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Watch Out For The Isolationists
by Dale Brown, 2008

ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED AT TheBigFiveOh.com Blog @ Yahoo.Com, August 26, 2008

As most of my readers know or have guessed, I fashion characters in my novels around real-world personalities. I make many changes in style and appearance so they're not exact copies, avoiding charges of character assassination or pittura infamante.

Some copies are obvious; still, I don't usually discuss or reveal them. But I'm going to admit one now: President Thomas Thorn, the third-party president who first appeared in 2001's Warrior Class and who did not run for re-election at the end of 2004's Plan of Attack, was fashioned from political commentator, long-time presidential adviser, and two-time presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan.

Why Buchanan? Because for these stories I wanted an isolationist president, one who wanted the United States to pull out of any foreign involvements or entanglements so America could concentrate on solving its own problems and making American society greater. I wanted foreign conflicts to swirl around the president instead of being shaped or influenced by him so he would have to react against a potential deadly development.

I had forgotten about this connection until I read Buchanan's columns concerning the Russ0-Georgian war. Buchanan has been mercilessly blasting President Bush, Condoleeza Rice, and John McCain about condemning Russia for the war, and has been running a long list of examples in history where great powers have gone to war over trivial conflicts between nations for which the United States didn't--or shouldn't have had--substantial interest.

Buchanan has been cherry-picking events in history to prove a point: we are lucky Georgia wasn't admitted into NATO, because otherwise U.S. Marines would be fighting the Red Army in the streets of Poti, Georgia right now. He says the United States instigated the Russian reaction by taking advantage of Russian political and economic weakness in the 1990's, admitting too many former Soviet republics and client-states into NATO, and recognizing the independence of Kosovo, a republic of Serbia, a close ally of Russia.

My opinion ofBuchanan now is the same when I designed the character of Thomas Thorn around him in 2000: he's an isolationist. America has no business meddling in places like Eastern Europe because that will antagonize the Russians; we shouldn't be meddling in the Middle East because that will antagonize Iran; we shouldn't be meddling in the Pacific because that will antagonize China.

The United States doesn't get itself into trouble because it meddles in other countries' affairs. We get in trouble when we commit to a plan of action and then abandon it. And the concept that guys like Buchanan want us to abandon is that the United States wants to support and defend democratically-elected representative governments.

There is no question that Russia wants buffer states around its periphery because it has weak and easily-crossed frontiers, and it uses force to absorb those buffer states. But is that Russian mindset of wanting buffer states still valid today?

Russia suffered mightily at the hands of Napoleon, the Nazi war machine, and the Ottoman Empire--but where are the threats against Russia today? The only nation that can threaten Russia's existence today is the United States, and we certainly don't want to take any Russian territory. We want a stable and happy Russia, not an angry and paranoid Russia.

We admitted the Baltic states, Poland, Romania, and the Czech Republic into NATO not to encircle and isolate Russia, but to support new democracies in Eastern Europe so they would be less likely to fall victim to Russian paranoia. We once considered admitting Russia into NATO. Why? To destroy Russia? No, because Communism had been replaced by democracy even in Russia, and the United States and its European allies wanted to help support and grow that fledgling democracy.

But so-called Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin has other plans for Russia. Putin is the de facto dictator of Russia. He is a committed nationalist in the old school who wants to lift Russia back up to superpower status by using his power and the power of the Russian military to crush dissent, crush his rivals, and scare the hell out of any former client-states that displease him.

In so doing, he is scaring guys like Patrick Buchanan too. According to Buchanan, we should let Russia have their way with Georgia because none of the oil that's shipped through there comes to the United States; we should do nothing when Russia shuts off oil and gas deliveries to the Baltic States because those countries are small, insignificant, and they shouldn't have been allowed to join NATO in the first place; we shouldn't place ballistic missile interceptors in Poland or the Czech Republic because they don't work anyway and it might make Russia angry.

If the United States was invading these former Soviet client-states and directly threatening Russia's borders, I'd say maybe Buchanan has a point. True, American ballistic missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, and NATO membership to the Baltics, means U.S. troops will be based there, closer to Russia's borders. But does Russia seriously think we're doing all this in preparation for invading Russia?

If Vladimir Putin wants to go back to the Cold War, the United States should oblige him. Perhaps Russia has more oil money than it did back when the Soviet Union collapsed, and so they can build a few more ships and planes, fly mock cruise missile attacks over Alaska, Guam, and the Black Sea, sail its one aircraft carrier for the first time in years, and feed more troops.

But the Soviet Union didn't collapse because it didn't have money, or even because it couldn't keep up with an American military buildup. It collapsed because its central government, controlled by a few Communist Party ideologues, ignored and repressed its citizens, kept power and wealth for itself, used force to impose its will on weak neighbors, and ran the country into the ground. It collapsed because its political system resisted change. It collapsed because the central government isolated itself from the rest of the world instead of joining the world community.

Patrick Buchanan seems to want the world to allow Russia to dominate and control its "near-abroad" once again for the sake of appeasement. All the Eastern European democracies that rose up in the 1990s should be silent, compliant, and allow Russia troops on their soil once again.

That is NOT what we should allow to happen.

Russia doesn't have a title to any of its neighbors in its "near-abroad." If Ukraine and Georgia want to join NATO and the European Union, they should be allowed to join. If the Baltics, any other nations in the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, or Central Asia friendly to the United States are threatened by Russia, we should respond.

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