LewRockwell.com
ANTI-STATE•ANTI-WAR•PRO-MARKET
March 3, 2014
In 1783 the Crimea was annexed by
Catherine the Great, thereby satisfying the longstanding quest of the
Russian Czars for a warm-water port. In fact, over the ages Sevastopol emerged
as a great naval base at the strategic tip of the Crimean peninsula, where it
became home to the mighty Black Sea Fleet of the Czars and then the
commissars.
For the next 171 years Crimea was an
integral part of Russia—a span that exceeds the 166 years that have
elapsed since California was annexed by a similar thrust of “Manifest
Destiny” on this continent, thereby providing, incidentally, the United States
Navy with its own warm-water port in San Diego. While no foreign forces
subsequently invaded the California coasts, it was most definitely not
Ukrainian and Polish rifles, artillery and blood which famously annihilated The
Charge Of The Light Brigade at the Crimean city of Balaclava in 1854; they
were Russians defending the homeland.
And the portrait of the
Russian ”hero” hanging in Putin’s office is that of Czar Nicholas
I—who’s brutal 30-year reign brought the Russian Empire to its historical
zenith, and who was revered in Russian hagiography as the defender of
Crimea, even as he lost the 1850s war to the Ottomans and Europeans. Besides
that, there is no evidence that Putin does historical apologies, anyway.
In fact, its their Red Line. When
the enfeebled Franklin Roosevelt made port in the Crimean city of Yalta in
February 1945 he did know he was in Soviet Russia. Maneuvering to cement
his control of the Kremlin in the intrigue-ridden struggle for succession after
Stalin’s death a few years later, Nikita Khrushchev allegedly spent 15
minutes reviewing his “gift” of Crimea to his subalterns in Kiev in honor of
the decision by their ancestors 300 years earlier to accept the inevitable and
become a vassal of Russia.
Self-evidently, during the long decades
of the Cold War, the West did nothing to liberate the “captive nation” of the
Ukraine—with or without the Crimean appendage bestowed upon it in 1954.
Nor did it draw any red lines in the mid-1990′s
when a financially desperate Ukraine rented back Sevastopol and the strategic
redoubts of the Crimea to an equally pauperized Russia.
In short, in the era before we got our
Pacific port in 1848 and in the 166-year interval since then, the security and
safety of the American people have depended not one wit on the status
of the Russian-speaking Crimea. Should the local population now choose fealty
to the Grand Thief in Moscow over the ruffians and rabble who have seized Kiev,
what’s to matter! Worse still, how long can America survive the screeching
sanctimony and mindless meddling of Susan Rice and Samantha Power? Mr.
President, send them back to geography class; don’t draw any new Red
Lines. This one has been morphing for centuries among the quarreling
tribes, peoples, potentates, Patriarchs and pretenders of a small region
that is none of our damn business.
Former Congressman David A. Stockman
was Reagan's OMB director, which he wrote about in his best-selling book, The Triumph of Politics. His latest book is The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in
America. He's the editor and publisher of the new David Stockman's
Contra Corner. He was an original partner in the Blackstone Group, and reads
LRC the first thing every morning.
Copyright © 2014 David Stockman
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