When Putin announced that Russia would no longer sell its oil and natural gas in dollars, there were the normal — its OK type statements from the financial world, and it was viewed by the Western financial cognoscenti as an anomaly.

However, since the Federal Reserve is printing an estimated $600 billion a year to give to bankers and brokers, who then buy U.S. Treasury bills to finance for our over-spending Federal Government with printed dollars — the value of the dollar drops due to the massive over supply.

Then, those countries holding the U.S. dollar as reserve currency start to speak up. They plead with the President and Congress to start balancing the budget and lowering the deficit.

Instead, President Obama and Congress has not decreased the deficit, it has grown four times it was under Bush, to record numbers — $9 Trillion — under President Obama and the Democratic Congress.

And President Obama, by pushing his trillion dollar health care plan is rubbing the world’s face in their concerns about U.S. spending. He simply does not care that the dollar is dropping and that the value of these country’s dollar holdings is also dropping.

Read More →

That long-running leftist delusion about how “We will make the world love us again” sure got old fast, didn’t it? (Never mind that outside of the jet-setting cliques of babbling salon intellectuals, our reputation around the world has always been pretty good - unlike the salon intellectuals, your humble correspondent actually gets out on the ground and meets real people with real ideas. But I digress.)

I don’t know how much you can trust polling inside Russia, but even so… consider this:

What is most surprising to me is that Russians’ attitudes toward the United States have actually worsened during Obama’s first year in office compared with what they were during the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush…

(Emphasis mine.)

After not even a year of this vanity-fueled ineptitude on the international stage, we are weaker at home and less-respected around the world.

I’m having difficulty working it out.  Is it because:

• …we get absolutely nothing out of this?
• …it brazenly goes against previous national security agreements made between the United States and what were, prior to this morning, staunch regional allies?
• …it came out of nowhere, to the point where the ranking Republican Senator on Armed Services is asking why this suddenly appeared?
• …it is fairly clearly a desperate domestic-policy bone thrown to a liberal base currently coming to a boil over the Democrats’ slow-motion collapse on health care?
• …or is it because they announced it on THE SEVENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SOVIET INVASION OF POLAND, YOU DAFT, HISTORICALLY ILLITERATE, IDIOTS?!?

…or should I just embrace the healing power of ‘and?’

Moe Lane

As part of part of Hillsdale
College’s DC-based Kirby Center for the Constitution and Citizenship
“First Principles on First Fridays” lecture series, John Bolton spoke at the Heritage Foundation today.  9/11 is of course a somber anniversary for our country, and a fitting moment to reflect on how how American foreign policy is being shaped in the post-George W. Bush era.

In Ambassador Bolton’s view, it is not a pretty picture.  He graded President Obama’s performance as ”absent.”  As Bolton pointed out in his remarks, the administration is pursuing a course of “Neo-Isolationism,” the point of which appears to be withdrawing American forces and refraining from using American influence around the world because such actions might be objectionable to the global community.  Ambassador Bolton noted that while President Obama has declared he believes in “American exceptionalism ,” the President followed up that assertion by saying he believed in it just as he suspects “that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”  By this logic all countries are exceptional in their own view–which should make everyone feel good–but the problem is that then no country is truly exceptional, including America.  This approach, Bolton surmised, has been the guiding principle that unites the President’s repeated offers to negotiate directly with Iran, enabling of the dog-and-pony show that was former President Clinton’s visit to North Korean, and eagerness to cede power to the International Criminal Court–while presiding over the evisceration of the Defense budget.  Ambassador Bolton was particularly outspoken on the current situation in Honduras, in which the administration is siding with Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega and Fidel Castro and against Honduras’ constitutional process.  He gave that situation “an F.  No question about it.  This is a disgrace.”

After the lecture, Ambassador Bolton graciously granted Redstate an exclusive interview to follow up on the formation (or lack thereof) of foreign policy by President Obama’s national security team, Hugo Chavez’ mischief-making around the globe, and the ramifications of the Obama administration’s policy towards Israel.  Click here to listen to the full podcast.

Today is an anniversary that is being marked rather somberly in places like the Baltic countries.

Seventy years ago today, the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany - Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop - stunned the world by announcing a non-aggression pact between their two (totalitarian) countries.

