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Why It's Hard To Take Democrats Seriously on Russia

The Democrat's lack of self-awareness is to their own record regarding Russia. This helps explain why conservatives have so much trouble taking 
liberal outrage about Russia seriously: Most of the people lecturing them for being "Putin's pawns" spent the better part of the past eight years 
blindly supporting a Democratic president, Barack Obama, whose default mode with Moscow was fecklessness.

Democrats are exasperated that Republicans don't share their outrage over the ever-widening scandal surrounding Donald Trump and Russia. The 
president's personal solicitousness toward Vladimir Putin, the alacrity of his son in welcoming potential assistance from Russians during the 2016 
campaign, and mounting questions as to whether Trump associates colluded with Russia as part of its influence operation against Hillary Clinton are 
leading Democrats to speak of impeachment and even treason.

As a longtime Russia hawk who has spent most of the past decade covering Kremlin influence operations across the West, I share their exasperation. 
Over the past year, I have authored pieces with headlines like "How Putin plays Trump like a piano," "How Trump got his party to love Russia," and, 
most recently in this space, "How the GOP became the party of Putin." As I see it, conservatives" nonchalance about Russia's attempt to disrupt and 
discredit our democracy ranks as one of the most appalling developments in recent American political history.

But as much as Democrats may be correct in their diagnosis of Republican debasement, they are wholly lacking in self-awareness as to their own record 
regarding Russia. This helps explain why conservatives have so much trouble taking liberal outrage about Russia seriously: Most of the people 
lecturing them for being "Putin's pawns" spent the better part of the past eight years blindly supporting a Democratic president, Barack Obama, whose 
default mode with Moscow was fecklessness. To Republicans, these latter-day Democratic Cold Warriors sound like partisan hysterics, a perception 
that's not entirely wrong.

Consider the latest installment of the unfolding Trump-Russia saga: Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting last summer with a Russian lawyer promising dirt on 
Clinton. Before inexplicably publicizing his own email correspondence, which revealed him eager to accept information that would allegedly 
"incriminate" his father's opponent, Trump Jr. claimed the confab concerned nothing more salacious than the issue of "adoption." Democrats have 
rightly pointed out that this was a ruse: When the Russian government or its agents talk about international adoption, they're really talking about 
the Magnitsky Act, a 2012 measure sanctioning Russian human rights abusers named after a Russian lawyer tortured to death after exposing a massive 
tax fraud scheme perpetrated by government officials. The law's passage so infuriated Putin that he capriciously and cruelly retaliated by banning 
American adoption of Russian orphans. Five years after its enactment, the law continues to rankle Russia's president. According to Trump himself, it 
was the ostensibly innocuous issue of "adoption" that Putin raised with him during a previously undisclosed dinner conversation at the G-20 summit in 
Hamburg earlier this month.

Yet for all the newfound righteous indignation in defense of the Magnitsky Act being expressed by former Obama officials and supporters, it wasn't 
long ago that they tried to prevent its passage, fearing the measure would hamper their precious "reset" with Moscow. In 2012, as part of this 
effort, the Obama administration lobbied for repeal of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, a Cold War-era law tying enhanced trade relations with Russia to 
its human rights record. Some voices on Capitol Hill proposed replacing Jackson-Vanik with Magnitsky, a move the administration vociferously opposed. 
Shortly after his appointment as ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul (today one of the most widely cited critics on the subject of Trump and Russia) 
publicly stated that the Magnitsky Act would be "redundant" and that the administration specifically disagreed with its naming and shaming Russian 
human rights abusers as well as its imposition of financial sanctions. McFaul even invoked the beleaguered Russian opposition, which he said agreed 
with the administration's position.

This was a mischaracterization of Russian civil society, the most prominent leaders of which supported repeal of Jackson-Vanik only on the express 
condition it be superseded by the Magnitsky Act. "Allowing  to disappear with nothing in its place ... turns it into little more than a gift to Mr. 
Putin," Russian dissidents Garry Kasparov and Boris Nemtsov wrote for the Wall Street Journal days after McFaul's remarks. (Nemtsov, one of Putin's 
loudest and most visible critics, was assassinated in 2015 just a few hundred meters from the Kremlin walls). Anti-corruption activist Alexei 
Navalny, meanwhile, wrote that while he supported repealing Jackson-Vanik, "no doubt the majority of Russian citizens will be happy to see the U.S. 
Senate deny the most abusive and corrupt Russian officials the right of entry and participation in financial transactions in the U.S., which is the 
essence of the Magnitsky Bill."

