OPINION:
Earlier this month, in his first speech as secretary of state, Antony Blinken underscored that “the president has promised diplomacy — not military action — will always come first.” He was building on a sentence from a moment earlier: “More than at any other time in my career — maybe in my lifetime — distinctions between domestic and foreign policy have simply fallen away.”
The truth of that statement is deeper than Mr. Blinken’s elaboration that “our domestic renewal and our strength in the world are completely entwined.” That’s because domestic policy, in contrast to the opening promise, is being dealt with in an increasingly militarized fashion. That is, foreign policy is being adapted domestically, as half of America is being dealt with the way foreign threats are. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray even upgraded the threat of “domestic terrorism” to ISIS levels.
Indeed, if you ask former New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, domestic terrorists are actually worse than foreign ones. In January, the Clinton-connected Bratton told CNBC’s Shepard Smith, “For the last 20 years our biggest concern was international terrorism — ISIS, al Qaeda. Now it’s here and it’s us, and it’s the citizens of the United States.” To not understate the case, Mr. Smith had a former DHS counterterrorism official named Nate Snyder drive the point home, rather incredibly: “[D]omestic terrorism — meaning violent white supremacists, neo-Nazis, sovereign citizens, militia movements — have been the most lethal threat in these past 10 years compared to al Qaeda and ISIS-inspired threats.”
It’s no accident, then, that the inauguration of the Democrats’ sock puppet was secured by troop numbers which, as The Military Times lent perspective, were “roughly five times the number of troops that the U.S. currently has in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Or that we now have a razor-wire wall in D.C. to keep out a false threat, but no wall to keep out a real threat at the southern border, which Arizona’s Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels told Sean Hannity is back to 2019 caravan-surge levels. “We had it under control and now it’s going back …. They’re being released without being tested … and then you look at the public safety aspect of this, it’s almost like we’re not part of this country.”
That’s about the size of it. In fact, it’s the basis of the policies our leaders are enacting against us. One begins to discern a double meaning in the title of Mr. Blinken’s speech: “A Foreign Policy for the American People.”
Parts of the speech bear this out. Mr. Blinken cites a Freedom House report that authoritarianism is on the rise around the world. “Governments are becoming less transparent and have lost the trust of the people. Elections are increasingly flashpoints for violence. Corruption is growing.” This might as well be about America — and Mr. Blinken admits, “It’s also happening here in the United States.” But instead of referring to the imperious overreaches by his boss on countless fronts, Mr. Blinken whips out the usual suspects: “Disinformation is rampant here. Structural racism and inequality make life worse for millions. Our elected leaders were targeted in the violent siege of the Capitol.”
This, then, lets him launch into the next usual suspect: “Shoring up our democracy is a foreign policy imperative. Otherwise, we play right into the hands of adversaries and competitors like Russia and China, who seize every opportunity to sow doubts about the strength of our democracy.”
Notice that Russia came first in that list, as it does later in the speech where he says, “Several countries present us with serious challenges, including Russia, Iran, North Korea.” Russia slips off the tongue more readily than the likes of Iran and North Korea. So, the least menacing and least alien of the list is uttered first. Like the “domestic threat,” it’s also the most manufactured one.
Republican Texas Rep. Michael McCaul also started his roster of baddies with Russia, counting “Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and now Saudi Arabia” as countries with dictators who “kill gruesomely” but whom we work with anyway, thereby “sending the wrong message.”
And in quoting Sky News Australia last Tuesday that “‘Never before’ has the leader of the free world been ‘so cognitively compromised,’” Fox News host Sean Hannity predictably pondered, “If that’s what our allies are reporting, I can only imagine … what our enemies [Enter Vladimir Putin’s face on screen] may think. And we have a lot of enemies … like Vladimir Putin, the mullahs in Iran, China, Kim Jong-un …” This order is telling, not only that conservatives have accepted the left’s framing of Russia as the worst thing ever, but more ominously that something may be brewing, given that Russia is the most doable of the list.
Notice it’s Russia whose border NATO has been staging exercises on, and it’s Russia against which the perfect storm has been whipped up: the public is primed and the military is in position.
