One of the great paleo-conservative thinkers of the pre-Reagan era is WND columnist Pat Buchanan. I had the privilege of meeting and sharing a stage with him as a young Christian activist in Oregon around 1990, and have always benefited from his insights and observations in his writings. The main issue that separates paleo-conservatives from neo-conservatives is war-policy: the paleos are the original America First champions firmly against unnecessary foreign wars, and the neo-cons seem to have never met a war they didn’t like. Pat’s piece this past week was about the geopolitics of oil and natural gas pipelines, specifically Russia’s pipeline to Germany, and thus all Europe.
The main reason the neo-cons joined with the leftists to take down President Trump’s presidency was his opposition to foreign wars, and his successful pursuit of domestic energy independence. The leftists hate Trump for many reasons, but the neo-cons have primarily one. You see, the wars of at least the past half-century have almost always been related to the projection of American military power to control oil and gas resources on foreign soil.
Pat Buchanan wrote: “Issue: Nord Stream 2, the Baltic Sea pipeline Vladimir Putin is building to complement his Nord Stream 1 and carry more natural gas from Russia to Germany, and from there to other NATO nations….What is behind American opposition…? First, the pipelines bypass Ukraine and Poland, cutting those countries out of the transit revenue. Second, we want Germany to buy our own shale-produced natural gas.” The rest of the article focuses on the question of whether Germany is wrong to partner with Russia in this. He reveals his own view, by writing “[Post Glasnost] Russia was no longer the largest captive nation of communism but a nation reaching out in friendship to the United States… [But] Having won the Cold War, and unable to find a new mission, we started a second Cold War to contain the new [significantly shrunken] Russia – this time at the borders of Belarus, Ukraine and Georgia, as we had once contained the old USSR at the River Elbe.”
I would add that the second Cold War ran rather luke-warm until, as Secretary of State under Obama in 2009, Hillary Clinton presented a “reset button” stage prop to Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to signal a new season of cooperation between our nations. But, in retrospect, that season of thaw appears to have been just another Clinton Crime Family scam, in this case to enrich themselves through such deals as the Uranium One scandal.
The real restart of a deep-freeze Cold War was triggered shortly after the Uranium One deal closed, when an infuriated Barack Obama (the ultimate LGBT global activist) determined to punish Russia for passing a nationwide ban on homosexual propaganda to children in 2013. It kicked off with an attempt to sabotage the 2014 Winter Olympics in Socci, Russia by humiliating the Russians with massive pro-LGBT propaganda and provocation during the games. It then continued with an Obama/Soros orchestrated 2014 Ukrainian coup that replaced the pro-Russian president with a pro-Obama stooge and handed the keys to the Ukranian treasury to Joe (and Hunter) Biden.
In August of 2013, I published and sent an Open Letter to President Vladimir Putin, predicting that Obama would take severe revenge on Russia for the “gay” propaganda ban.
I had done a public speaking tour across Russia in 2006-2007 and visited Moscow in October 2013 for an international pro-family conference. From personal observation, I can testify that Russia is not only NOT a Marxist state, but that its people are ideologically the closest to American conservatives of any nationality of the 65 countries I have visited in my travels.
I was thus very pleased when then-candidate Donald Trump campaigned heavily in 2016 on restoring relations with Russia. But this Trump campaign promise scared the Purple Uniparty globalists more than any other. Obama, Clinton and Biden were terrified that their crimes in Ukraine would be exposed and prosecuted, and the Neo-Cons were terrified that Trump would pull the military out of their highly lucrative wars – especially Syria, which has only ever been about completing the Qatar to Bulgaria pipeline across Syria and Turkey before Russia could complete Nord Stream 2. For decades, Syria has been a US/Russia proxy-war battlefield over oil revenues, complicated by an Iranian second pipeline across Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean (presumably stalled by the US occupation of Iraq).
This is the true reason for the Russian Collusion Hoax still being pushed by the Never Trumpers despite having been totally debunked. And the all-hands-on-deck commitment to force President Trump into an anti-Russian posture is, I believe, why he uncharacteristically flipped on Syrian policy and bombed Syrian targets April 6th, 2017 supposedly in retaliation for Syria’s supposed use of “chemical weapons” on April 4th – an allegation vehemently (and very plausibly) denied by Syrian President Assad. It should be noted that international law allows military action outside of wartime on very limited grounds, explaining why “chemical weapons” is the go-to pretext for neo-con warmongers since before the George W. Bush wars (which I regret having supported at the time).
My personal conspiracy theory is that Trump was forced into striking Syria in 2017 by heavy left and “right” media propaganda, combined with extortion from neo-con Senators John McCain and Mitch McConnell, the latter of whom inexplicably held back the Senate confirmation of Trump’s SCOTUS nominee Neil Gorsuch from January 2017 until just after the bombing. But Trump tipped off Russia with media comments before the attack to (I believe) prevent an intended escalation – in the same way General Flynn (I believe) prevented an intended Obama Hot War between the 2016 election and the inauguration. If President Trump is reelected in 2024, I think he will find a way to keep his promise to essentially end the second Cold War, to the benefit of the world and the detriment of the warmongers.
I don’t wish to suggest Pat Buchanan shares my personal theories – but I think he would agree that while geo-politics always involves partly hidden factual complexities – the motivations behind the actions of nations are no different than the basic motives of powerful individuals: a greed for money, and a lust for power (including, especially in Obama’s case, the power to enforce your will on everyone else). And in our lifetimes the nexus of those motives usually involve politicians, armies, and oil (as in “President” Biden sending the US military sweeping back into Syria in his first week). But in Trump’s case they didn’t. He truly put America First. And that is why the neo-cons hate him.