Nevertheless, the Obama administration not only persisted in opposing Magnitsky, but continued to claim that it had the support of the Russian 
opposition in this endeavor. "Leaders of Russia's political opposition," then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in an op-ed for The Wall 
Street Journal, "have called on the U.S. to terminate Jackson-Vanik, despite their concerns about human rights and the Magnitsky case." Despite 
administration protestations, Congress passed the Magnitsky Act and Obama reluctantly signed it into law. Reflecting on the legislative battle two 
years later, Bill Browder, the London-based investor for whom Magnitsky worked and the driving force behind the bill, told Foreign Policy, "The 
administration, starting with Hillary Clinton and then John Kerry, did everything they could do to stop the Magnitsky Act."

Today's liberal Russia hawks would have us believe that they've always been clear-sighted about Kremlin perfidy and mischief. They're displaying 
amnesia not just over a single law but the entire foreign policy record of the Obama administration. From the reset, which it announced in early 2009 
just months after Russia invaded Georgia, to its removal of missile defense systems in the Czech Republic and Poland later that year, to its ignoring 
Russia's violations of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (while simultaneously negotiating New START) and its ceding the ground in 
Syria to Russian military intervention, the Obama administration's Russia policy was one, protracted, eight-year-long concession to Moscow. 
Throughout his two terms in office, Obama played down the threat Russia posed to America's allies, interests and values, and ridiculed those who 
warned otherwise. "The traditional divisions between nations of the south and the north make no sense in an interconnected world nor do alignments of 
nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War," Obama lectured the United Nations General Assembly in 2009, a more florid and verbose way 
of making the exact same criticism of supposed NATO obsolescence that liberals would later excoriate Trump for bluntly declaring.

When it abandoned missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic that same year-announcing the decision on the anniversary of the 
Soviet Union's invasion of Poland, no less-the Obama administration insisted that the move wasn't about kowtowing to Moscow but rather more robustly 
preparing for the looming Iranian threat. Notwithstanding the merits of that argument, perception matters in foreign policy, and the perception in 
Central and Eastern Europe was that America was abandoning its friends in order to satiate an adversary. That characterizes the feelings of many 
American allies during the Obama years, whether Israelis and Sunni Arabs upset about a perceived tilt to Iran, or Japanese concerned about 
unwillingness to confront a revisionist China. Liberals are absolutely right to criticize the Trump administration for its alienation of allies. But 
they seem to have forgotten the record of the man who served as president for the eight years prior.

Three years later, in the midst of what he thought was a private conversation about arms control with then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, Obama 
was famously caught on an open microphone promising that he would have "more flexibility" (that is, be able to make even more concessions to Moscow) 
after the presidential election that fall. (Imagine the uproar if Trump had a similar hot mic moment with Putin.) Later that year, after Mitt Romney 
suggested Russia was America's "No. 1 geopolitical foe," Obama ridiculed his Republican challenger. "The 1980s are now calling and they want their 
foreign policy back," Obama retorted, in a line that has come back to haunt Democrats. An entire procession of Democratic politicians, foreign policy 
hands and sympathetic journalists followed Obama's lead and repeated the critique. According to soon-to-be secretary of state John Kerry, Romney's 
warning about Russia was a "preposterous notion." His predecessor Madeleine Albright said Romney possessed "little understanding of what is actually 
going on in the 21stcentury."

This wasn't merely a debate talking point. Downplaying both the nature and degree of the Russian menace constituted a major component of mainstream 
liberal foreign policy doctrine until about a year ago-that is, when it became clear that Russia was intervening in the American presidential race 
against a Democrat. It provided justification for Obama's humiliating acceptance in 2013 of Russia's cynical offer to help remove Syrian chemical 
weapons after he failed to endorse his own "red line" against their deployment. Not only did that deal fail to ensure the complete removal of Bashar 
Assad's stockpiles (as evidenced by the regime's repeated use of such weapons long after they were supposedly eliminated), it essentially opened the 
door to Russian military intervention two years later.


 

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Trump WINS!

Donald Trump is the 47th U.S. president, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris.

Republican Donald Trump was elected President of the United States in the 2024 election, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris. 

Trump, 78, will begin his second term early next year.

Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the U.S. President on Monday, January 20, 2025, on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. 

A Second Trump Administration