V-Day Eve: When Parallel Lines Come Together

BG Bruce McClintock and Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov who took part in the historical space linkage "Soyuz - Apollo" shake hands at the recent unveiling ceremony of the "Elbe Memorial" in Moscow

In Moscow the preparations for the May 9th Victory Day parade began already in the middle of the final week of April.  Heavy equipment including mobile ICBM carriers and the latest battle tanks, as well as troop formations carry on the long tradition established in Soviet times of demonstrating the nation’s military might on this day for televised dissemination across the vast expanse of Eurasia.

Meanwhile another Victory Day parade that began just one year ago but is likely to become a still more enduring tradition, the so-called March of the Immortal Regiment in which ordinary citizens carry photographs of their own family heroes from WWII:  fathers, grandfathers, mothers and grandmothers who fought on the front or worked at defense positions behind lines. These processions, which are held in towns across Russia tap into a nationwide wellspring of emotion and pay tribute to the fact that practically every family in the country lost members to the WWII war effort.

This extraordinary sense of loss from war is something which sets Russian consciousness apart from American one and at times makes it difficult to recall that we were allies in that epochal war. The forty years of Cold War alienation between us is another factor that dims what we once achieved together. For these reasons,   President Vladimir Putin’s evocation of our WWII alliance when he spoke before the United Nations General Assembly meeting in September 2015 and called upon the United States to link arms with Russia and head up a multinational effort to defeat the Islamic State and vanquish terrorism fell on deaf ears in this country.

However, statesmanship and common sense dictate that we seek ways to engage with one another in permanent rather than episodic manner, and that we deal in a spirit of equality and mutual respect. Regrettably, at this point Donald Trump is the only presidential candidate who has the guts to say that perhaps it is not only Russia’s or Putin’s fault that the U.S. – Russia relations are now in the worst shape since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

Trump tells us that ever since the handover of power from Ronald Reagan "our foreign policy began to make less and less sense.

Logic was replaced with foolishness and arrogance, which ended in one foreign policy disaster after another."  The results of Clinton-Bush-Obama policies are there for all to see: lives lost, treasure spent and chaos spreading across large swathes of the Middle East and south-east Europe. The consequence is that we and our allies are much less secure today than we were twenty-five years ago.

Bill Clinton’s dubious decision to expand NATO into Eastern Europe was a tragic foreign policy mistake. At a stroke we squandered the unique and short lived window of opportunity to integrate Russia with the West. Nineteen U.S. Senators, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe General John Shalikashvili, all opposed NATO expansion. The legendary diplomat George Kennan called NATO's move to the East a "strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions." New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called it a road to some future nuclear war.

George W. Bush followed in Clinton’s fatal steps by continuing NATO expansion and re-casting it within a democracy promotion crusade that his neocon advisers and his Vice President so warmly recommended to him. These same people who advocated the invasion of Iraq which not only lead to misery and devastation in the Middle East but ultimately gave rise to the Islamic State.

The Obama administration yielded new disasters in Libya, Syria and Yemen. Moreover, it took charge of regime change in Ukraine and brought us to the dangerous ongoing confrontation with Russia.

As we celebrate the days of our joint victory in WWII, it is also the time for reflection and for calmly analyzing what went wrong and what must be done in the future.  

As we can see these grave mistakes have been made by both of our mainstream political parties in power over that period of time and, of course, Donald Trump has no proprietary rights over the foreign policy known as "Realism.”

Therefore, it would be a good thing if the other candidates gave it a test drive as well, because it is the only approach to international affairs that can save us from needless confrontation and risk of nuclear war, which is where we find ourselves today.

russia-insider.com