I remember the news reports about the Soviets invading Czechoslovakia in 1968. I remember East Germany before the Berlin Wall fell. I remember Checkpoint Charlie. I remember the Warsaw Pact and the hard line, pre-“glasnost” Soviet leaders, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko. I can remember when China was essentially a closed society and a mystery to the West…at least until Richard Nixon visited there in 1972. I remember the violent suppression carried out by these Marxist/communist governments, something that Americans under the age of 35 only read about in history books. To them, China has always been open, there never was a USSR and they have never seen a communist state roll an army into a neighboring nation because they were insufficiently communist. They have never heard miraculous stories of daring escapes from East Germany and the terrible accounts of the 171 people killed trying to reach freedom. I dont believe that there should be a shooting war involving the US - but I do believe that the 1994 Budapest Memorandum should be honored. As a minimum, we should be shipping arms and equipment (Why not just send the surplus ordnance and equipment from Iraq?) to Kiev and the US missile shield should be deployed in Poland and the Czech Republic. Isolationism didnt work in the 30s and there are even fewer reasons to think it will work in 2014.
Posted on: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 12:05:54 +0000