Obama Rewrites the Cold War
The President has a duty to stand up to the lies of our
enemies.
There are two different versions of the story of the end of the Cold War: the
Russian version, and the truth. President Barack Obama endorsed the Russian
version in Moscow last week.
Speaking to a group of students, our president explained it this way: "The
American and Soviet armies were still massed in Europe, trained and ready to
fight. The ideological trenches of the last century were roughly in place.
Competition in everything from astrophysics to athletics was treated as a
zero-sum game. If one person won, then the other person had to lose. And then
within a few short years, the world as it was ceased to be. Make no mistake:
This change did not come from any one nation. The Cold War reached a conclusion
because of the actions of many nations over many years, and because the people
of Russia and Eastern Europe stood up and decided that its end would be
peaceful."
The truth, of course, is that the Soviets ran a brutal, authoritarian regime.
The KGB killed their opponents or dragged them off to the Gulag. There was no
free press, no freedom of speech, no freedom of worship, no freedom of any kind.
The basis of the Cold War was not "competition in astrophysics and athletics."
It was a global battle between tyranny and freedom. The Soviet "sphere of
influence" was delineated by walls and barbed wire and tanks and secret police
to prevent people from escaping. America was an unmatched force for good in the
world during the Cold War. The Soviets were not. The Cold War ended not because
the Soviets decided it should but because they were no match for the forces of
freedom and the commitment of free nations to defend liberty and defeat
Communism.
It is irresponsible for an American president to go to Moscow and tell a room
full of young Russians less than the truth about how the Cold War ended. One
wonders whether this was just an attempt to push "reset" -- or maybe to curry
favor. Perhaps, most concerning of all, Mr. Obama believes what he said.
Mr. Obama's method for pushing reset around the world is becoming clearer
with each foreign trip. He proclaims moral equivalence between the U.S. and our
adversaries, he readily accepts a false historical narrative, and he refuses to
stand up against anti-American lies.
The approach was evident in his speech in Moscow and in his speech in Cairo
last month. In Cairo, he asserted there was some sort of equivalence between
American support for the 1953 coup in Iran and the evil that the Iranian mullahs
have done in the world since 1979. On an earlier trip to Mexico City, the
president listened to an extended anti-American screed by Nicaraguan President
Daniel Ortega and then let the lies stand by responding only with, "I'm grateful
that President Ortega did not blame me for the things that occurred when I was 3
months old."
Asked at a NATO meeting in France in April whether he believed in American
exceptionalism, the president said, "I believe in American Exceptionalism just
as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks
believe in Greek exceptionalism." In other words, not so much.
The Obama administration does seem to believe in another kind of
exceptionalism -- Obama exceptionalism. "We have the best brand on Earth: the
Obama brand," one Obama handler has said. What they don't seem to realize is
that once you're president, your brand is America, and the American people
expect you to defend us against lies, not embrace or ignore them. We also expect
you to know your history.
Mr. Obama has become fond of saying, as he did in Russia again last week,
that American nuclear disarmament will encourage the North Koreans and the
Iranians to give up their nuclear ambitions. Does he really believe that the
North Koreans and the Iranians are simply waiting for America to cut funds for
missile defense and reduce our strategic nuclear stockpile before they halt
their weapons programs?
The White House ought to take a lesson from President Harry Truman. In April,
1950, Truman signed National Security Council report 68 (NSC-68). One of the
foundational documents of America's Cold War strategy, NSC-68 explains the
danger of disarming America in the hope of appeasing our enemies. "No people in
history," it reads, "have preserved their freedom who thought that by not being
strong enough to protect themselves they might prove inoffensive to their
enemies."
Perhaps Mr. Obama thinks he is making America inoffensive to our enemies. In
reality, he is emboldening them and weakening us. America can be disarmed
literally -- by cutting our weapons systems and our defensive capabilities -- as
Mr. Obama has agreed to do. We can also be disarmed morally by a president who
spreads false narratives about our history or who accepts, even if by his
silence, our enemies' lies about us.
Ms. Cheney served as deputy assistant secretary of state and
principal deputy assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs from
2002-2004 and 2005-2006.
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