Should US Peel Russia Away From China? – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

My colleague at The American Spectator Matthew Omolesky characterizes the “notion of a Reverse Nixon Maneuver,” proposed by Edward Luttwak and other foreign policy realists (including President Trump) as “utterly preposterous,” an “outlandish … geopolitical gambit,” a “pure fantasy, borne ironically enough from the depths of the realists’ overwrought collective imagination, with little or no bearing on reality.”

Foreign policy realists who advance this policy approach, he writes, are “absurd” and have lost “their grip on reality.” This school of thought, he writes, should be called “Un-realism” or “sur-realism” or “fantasism” or “delusionism.” And, a pro-Russian Reverse Nixon Maneuver is “grotesquely immoral to boot.”

In an earlier column titled a “Letter to a Young Realist,” Omolesky accuses realists of picturing ourselves as Machiavelli, Clausewitz, Bismarck, or Kissinger, as we ignore Taiwan’s commitment to democracy or make unnecessary concessions to Russia over Ukraine, and eschew ideological or spiritual connections to anything. Realists, he writes, have a “tendency to wake up one day and find that [they] have become an abject totalitarian bootlicker, countenancing any number of crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, ecocide, even physical and cultural genocide, all on the basis of raison d’etat.”

Omolesky is a human rights lawyer who has been championing Ukraine in its defense of its homeland since Russia’s aggressive war began. Presumably, that makes him feel good about himself — which is one thing that separates foreign policy crusaders from realists. To be on the side of the angels — though Ukranians and their leaders are hardly angelic — is a great feeling.

Jimmy Carter was also in favor of “human rights,” and based his foreign policy on promoting human rights. Ask Iranians and Nicaraguans how that worked out. Carter’s devotion to human rights made him abandon that “inordinate fear of communism,” and almost turned the world over to the men in the Kremlin. Barack Obama’s UN Ambassador Samantha Power sought to steer American foreign policy in the direction of benevolent intervention as part of the “human rights” ideology called “Responsibility to Protect.” George W. Bush sought to transform the Arab world into democracies but instead initiated endless wars that cost tens of thousands of lives.

But back to the Reverse Nixon Maneuver and its alleged absurdity. Omoloesky details the current strategic and economic ties between Russia and China, implying that they are permanent and unalterable. But nothing in international relations is permanent or unalterable. Nazi-Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union had strategic and economic ties between 1939 and 1941, until Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa. But those German-Soviet ties actually predated the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, reaching back into the 1920s. History is replete with “diplomatic revolutions” where former enemies become allies, and vice-versa. Realists understand that.

The Sino-Soviet split that Nixon exploited didn’t happen overnight. Its roots lay in the mid-1950s when ideological disputes between Mao Zedong and Nikita Khruschev emerged, but the break didn’t occur until the late 1960s when Soviet and Chinese forces clashed along the Ussuri River. And when Nixon began the opening to China, he was condemned by human rights advocates and anticommunists for effectively allying with the most murderous regime in human history, and a regime that was supplying some of the military equipment that the North Vietnamese used to kill U.S. soldiers. It is unlikely that we would have won the Cold War when we did without Nixon’s geopolitical gambit.

Russia and China Are Not Natural Allies

The strategic partnership between China and Russia won’t end overnight, either, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t begin exploring ways to weaken and ultimately end the partnership. The two countries are not natural allies, as Luttwak pointed out in his Unherd piece that Omolesky unjustifiably ridicules. And its just common sense geopolitics to pursue policies that strengthen the geopolitical pluralism of the Eurasian landmass.

But geopolitics is not a feelgood subject. What the United States must do to further its geopolitical interests is not always nice or kind or benevolent. It is, instead, selfish and sometimes nasty and brutish. Facing up to harsh realities doesn’t necessarily make one feel good. As the great geopolitical thinker James Burnham once said: “Sometimes in this world you have to throw your friends to the wolves. But you don’t have to talk a lot of s…t about democracy while you do it.”

Near the end of his attack on foreign policy realists, Omolesky suggests that our best bet is to align ourselves to our traditional European and Pacific allies which are “fundamentally ideologically and economically aligned with us” against the Sino-Russian axis. This “fundamental” alignment, however, extends back only about 75 years. Before that, we fought with Russia and China against some of our more recent allies. Realists tend to view international relations through a larger historical lens. When you do that, what seems “absurd” or “preposterous” today may become reality in 10 or 20 years.

The old saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions sums up nicely the foreign policy approaches of those, like Omolesky, who would abandon realism in the name of protecting and advancing global human rights. While they comfort themselves with their moralism and tout their commitment to abstractions, Ukrainians and Russians keep dying and the risks of a wider war keep growing. Let’s hope President Trump’s realism prevails.

READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa:

The Left’s Hypocrisy About the ‘Imperial Presidency’

George Will and Munich