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"Why It's Hard To Take Democrats And Liberals Seriously on Russia" 

 Democrats lack self-awareness as to their own record regarding Russia, 
argues James Kirchick. This helps explain why conservatives have so much 
trouble taking libral 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. This piece originally appeared on 
Politico. You can read Kirchick's related piece-"How the GOP became the party 
of Putin"-here. 

Politico: 

 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 mis-characterization 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 [Jackson-Vanik] 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 21st century." 

 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. 

 Even after Putin annexed Crimea in 2014, the first violent seizure of 
territory on the European continent since World War II, Obama continued to 
understate the severity of the Russian threat. Just a few weeks after the 
annexation was formalized, asked by a reporter if Romney's 2012 statement had 
been proven correct, Obama stubbornly dismissed Russia as "a regional power 
that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors not out of strength but 
out of weakness." Truly. Russia is such a "regional power" that it reached 
across the Atlantic Ocean and intervened in the American presidential 
election, carrying out what Democrats today rightly claim was the most 
successful influence operation in history. "It is the hardest thing about my 
entire time in government to defend, " a senior Obama official, speaking of 
the administration's halfhearted response to Russia's intrusion, told the 
Washington Post. "I feel like we sort of choked." 

 Yet rarely in the course of accusing Trump of being a Kremlin agent have 
liberals-least of all the president they so admire-reflected upon their 
hypocrisy and apologized to Romney, whose prescience about Russia, had he 
been elected in 2012, may very well have dissuaded Putin from doing what he 
did on Obama's watch. In Obama, Putin rightly saw a weak and indecisive 
leader and wagered that applying the sort of tactics Russia uses in its post-
imperial backyard to America's democratic process would be worth the effort. 
The most we've seen in the way of atonement are Clinton's former campaign 
spokesman Brian Fallon admitting on Twitter, "We Dems erred in "12 by 
mocking" Romney, and Obama speech-writer Jon Favreau sheepishly conceding, 
with a chuckle, "we were a little off." If Obama feels any regret, maybe he's 
saving it for the memoir. 

 But even if liberals do eventually show a modicum of humility and 
acknowledge just how catastrophically wrong they were about Romney, this 
would not sufficiently prove their seriousness about Russia. For their 
current criticisms of the Trump administration to carry water, liberals will 
have to do more than simply apologize for regurgitating Obama's insult that 
Republicans are retrograde Cold Warriors. They will have to renounce pretty 
much the entire Obama foreign policy legacy, which both underestimated and 
appeased Russia at every turn. Otherwise, their grave intonations about 
"active measures, " "kompromat" and other Soviet-era phenomena will continue 
sounding opportunistic, and their protestations about Trump being a Russian 
stooge will continue to have the appearance of being motivated solely by 
partisan politics. 

 For now, the newfangled Democratic hawkishness on Russia seems motivated 
almost entirely, if not solely, by anger over the (erroneous) belief that 
Putin cost Clinton the election-not over the Kremlin's aggression toward its 
neighbors, its intervention on behalf of Assad in Syria, its cheating on the 
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force Treaty, or countless other malfeasances. 
Most Democrats were willing to let Russia get away with these things when 
Obama was telling the world that "alignments of nations rooted in the 
cleavages of a long-gone Cold War" are obsolete, or that Russia was a mere 
"regional power" whose involvement in Syria would lead to another 
Afghanistan, or when he was trying to win Russian help for his signal foreign 
policy achievement, the Iran nuclear deal. If the Democrats" newfound 
antagonism toward the Kremlin extended beyond mere partisanship, they would 
have protested most of Obama's foreign policy, which acceded to Russian 
prerogatives at nearly every turn. As the former George W. Bush speech-writer 
Matt Latimer cleverly imagined in these pages, had Trump ran for president 
and won with the assistance of Russia but as a Democrat instead of a 
Republican, it's not difficult to imagine Democrats being just as cynical and 
opportunistic in their dismissal of the Russia scandal as Republicans are 
today. 

