But the condition of the country isn’t why the Washington intelligence and media elite want a conflict with Russia. Washington wants a new Cold War because the Cold War was good for Washington. Cold wars are better than hot wars because you don’t even have to make sure the weapons work. Imagine majoring in Russian back in the 1980s only to learn shortly afterward that the Berlin Wall had fallen. There’s no on-the-job retraining for bureaucrats and policy experts, comrade. For many in Washington, long ago trained to address one specific big problem, the Cold War will only end when their bodies are cold. Progress in foreign policy too often advances funeral to funeral.
How to react to Robert Mueller’s appointment as independent special counsel was the subject of much debate in the Republican conference at the time the Russia investigation began. Ryan and Gowdy both surmised that Mueller was some sort of Beltway paladin. The thinking went that we should all praise Mueller, confirm the legitimacy of his team’s investigative work, and then pray that Trump hadn’t done anything criminal. Besides, they thought, a President Pence—one of Congress’s own—wouldn’t be so bad sitting in the Oval Office if it came to that. What couldn’t be done at the ballot box—defeating Trump—could be accomplished ex post facto in the witness box.
The Russia hoax not only debased Congress and harmed the presidency but it also distracted us from the real threat—namely China. Search your own home and count the things you own that were made in China. And you bought these things when relations were a lot better than they are now. Asia’s largest consumer of energy, China, is right next to Asia’s largest producer, Russia. They are building bridges to one another that could well imperil the free world.
We can beat Russia and other fossil fuel foes just by keeping the price of oil perpetually low. But don’t take my word for it. Ronald Reagan did just that, as Steven Hayward recounts in The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution, 1980–1989. It was a deliberate policy of the Reagan administration to bankrupt petrostates even if it wound up hurting Oklahoma and Texas. Never again would Americans wait in line to fuel their cars and go to work. We should finish the job.
The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones. The Coal Age didn’t end because we ran out of coal. Nor will the Oil Age end because we have run out of oil. Peak oil is a fantasy. Conservatives decry the Green New Deal because they rightly understand it as a socialist wish list, not a sane way to end our reliance on fossil fuels. Stewardship is not socialism, though, and we should indeed be doing what we can to husband our precious resources before they are gone forever, and think about replacements while we do so.
China is rising while Russia sinks. Even when China mimics Western-style capitalism, it does so with an authoritarian tinge. SenseTime tracks your face. BGI steals your genetics. DJI spies on you from the sky. The end goal of China is to make us all, like too much of China’s Uighur population, suspects under house arrest.
But criticism of Russia and China should not blind us to our own errors. We become like our enemies all too quickly when we think the ends justify the means. In the case of the establishment’s no-holds-barred war on Trump, the Bill of Rights very quickly became just a suggestion. Every civil liberty was thrown out the window in the effort to bring down the president. Baseless surveillance? No problem! Weird federal informants? No big deal! Planting fake stories? Of course! Convincing other countries to illegally monitor Americans? Absolutely cool. Changing evidence before a secret court? Why not! Attempting to entrap members of the president’s family and campaign? How exciting.
And the sick thing is that they thought they were ending American liberties to protect America. How quickly we do wickedness when we justify what’s wrong.
The Obama administration blamed Russia for its failures rather than its own stupidity. Scapegoating, as I suggested earlier, makes things easier emotionally. You don’t have to accept responsibility for, say, having told Russia on a hot mic that you’ll have “more flexibility” after the next election, so they shouldn’t worry too much about conservative hardliners here. On the other hand, you also don’t have to accept responsibility for expanding wars you said you’d end or starting a few new ones along the way.
Obama’s foreign policy misadventures needed scapegoats, and so his team would do anything to make the picture of Russia as an equal power to the U.S. appear true. The Obama team was also too proud to believe that they were outsmarted in an election by Donald Trump. We must have been defeated by the Russians, and they had to be underhanded to get it done! A cabal formed at the top of our government to shift the blame for Hillary Clinton’s defeat, and that effort included President Obama’s closest allies. The recently declassified notes of disgraced former FBI agent and Trump hater Peter Strzok prove that it was Vice President Biden himself who suggested the never-before-used Logan Act to set up General Michael Flynn. Biden had a central role in the Obama era’s corruption. Like the autocratic foreign rulers they so often condemned, they deployed tactics that should never have been used on American soil.
We now know that on the final day of the Obama administration—the same day when I sat in the bleachers watching the president take the oath of office—the outgoing national security advisor, Susan Rice, was sending emails about the Obama group’s stay-behind contingency plan for coping with a Trump presidency they did not see coming, did not want, and would do everything to thwart.
Stalin’s security enforcer Lavrenti Beria, ironically, was the person who said, in a brazen show of elite corruption, “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime”—meaning that a sufficiently corrupt investigation
