While America Slept. Robert C. O'Brien

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СКАЧАТЬ procuring nuclear arms on their own or from a sympathetic third country such as Pakistan to counter Iran, which will in essence be an internationally recognized nuclear threshold state.

      Further, Iran will receive tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief. In addition to expanding its own military forces, there is no doubt that much of that money will be funneled to Iranian proxies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Assad regime in Syria, Shia militias in Iraq, and Houthis rebels in Yemen—not to mention Hamas in Gaza, which Iran has supported in the past. All of these groups are at war with or threaten America’s friends and allies in the region. The economics of this deal will surely increase the volatility of an already dangerous region.

      President Obama claims that without this deal, the current sanctions regime covering Iran would have crumbled. This claim strains credulity. Nations that wanted to drop sanctions and trade with Iran would face the prospect of being frozen out of world banking and trade systems. Siding with Iran over America and her fifty-plus allies around the world—not to mention most Arab states, which have the same interest as America in keeping up pressure on Iran—would be an unlikely step for most nations. However, when Iran is discovered to have flouted this deal—just as it has flouted UN sanctions and the Nonproliferation Treaty over the years—it will be difficult to reimpose crippling sanctions on Tehran. The bottom line is that it’s far less likely that “snap back” sanctions will ever be imposed on Iran than that the current sanctions regime would have crumbled.

      It is unprecedented that President Obama is taking this major and likely damaging step in the foreign policy arena with absolutely no bipartisan support. All leading Republican candidates for president will oppose this deal with revolutionary Iran. Republican members of the House and Senate will overwhelmingly reject it. Our closest ally in the region and the Middle East’s only true democracy, Israel, is dead set against the deal. The same is true for our key Arab allies. In response, the president in his press conference lumped Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, “the Israeli ambassador,” and “the Republican leadership” into a group that must argue for a new Middle Eastern “war” as the only viable alternative to his deal with Iran’s Supreme Leader. This straw-man argument that America only has a choice between the president’s weak deal and “war” is so discredited as to no longer merit a serious response.

      After Prime Minister Chamberlain signed the Munich Accords with the Supreme Leader of another ideological and cruel regime, Winston Churchill said in Parliament that the British people “should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road. . .” Sadly, his prophetic warning in 1938 appears to be applicable to us today.

       Ukraine Votes for a Future in Europe

      On Sunday night, I sat in a chilly school gym while election officials in the city of Lviv went through the tedious process of counting and reconciling paper ballots for Ukraine’s parliamentary election. Millions of Ukrainians went to the polls on Sunday to elect a new Parliament, less than a year after former president and Putin puppet Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in the Maidan protests. There was no heat, because most of the gas that powers Ukraine comes from Russia and is too expensive to use this early in the season. Despite the conditions, however, I will not forget the Ukrainian people I met while observing their election.

      There was a kindly grandmother running a rural polling station, who was so proud to have a foreign observer, especially an American, visit her village. She told me that the little hamlet, aptly named Velyka Volya (“Great Freedom”), was the place where a group of Ukrainian resistance fighters, in a 1946 version of Masada, committed suicide rather than surrender to the encircling Soviet troops.

      An elderly man at a downtown polling station shared his story. As a medical student following the Second World War, he joined the resistance and fought the Soviets until his capture in 1951. He was shipped to a Russian gulag and survived for six years before being released, but authorities prevented him from going home. He never returned to medical school. He was so happy to be serving as a precinct secretary in a democratic election in his native land. He pleaded with me for America to send arms and Kevlar so that Ukraine’s young men would have a fighting chance against Russian regulars.

      This article was originally published in the National Interest, October 29, 2014.

      A young mother arrived at a suburban precinct. In tow was her three-year-old daughter, dressed in a white snowsuit that matched her own. The little girl clutched and waved Ukraine’s blue and yellow flag and smiled the whole time that her mom underwent the formalities of casting her vote. The election was about the child. Her mom envisioned for her a future of freedom and the rule of law in the sunlit uplands of the West, not of despotism in the wintry East.

      Fresh-faced kids manned the precincts. Of the seventeen precinct election committees my team visited, most had a majority of twenty-something members. Some were made up entirely of young people. The Maidan protests that claimed the lives of one hundred of their contemporaries inspired them to get involved and stop the apparatchiks from stealing another election. These young people are taking their country back. Corrupt, one-party rule has no part in their plans.

      One of these young post-Maidan activists is Hanna Hopko. She is a thirty-two-year-old mom and committed Christian with a PhD in communications. Hopko has already established herself as a reformer who took on big tobacco in her effort to rid Ukraine’s bars and restaurants of secondhand smoke—no easy feat in a country where cigarettes are still sold everywhere. Hopko was the number-one candidate on the Samopomich Party list. Until Sunday, Samopomich had never contested a parliamentary election. What it lacked in national election experience, it made up for with a pro-European, free-men and free-markets platform. While it appears that President Petro Poroshenko’s bloc will win a narrow victory, the International Republican Institute exit poll shows Samopomich taking an unexpectedly strong third-place position. Dozens of its “outsider” candidates, led by Hopko, will now be demanding reform from inside Ukraine’s Parliament.

      Finally, for the first time since the Soviets occupied Ukraine in 1918, there will be no Communist Party representation in Ukraine’s legislative assembly. When the exit polls were released just after 8:00 p.m., showing that the Communists were well below the 5 percent threshold for proportional representation, several Ukrainian voters pumped their fists and smiled. For them, this election was a welcome end to Communist influence over their lives.

      Notwithstanding the war and the punishing economic circumstances Russia’s invasion and occupation have inflicted on them, Ukrainians are happy today. They showed the world that they remain unbowed in the face of aggression and are committed to a future in the democratic West.

       Obama’s Falklands Failure

      With the world’s attention focused on Bashar al-Assad’s violent suppression of the Syrian civilian uprising, and with the increasing likelihood of a strike by Israel to thwart Iran’s relentless drive to obtain nuclear weapons, perhaps the most underreported international story is the increasingly heated dispute between Britain and Argentina in the South Atlantic Ocean. It is an unfolding issue that could say much about the way the United States handles its alliances, including those in the Asia-Pacific region.

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