 Democrats" lack of introspection about their past policy failures, along 
with their amateurish, newfound zeal for opposing Russia, hurts the wider 
effort to convince the American public that Russian meddling in our democracy 
is a serious issue. The most credible voices in this discussion are those 
genuinely knowledgeable about Russia's grand strategy to disrupt Western 
democracy, of which the Trump case is but one element of a long-running 
global campaign. Not coincidentally, these people have also been consistent 
in their hawkishness across presidential administrations, as willing to 
confront the Obama administration over its failures as they are today 
lambasting Trump. Yet largely because of a media preference for 
sensationalism, these nuanced voices are being drowned out in favor of 
Democratic partisans and internet conspiracy theorists peddling wild 
accusations of 'treason." Most liberals, to put it bluntly, are new to the 
cause, and their obvious overcompensation and shrill rhetoric is degrading 
our civic culture. "We were and are under attack by a hostile foreign power 
and ... we should be debating how many sanctions we should place on Russia or 
whether we should blow up the KGB, GSU [sic], or GRU, " Democratic factotum 
Paul Begala recently blathered on CNN, referring to, successively, the 
Soviet-era intelligence service, a non-existent agency, and Russian military 
intelligence. On Twitter, MSNBC host Joy Reid recently opined, apropos of 
nothing, that "Donald Trump married one American (his second wife) and two 
women from what used to be Soviet Yugoslavia: Ivana-Slovakia, Melania-
Slovenia." 

 Put aside the weird, inquisitorial implication that Trump, solely by virtue 
of his having married two women from the former Eastern bloc, must therefore 
be a Russian mole. Reid's assertion managed to fit three basic errors into a 
single sentence: 1) Ivana Trump was born in the present-day Czech Republic, 
not Slovakia 2) Slovakia, furthermore, was never part of Yugoslavia and 3) 
Yugoslavia, though socialist, was never part of the Soviet Union and famously 
resisted incorporation into the Warsaw Pact. This is what happens when 
partisan Democrats who never expressed an iota of interest in Russia before 
June 2016 try to impersonate Scoop Jackson: They end up sounding like a less 
methodical Joe McCarthy. 

 Taken too far, liberals" Russia obsession could hurt them. Many Democrats 
seem to genuinely believe that Putin is the only reason Clinton isn't 
America's first female president. Seeing Russian meddling as the single or 
most significant explanation for their electoral woes conveniently lets 
Democrats ignore the many other factors-a lousy candidate, an uninspiring and 
unconvincing platform, a left-wing identity politics that alienates many 
Americans, just to name a few-that thwarted what ought to have been an easy 
victory against the most toxic and unqualified individual ever to run for 
president. While the American people certainly need to be better educated 
about the breadth of Kremlin influence operations and the multifarious ways 
Russia threatens the free world, a fixation on Russia to the exclusion of all 
else will not win elections. 

 Hypocrisy is no stranger to politics, of course, and it's never too late for 
people to come around to the realization that Russia poses a danger. But with 
Democrats seriously talking about impeachment or even treason, a reckoning is 
in order. Constantly harping on Trump's strange affinity for Putin and 
suspicious connections to Russia isn't sufficient; the far more substantive 
policy concessions made to Russia by the previous administration did at least 
as much damage to American interests, if not more. Are liberals willing to 
admit the reset was a giant miscalculation from the start? Are they willing 
to support sending arms to Ukraine? To redeploy missile defense systems to 
allies in Eastern Europe? Are they willing to concede that Obama's Syria 
policy was an epic disaster that paved the way for Russia's reemergence as a 
Middle Eastern military power? Are they, in other words, willing to renounce 
the foreign policy legacy of one of their most popular leaders? Because only 
that will demonstrate they're serious about confronting Russia. Anything 
short reeks of partisanship. 

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Trump still winning after WINNING Presidency!

Donald Trump is STILL the 47th U.S. president.

A Second Trump Administration is STILL going!