While there had been a great deal of vituperate invective between the two great socialist powers, the underlying reality was that they had long been de facto allies. During the 1920s and into the 1930s, the Soviet Union provided training facilities for German pilots as Germany tried to secretly rebuild its air force - something that was forbidden to Germany under the terms of the Versailles Treaty. In the meantime, the Soviet Union continued to be a very large supplier of raw materials to Germany’s rebuilding industries. And during the 1930s, Nazi Germany’s nascent “security services” learned a great deal from the Soviet Union’s “security agency”….

So on the surface, the agreement of a simple “non-aggression pact” seemed rather anodyne.

But it was the secret protocols that were the real “content” of the agreement.

We’ll look at those details - and why they are suddenly important again - below the fold.

Read More →

Back during the 1980s, there were many left-right intellectual divides regarding the Soviet Union.

One of the forgotten ones was: How should we regard the “Soviet Union?”

Mushy-leftist types were fond of the notion that the Soviet Union was a relatively normal, basic “nation” - but one that was deservedly paranoid because of the 1941 German invasion (a line of thought conveniently stoked on a regular basis by Radio Moscow). In this view, the Soviet Union was really a cuddly little fuzzball, and if we’d just be gentle and reassuring it would cease and desist from its continual truculence - since if we could get across that we really, really, really had no aggressive intentions, the bear would purr. And, oh yeah, we could help this along by pledging that we would cheerfully recognize the extant possessions as a permanent Soviet “sphere of influence.”

More of us, though, took a different view - one that was more grounded in reality and history.

More below the fold.

Read More →

This hasn’t gotten much mention here - but when I was in Romania earlier in the week it was big, big news:

The troubled Nabucco pipeline project — designed to diversify Europe’s energy supply and loosen Russia’s grip on the continent’s natural gas market — took a major step forward on July 13 with the signing of a transit agreement between Turkey and five European Union countries involved in the undertaking.

The 2,050-mile-long (3,300 kilometer) Nabucco pipeline is designed to bring gas from the Caspian Basin and the Middle East to European markets via Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Austria. The $10-billion pipeline is scheduled to start operating in 2014. Nabucco’s primary objective is to lessen Europe’s overdependence on Russia for gas. Moscow currently supplies approximately 40 percent of Europe’s gas.

But there’s even more good going on, which we’ll discuss below the fold.

Read More →

God, I miss the days of the Bush administration, when we didn’t do things like this.

Referring to the long history of Russia-U.S. trade stretching back more than two centuries, Obama told an audience of business people in Moscow:

“Along the way, you gave us a pretty good deal on Alaska. Thank you.”

Contra Reuters, this was not a “pointed quip” (as Ed Morrissey notes, it only works as one if you assume that the President wanted to insult his hosts): it was a “somebody didn’t read the briefing materials (particularly the bits about Vladimir Zhirinovsky) gaffe.”  What’s next?  Thanking the Chinese for their involuntary help with training up our Navy during the Boxer Rebellion?  That should go over well: they’re even touchier about their history than the Russians are.

And I actively dread thinking about what the current President is going to say, the next time that he visits Japan.

Moe Lane

Crossposted at Moe Lane.

Some watershed events in history are generally well-known, while others remain obscure, perhaps known only in a particular geographic region. However, some of these seemingly-obscure events deserve more attention - as much of the present situation in many parts of the world owes a great deal to those events.

Today happens to be the 300th anniversary of one of those little-known watersheds - the Battle of Poltava.

Poltava represents a critical breakpoint in the history of eastern Europe; it shattered forever the power of Sweden, marked the rise of Russia as a major power, provided a poignant note that Poland was in terminal decline, and sparked the rise of Prussia that would eventually lead to the emergence of Germany as the other major power in eastern Europe.

But getting to Poltava…. that was the culmination of an accumulation of events over a number of centuries - one of history’s more chaotic stories.

We’ll tell that story below the fold.

Read More →

I don’t know about you, but for my entire life whenever I’ve heard someone prattle about “a world without nuclear weapons,” I roll my eyes for at least two reasons. One is the naivete; the other is the practical notion that in such a world, one “kook-with-nuke” would be king.

