Ann Coulter’s Cold Take on Russia/Ukraine

Americans really don’t perceive the threat from the Kremlin because they live so far away.

Coulter there gives the typical paleo-con isolationist take, that it’s “none of our business” while giving Putin the benefit of the doubt and gesturing against the existence of NATO. She doesn’t think there’s a need for NATO to exist after 1991 because she doesn’t understand that the same people who ran the imperialist Soviet empire are running Russia in present day. Putin was a career KGB spook and headed the FSB for a few years before becoming president. He has the same anti-Western Soviet tendencies of past dictators. He perceives the collapse of the USSR empire as a “catastrophe” and wants to see it restored in a smaller, modified way, what he calls the “Eurasian Union”. Those small countries in Eastern Europe who finally threw off Soviet shackles in 1991, have to constantly fear for their safety and security without a NATO security guarantee. It would only be a matter of time before the Kremlin made moves to take them back, which is why those countries begged to join NATO. Is that not a valid concern, considering the history of Russian invasion and subjugation of their lands? Big Western powers are unlikely to get into a hot war with Russia just to protect some tiny Baltics country, so it’s totally reasonable for them to seek refuge under NATO protection so that never happens.

She used the tired old “Ukraine used to be part of Russia so it has no right to exist” line. If that’s universally true, then the southern half of America should be given back to Mexico. Maybe Britain should take back America entirely, since it was a former British colony. Then she opines that Ukraine should “give up some land” to make peace with Putin, as if capitulation to Putin’s current demands will stop him in the future. Yet she would never take this stance if the US were invaded by Mexico. I doubt she’d give up an inch of land back to the Mexicans, even though the same pretense could be used by the Mexicans to take back previously held lands in the South where millions of Hispanics currently live. Dubious arguments coming from Coulter, who was one of the more hawkish neocon proponents of the pointless Iraq war for Israel’s interests, but now portends to be a pure isolationist.

She claims the US has constantly given Putin the “cold shoulder,” but this is a distortion.

Putin was fully embraced by Bush after 9/11 and collaborated with Russia in the “war on terror”. Then after Russia attacked Georgia in 2008, relations froze, but Obama restored them with the “Russian reset” and the two sides were chummy again in 2009, sharing intelligence on Islamic terrorist threats like the Chechens who did the Boston marathon bombing.

There’s Obama telling Romney, “the 1980s want their foreign policy back, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years!” There’s Obama saying he supports integrating Russia into the World Trade Organization. Doesn’t sound like fighting words to me. Bush and Putin were virtually rimming each other back in 2001.

The lie that the US has “always been mean to Russia and pushed it away” is a myth invented by Putintards to portray Putin as the good, rational statesman in contrast to “irrational” US policymakers. The truth is that things really only went sour when Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 and backed separatists in Eastern Ukraine. Prior to that things were going smoothly, to the point where Putin had no issue with Obama’s invasion of Libya until years later when they were lobbing mutual criticism at each other. Putin also seemed to have no issue with the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, probably for his own cynical reasons of weakening the West while he built up his own military strength for future incursions.

The alt-left/right pseudo alternative media relentlessly spins this narrative that the US/NATO are the aggressors against Russia for merely giving security guarantees to small Eastern European countries that have been invaded and conquered by the Kremlin not so long ago. Guaranteeing the security of Eastern Europe from Russian encroachment is seen as “aggression” by Kremlin imperialists who don’t even recognize the sovereignty of those countries and views them as “lost Russian territories”. It makes sense that Soviet Kremlin imperialists would portray anything that blocks their designs on Eastern Europe as aggression, while committing actual military aggression themselves in Georgia and Ukraine, and soft-power aggression in the Baltics with cyber-attacks and NGO subversion.

There’s no doubt that the US has been meddling in Eastern Europe for years and has tried to move those countries out of Russia’s orbit, but it’s ultimately the decision of those people which alliances they want to make and which countries they want to align with. It’s no more Russia’s right to decide the foreign and domestic policy of Eastern Europe as it is the right of Washington to decide the foreign and domestic policies of Latin American countries. Nationalists in Eastern Europe ought to be weary of US influence too, so long as woke maniacs like Biden are in office, and they should pursue their own third way nationalism away from dependence on either Washington, Brussels or Moscow. None of them truly have their best interests at heart.