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Buchanan: Well, this is quite a turning point in American political history. I had been a supporter of the Cold War and every American intervention and war in it, except for one. That was when I urged Reagan not to send the troops into Lebanon because I didn’t see that as in our vital interest or part of this global confrontation with the Soviet empire.
But, when the Soviet empire collapsed and the Warsaw Pact dissolved in Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltics, and the Red Army was pulled out of Germany and went home, and then the Russian Federation broke up into 15 countries, I said, "Look, the war is over." The war that defined my entire life, from the time I went into journalism and politics in the early ’60s, JFK’s time.
I said, "That’s over. If the Russians are … if they’re really going home, we ought to go home and let the Europeans undertake their own defense and let them have NATO. The American troops can come out. We can make some kind of arrangements with them but basically leave the defense of it up to Europe. Europe will be up to Europe. A Russia that is free and independent, and has broken away from the Soviet empire, and given up communism is not an enemy of the United States. We ought to try to make it a friend."
During the ’90s and up until the first decade … into the first decade of the new century, one of the main things I did, and George Kennan was right there as well, was urge the United States not to bring Eastern Europe or any of those Warsaw Pact countries and certainly not the Baltic states … much as we appreciated them being free, to not bring them into NATO, to not put our own military alliance on Russia’s front porch because the reaction is predictable.
They’re going to see they’ve been treated as a recidivist or someone who is going to be a real problem. You took advantage of our victory in the Cold War or the triumph of the western anti-communism and the Capitalist West. Then, you’re imposing our system or imposing our NATO alliance right there in Eastern Europe is going to bring real trouble. It has proceeded to do so and I think we produced Putin. More than that, I think Putin’s hostility to the West is not altogether unjustified given what we did when they basically laid down their weaponry and went home.
That was the break. I can recall some meetings and gatherings of folks where when I started talking about, "Let’s go home from … let’s give NATO to the Europeans and bring the troops home," they were stunned. Many of them were neocons and they said, "We’ve got to keep troops in there and we need them for the Middle East. We need them for this, we need them for that." Under Clinton, and Bush I, and even Obama, the whole interventionist foreign policy that has led to the tremendous disasters we’ve got now, that was adopted and embraced. Take a look at the wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and Yemen.
What are they … six or seven trillion dollars, 7,000 dead, scores of thousands of wounded and injured, a total distraction from what we ought to be doing. Where are the fruits of this intervention and this Intervention Uber Alles, if you will? They’re really nonexistent, but this is where … it was the break point. I was very much a Cold Warrior. The Cold War was what took me into journalism, and then into politics, and then into the White House, and then to writing a column. But, I was a Cold Warrior because I felt it was my country and civilization that were under pressure, and under threat and under peril.
As I say, when the communist empire collapsed, and communism died, and the Soviet empire disintegrated, and the Soviet Union broke apart into 15 independent countries, that war was over. We should have come home. Now, we find ourselves drifting toward another conflict in the Middle East with Iran, which, I trust, the president can keep us out of.
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Full transcript:
https://original.antiwar.com/buchanan/2019/07/30/the-antiwar-right-and-the-new-cold-war/
