PAT BUCHANAN: GOP interventionists up the ante against Putin

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As ranking Republican on the foreign relations committee, Corker is in line to become chairman, should the GOP take the Senate. That makes this proposal a gravely serious matter.

Corker's bill would declare Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine "major non-NATO allies" of the United States, move NATO forces into Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, accelerate the building of an ABM system in Eastern Europe, and authorize U.S. intelligence and military aid for Ukraine's army in the Donbass war with Russian-backed separatists.

U.S. aid would include antitank and antiaircraft weapons.

S. 2277 would direct the secretary of state to intensify efforts to strengthen democratic institutions inside the Russian Federation, e.g., subvert Vladimir Putin's government, looking toward regime change.

If Putin has not vacated Crimea and terminated support for Ukraine's separatist rebels within seven days of passage of the Corker Ultimatum, sweeping sanctions would be imposed on Russian officials, banks and energy companies, including Gazprom.

Economic relations between us would be virtually severed.

In short, this is an ultimatum to Russia that she faces a new Cold War if she does not get out of Ukraine and Crimea, and it is a U.S. declaration that we will now regard three more former Soviet republics -- Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia -- as allies.


But Russia, where anti-Americanism is virulent and rampant and the Russian people support Putin's actions in Ukraine, would want him to tell the Americans just what to do with their ultimatum.

And how Russia would respond is not difficult to predict.

Our demand that she get out of Crimea and leave her two-century-old naval base at Sevastopol in the custody of President Petro Poroshenko in Kiev and his U.S. allies, would be laughed off.

Putin would tell us that Crimea has voted to return to Russia. It's ours, and we're going to keep it. Now deal with it.

To make good on our latest red line, we would have to start shipping weapons to Kiev, in which case Russia, with superior forces closer, would likely move preemptively into East Ukraine.

What would our NATO allies do then?




Is there more freedom in China?

How do we think Beijing would respond if Corker & Co. openly declared not only their right but their intent to funnel U.S. fundsto civic organizations to bring about an end to single-party Communist rule?




The Reagan-Gorbachev INF treaty to eliminate all intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe -- the USSR's triple-warhead SS-20s, and our Pershing II and cruise missiles -- could wind up in the dumpster.





The American Imperium is folding up. Retrenchment is under way.

If the Republican counteroffer to Obama's is a return to the compulsive interventionism of Bush II, this is where some of us will be getting off.

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