“The U.S. Sixth Fleet destroyers Porter and Donald Cook have been operating with allies and with Ukraine’s navy in the Black Sea since January,” Martin Sieff warned last month in Strategic Culture Foundation. “On February 8 … both warships, along with a P-8A reconnaissance plane, joined with two Turkish frigates and F-16 fighters in an integrated surface, air and subsurface warfare drill.”
While one is tempted to take heart from Mr. Blinken’s words that “we will not promote democracy through costly military interventions,” they’re belied by these active developments, as well as by the Biden administration’s bursting through the gate with new sanctions against Russian officials and businesses over the alleged poisoning and the jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny — and the vow that these are only “the first of several steps planned in response to [the] ‘destabilizing’ Russian actions,” as the Fox News ticker put it.
And in case the last two decades, let alone the last five years, of bear-baiting hasn’t pushed Russia to the edge, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal “proudly declared on Feb. 9 that two new NATO naval bases would open on the Black Sea before the end of this year,” Mr. Sieff continued. “Yet the Black Sea has historically been a crucial defensive region against invasion for Russia for the past quarter of a millennium since before the American Declaration of Independence in 1776.” And yet NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg absurdly stated that “the Black Sea is of strategic importance for NATO and the NATO allies — our littoral states, Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania. And then we have two close and highly valued partners in the region, Ukraine and Georgia,” nations that Mr. Sieff points out are weak, violent, and “lastingly destabilized by U.S. and Western coups.”
Mr. Sieff contrasts “the tiny, embarrassing protest … on Jan. 6” to Ukraine’s very real 2014 coup, recalling how John McCain and then-Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland “openly prowled the streets of Kyiv loudly calling for revolution and … Nuland handed out cookies to assure the rioters and revolutionaries that the U.S. government supported them.” Mr. Sieff is disgusted that American history is recording the Capitol incident as an “Insurrection” (or, if you ask Las Vegas NBC affiliate Channel 3, a “hostile takeover”).
As usual, the Democrats crying wolf about an “insurrection” will never admit that the climate they’re creating might cause a reaction, that the draconian national overhauls we’re being subjected to may reap the real thing.
It’s no secret that we are a country divided, that we are more like two dueling nations within a single geographical area: when a Republican is in power, there is a restive population of Democrats; when a Democrat is in power, there is a restive population of Republicans. But it has never been more literal than the spectacle of President Biden on his first day acting like a kid in a candy store, signing executive order after executive order, amounting to a sheer undoing of the previous “regime.” And while Democrats like to claim subjugation under Republicans, it is under a Democrat that actual subjugation is being enacted.
You cannot live with people who don’t want to live with you, who see you as a bigger enemy than beheaders, cartels, and criminals; who applaud using the power of the state to prosecute you for your beliefs; who want to put you on a no-fly list; who defend your voice being removed from the public square and your civil liberties and due process denied — for offenses that their side commits in greater proportion. This is not fixable, and so the long-familiar notion of there being “two Americas” may have to become a geographic reality.
Rather than living as Soviet families did, with a packed suitcase at the ready for when that knock on the door comes (as has already happened to several Trump appointees and associates), isn’t it better to pack up now and not live in fear? From Oregon to Colorado, talk of counties seceding to other states was already in the air (and on the ballot), but with President Biden’s order for no new oil drilling (never mind the larger usurpation of H.R. 1), he has stepped on the toes of Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Montana and others. In welcoming drug- and human-smugglers by effectively demolishing the southwestern border wall, he’s spurred Texas and Arizona to assert their right to defend themselves. By directing federal agencies to calculate the social cost of greenhouse gas pollution, the president has violated the Separation of Powers clause, inviting a 12-state lawsuit against his administration led by Missouri.
These states make up a rather cohesive bloc. Clearly, President Biden isn’t heeding his own secretary of state about the foreign and the domestic being related. One has to handle domestic states as respectfully as one would foreign states; we’re called “states” for a reason — we don’t have to stay “United.”
⦁ Julia Gorin was a Soviet refusenik who came to the U.S. in 1976. She is the editor of “Hillarisms: The Unmaking of the First Female President.”
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