Reagan: Russia is not the big enemy

Published 11:27 am Friday, February 4, 2022

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Everyone’s watching Russia to see what its thug-for-life, Vladimir Putin, is going to do in Ukraine.

We ordinary citizens don’t know whether Putin will actually invade Ukraine with the 127,000 Russian soldiers he’s placed at its borders or whether he’s just bluffing.

But the Biden administration – which belongs to the Neville Chamberlain School of Foreign Policy — doesn’t know what Putin is going to do, either.

Biden has just sent 3,000 troops over to Eastern Europe not to fight the Russians but to show Putin that America means business when it tells him not to take the part of Ukraine he hasn’t already grabbed.

That’s Biden’s way of trying to be tough on Russia.

But if we had a real leader with guts and brains, we’d tell Putin if he doesn’t pull his troops from the Ukraine border within 72 hours we’ll bankrupt him like we did in the 1980s.

We’ll shut down Russia’s vital NordStream natural gas pipelines from Russia to Germany, reopen our Keystone Pipeline, free up our oil and gas frackers and flood America and the rest of the world with lower-cost energy.

Biden opened the door for Putin last year by allowing the second NordStream pipeline, so now he should shut the door by reopening our Keystone Pipeline and telling AOC and the other progressives in Congress to fly a kite in a wind farm.

A lot of Democrats, liberal pundits and former CNN employees who still believe that Putin stole the 2016 election for Trump also believe Russia is still a military threat to us.

But despite its aging arsenal of nukes, it’s really a broken-down, impoverished ex-superpower with a GDP smaller than Canada’s. It has nothing the West wants or needs but oil, natural gas and maybe caviar.

Russia doesn’t have the rubles or gold to spend on a big war or even a little one — but China does.

Russia isn’t in every other American’s pocket, either. But China sure is — and I’m not just talking about its business partners running the NBA or the Biden family.

Unless you’ve been living on a desert Pacific island since my father left Washington, you know our entire economy is dangerously dependent on China and its factories.

Forget Chinese-made imports like iPhones, Nike shoes and Black & Decker tools.

Just check out where most of those home coronavirus test kits Joe Biden has promised he’s mailing to each of us were made.

Of course the most dangerous product China has exported to us — and the world — was COVID-19.

It’d be hard for Hollywood to make up something as crazy as this true story: China gives us a deadly virus that kills nearly 1 million Americans and then sells us boatloads of the test kits that tell us if we have caught it.

Meanwhile, it’s Communist China — not authoritarian Russia — that has been flexing its military muscles and expanding its influence in Asia and around the world for a quarter century.

China’s dictators have taken over Hong Kong and snuffed out most of its people’s freedoms.

Before that, they conquered Tibet — what the Communist Party propagandists called the “Peaceful Liberation of Tibet.”

They’ve also built islands for military purposes in the South China Sea and lately have been intimidating Taiwan by flying warplanes into that free country’s airspace.

China has paid no price for any of the evil it’s done to people outside or inside its borders, not even for oppressing 12 million mostly Muslim Uyghurs and putting a million of them into concentration camps.

China should worry everyone on the planet, but it’s the Russians we’re supposed to fear? Like so much of the Biden administration’s foreign policy “thinking,” it makes no sense.

So don’t worry about Russia starting World War III over Ukraine, folks.

WWIII started decades ago. It’s us against China, not Russia — and we’re losing.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to reagan@caglecartoons.com and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.