessly exploited its power wherever it possesses it, Putin has not even scratched the surface of what he could do if he wished to do harm. He has demonstrated patience and shrewdness to advance the interests of his nation without being overly provocative of other world powers, even those hostile to him like the United States has been since the Obama years.
McCain’s allegations are nothing but “the Maverick,” the controlled opposition gentleman from Arizona, regurgitating talking points handed to him by his chums in the liberal press. McCain is literally one of those few people to whom we should look for guidance. It’s wonderfully simple. What he does, we should do the opposite of. His gal pal, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, is similarly useful in that respect.
Why all this anti-Russian rhetoric from the old fogeys in the Senate? Could it be that their pals in the press and their paymasters on Wall Street have a bone to pick with the Russian nation? Could it be that Putin and his countrymen are an obstacle in their way towards queer world domination? As an observer of world events, it was notable that just as gay power came to the forefront of American politics and Russian nationalism reasserted itself in the form of traditional Orthodox Christianity, U.S.-Russian relations soured. As the two world powers have continued to move down their chosen trajectories regarding homosexuality, they have moved further and further apart and more openly hostile towards each other.
Conversely, ISIS is arguably the result of direct or indirect American backing. Some, like the Iranian government, believe the U.S. directly and intentionally set up ISIS to serve Israel’s interests in the region. Others say American allies in the region blundered their way into creating ISIS. The less conspiratorially-minded could easily argue that U.S. intervention in Iraq created the conditions for ISIS to thrive. In either case, McCain’s support for the war in Iraq and stalwart support for Israel make his downgrading of ISIS as a threat a curious (((coincidence))).
Maybe the old Navy fighter pilot is simply playing the part of Gen. Jack D. Ripper from Stanley Kubrick’s cynical wartime masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Every suicidal war needs one convinced belligerent to bully the less convinced over the edge of sanity into bloodshed. Sadly, even if McCain isn’t that man, there will always be others to take his place once he finally fades into obscurity.
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