But it turns out that in Moscow, the Russian leadership sees the Obama offer as something else - yet another move in the game of trying to rein in Russian influence in the world.

In other words, the Kremlin sees this plan as a threat.

Wasn’t the Obama-Medvedev chumminess supposed to reflect a “reset” (?!) of the U.S-Russia relationship? What’s going on here?

More below the fold….

Read More →

I frequently complain about Barack Obama not paying enough attention to Latin America. The region affects our security directly, yet the Obama administration gives little sign of recognizing the efforts of China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and others to build alliances against our interests. Two recent articles help illustrate the dangers. The first deals with Iran’s ongoing efforts to strengthen supporters in Latin America’s large Arab population:

Of course where there is Hezbollah and Hamas, the Iranian hand is not far away. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has openly worried about “Iranian meddling” in Central and South America, and Navy Admiral James Stavridis, head of U.S. Southern Command, expressed concern over Iranian support of Hezbollah and other militant operatives in the tri-border region and in Colombia.

But Iran’s subversive activity in lawless regions of the Americas is often overshadowed by its more public interactions with Latin American populists such as Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, and Evo Morales of Bolivia. For example, in September 2006, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was welcomed with full military honors in Caracas, where he signed 29 economic cooperation agreements. Ahmadinejad embraced Chávez at the airport, saluting “all revolutionaries who oppose world hegemony.” Since then, Iran has funded economic projects and signed cooperation agreements with Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, not forgetting to take advantage of the convenient anti-American photo opportunity…

Read More →

I was originally going to do a you’ll-like-this-guy - A Song for Arbonne is brilliant, you’ll love everything that he does, buy everything that he wrote - but never mind that now: read this article about the recent Russian poll of the greatest Russian ever. (Stalin in third, Lenin in sixth):

It would feel self-indulgent to launch a jeremiad about how very, very evil Lenin and Stalin and their system were. The novelist Martin Amis did this in a book a little while ago, Koba the Dread, which is essentially about his own belated discovery of that truth. And how his father, Kingsley Amis, and godfather, Robert Conquest (who exposed the atrocities of the Great Terror for the west) had been … right all along while Amis and his college chums had been proclaiming the glories of the Soviet Union and Mao’s China in the 1960s. It was nice to see Amis fils getting around to getting it right, but the tone of shocked baby-boomer awakening bordered on the amusing.

No, it seems to me there’s another point, a narrower focus to be sought here, and it comes from - unsurprisingly - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose The Gulag Archipelago, smuggled out to the west thirty-five years ago, documented the abomination of the Soviet internment camps with a terrifying mixture of Biblical prophet and meticulously detailed scientist. (Solzhenitsyn, who did more to expose the reality of Lenin and Stalin and the Soviet empire to the world than anyone else who ever lived, and did so with unfathomable courage, did not surface anywhere near the top of the balloting, by the way.)

Here’s the issue that seems necessary to register after considering this vote: in The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn makes the point that as of 1966 some 86,000 Germans had been convicted in Germany for Nazi crimes. But what about in the Soviet Union - the Gulag, the enforced starvations, the Terror? “In our own country (according the reports of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court) about ten men had been convicted.” (The italics are his.) And he asks, “What kind of disastrous path lies ahead of us if we do not have the chance to purge ourselves of that putrefaction rotting inside our body?”

Read More →

There’s a Reuters story that popped up this morning that’s rather alarming.

Georgia is appealing for help in discouraging Russia from what appears to be a military build-up in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

As I’ve opined before, the Russians are in a big hurry for their own reasons, and they long ago figured out that President Obama is a weak leader who can be rolled.

Read More →

Over at The Moscow Times, Yulia Latynina still seems to be able to write Kremlin-critical columns. Her latest is a rather snarky piece about the poor state of the Russian army - in particular, the poor care that is received by the troops.

But there are a couple of notable news items that pop out of that column….

Read More →

Yesterday, the government of the central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan announced that it won’t be renewing the leasing agreement with the United States for the use of military bases there - ending the odd arrangement of being the only country in the world that was hosting both American and Russian military bases at the same time.

One can speculate if the domestic political situation here was a factor, but the Reuters reporter who filed the above-cited story sure didn’t have any qualms about it:

Read More →