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Bill Straub: Paul right to urge caution, but wrong to ignore the growing menace of Russian imperialism


What say we hop aboard Mr. Peabody’s Wayback machine and take a quick jaunt to March 15, 2017, where we find Sen. John McCain giving a speech on the floor of the upper chamber taking aim at our old pal from Bowling Green, Sen. Rand Paul.

Paul, as is his wont, had just exited the Senate chamber after blocking a vote on a resolution that would ease Montenegro’s entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a legislative maneuver that McCain and others believed would earn the Kentucky lawmaker the eternal gratitude of Russia President Vladimir Putin who, like Rep. Thomas Massie, R-SomewhereorotherLewisCounty, and, to a certain extent, former President Donald J. Trump, would like to see NATO dry up and blow away.

McCain, the renowned war hero and 2008 Republican presidential candidate, made it clear he didn’t consider Paul’s tactics in the best interests of the United States, asserting that anyone who objected to the treaty would be “carrying out the desires and ambitions of Vladimir Putin, and I do not say that lightly.”

“The only conclusion you can draw when he walks away is he has no argument to be made,” McCain said of Paul, a fellow Republican. “He has no justification for his objection to having a small nation be part of NATO that is under assault from the Russians. So, I repeat again: The senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin.”

The NKyTribune’s Washington columnist Bill Straub served 11 years as the Frankfort Bureau chief for The Kentucky Post. He also is the former White House/political correspondent for Scripps Howard News Service. A member of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, he currently resides in Silver Spring, Maryland, and writes frequently about the federal government and politics. Email him at williamgstraub@gmail.com

Remember that phrase, “working for Vladimir Putin,” as we bid adieu to 2015 and return to April 26, 2022, away from the Senate floor but in a hearing room where Randal Howard Paul is once again, as McCain noted five years ago, “carrying out the desires and ambitions of Vladimir Putin.”

This time the targeted nation is Ukraine, the long-time focus of Putin’s imperialist desires, a country that has nobly battled a Russian military that invaded without provocation in February. Putin’s aggression has thus far produced decidedly mixed results, but it has left sickening carnage in its wake, along with an abhorrent commitment to war crimes.

Paul wants nothing to do with this mess, the greatest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War, and remains unmoved by atrocities perpetrated by the invaders, which include killing children and their bodies dumped in mass graves.

It’s all part of Russia’s crusade to resuscitate its crumbled empire, an aspiration that obviously should be of concern to the U.S. and its allies despite Paul’s lackadaisical attitude. The man who has earned the sobriquet Russia Rand made his thoughts clear in an op-ed that appeared in the Courier Journal of Louisville on Jan. 26, maintaining that Ukraine should be neither fish nor fowl, prohibited from joining NATO so it can serve as something of a bridge between two distrustful factions – the U.S. and Russia – imagining Kyiv as “a meeting ground for East and West.”

“From our perspective, Ukraine should not and cannot be our problem to solve,” Paul wrote. “It is not our place to defend them in a struggle with their longtime adversary, Russia. There is no national security interest for the United States.”

Of course, Paul’s house of cards came tumbling down a month later, on Feb. 24, when Russia invaded his proposed “meeting ground,” even though Ukraine has never joined NATO.

In a back-and-forth with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken during a meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week, Paul allowed as how “there is no justification for Putin’s war on Ukraine.” But he then proceeded to rationalize Russia’s aggression by once again raising the NATO specter and criticizing the Biden administration for “beating the drums” on Ukraine’s behalf, hinting that the mess lies at the president’s doorstep, rather than with Putin and his invading army.

Paul continues to raise the NATO-Ukraine non-relationship as the boogeyman in this horrendous scenario, passing on responsibility for the tragedy to the U.S. and its allies, to Putin’s delight, no doubt. But it’s becoming increasingly obvious that NATO is a pretext, something of a strawman, for the Kremlin to knock down.

The real reason for Putin’s belligerence, it appears, is his belief that Ukraine is and has always been a part of the Russia empire, that it is not deserving of sovereign nationhood and that the 44 million Ukrainians need to return to the welcoming embrace of Mother Russia.

Putin, in a long and interesting article published in July 2021, proclaimed that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people – a single whole.”

“In essence, Ukraine’s ruling circles decided to justify their country’s independence through the  denial of its past, however, except for border issues,” Putin wrote. “They began to mythologize and  rewrite history, edit out everything that united us, and refer to the period when Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as an occupation.”

Jacob Lassin, a postdoctoral research scholar in Russian and East European Studies at Arizona State University, and Emily Channell-Justice, director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at Harvard, have combined to write an article stating flatly that “Putin has just proved that his aggression toward Ukraine was never really about NATO.”

Citing a recent Putin speech, the pair wrote, “In his view, Ukraine’s independence is an anomaly – it’s a state that should not exist,” the pair wrote. “Putin sees his military moves as a way of correcting this divergence. Largely absent from his discussion was his earlier emphatic grievance that an eventual spread of NATO to Ukraine threatens Russia’s security.”

Yet Paul clings to the canard that Putin’s opposition stems from his fear of facing a NATO nation on its border, even though it is not, and never has been, a member.

Regardless, Blinken responded to Paul, insisting “it is the fundamental right” of Ukraine and other countries “to decide their own future and their own destiny,” not to react to the whims of Vladimir Putin. He also took the opportunity to note that Putin has a tendency to avoid invading nations that belong to NATO.

“If you look at the countries Russia has attacked over the last years – Georgia, leaving forces in Transnistria and Moldova and repeatedly the Ukraine – these are countries that are not part of NATO. It has not attacked NATO countries,” Blinken said.

Paul, in that weird way of his, responded by seeming to offer another justification for Russia’s actions, asserting that “you could also argue the countries they attacked were part of Russia…or part of the Soviet Union.”

The claim is historically accurate but fails to deal with the notion that Ukraine has existed as an independent nation since the fall of the Soviet empire in 1991 and that the argument opens the door to the Mexican military invading Texas and California to reclaim its former territory.

Blinken wasn’t buying, suggesting that Paul’s comments raised questions about Ukraine’s right to autonomy while hinting that all Russia was trying to achieve was to reclaim traditional possessions.

“…that does not give Russia the right to attack,” he said.

Paul, it should be noted, raises a legitimate point if he’s simply saying America needs to be careful — more careful — in selecting the world conflicts it chooses to enter – Vietnam certainly proved that – and the use of ground troops should be avoided at all costs.

Fair enough.

But he’s ignoring the growing menace of Russian imperialism and its threat to the world order, especially in Europe. The U.S. has every right to choose sides here and Paul should pass on the empty rationalizations to the Russians themselves.


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