Harris Goes Full Cold War in Hopes of the Polish Vote.Who Cares if it Pushes Us Closer to War.
Though they may be happy to ignore Palestinian-American voters' pleas for a halt to U.S. support for Israeli butchery in Gaza, the Harris-Walz campaign is only too happy to go full cold war for the sake of Polish-American and Ukrainian-American votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Politico National Security reports that a Democratic dark money operation, America’s Future Majority Fund super PAC, is about to blanket the Keystone State with a full-throated ad campaign invoking Reagan’s and Kennedy’s stand against “communist dictators” and pledging that Harris “will stand up to Putin, protect our allies and keep us safe.” There’s even a brief shot of Joseph Stalin to remind us how wicked the Russians are. Trump, naturally, features as Putin’s ally. Foreign Policy, as the old Washington adage goes, stops at the water’s edge, meaning that it’s always about domestic politics. We certainly have been here before, most pertinently back in 1996, when Bill Clinton opted to break prior U.S. promises to Moscow that NATO would not expand “one inch” to the east, and sanction exactly that. As I wrote in my book Spoils of War “‘It was widely understood in the White House that Zbigniew] Brzezinski told Clinton he would lose the Polish vote in the ’96 election if he didn’t let Poland into NATO,’ a former Clinton White House official closely involved in NATO expansion planning assured me. To an ear as finely tuned to electoral minutiae as the forty-second president’s, such a warning would have been incentive enough, since Polish Americans constituted a significant voting bloc in the Midwest. It was no coincidence then that Clinton chose Detroit for his announcement, two weeks before the 1996 election, that NATO would admit the first of its new members by 1999 (meaning Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary). He also made it clear that NATO would not stop there. “It must reach out to all the new democracies in Central Europe,” he continued, “the Baltics and the new independent states of the former Soviet Union.” None of this, Clinton stressed, should alarm the Russians: “NATO will promote greater stability in Europe, and Russia will be among the beneficiaries.” Not everyone saw things that way; in Moscow there was talk of meeting NATO expansion “with rockets.” Chas Freeman, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs from 1993 to 1994, recalls that the policy was driven by “triumphalist Cold Warriors” whose attitude was, ‘The Russians are down, let’s give them another kick.’ Freeman had floated an alternate approach, Partnership for Peace, that would avoid antagonizing Moscow, but, as he recalls, it “got overrun in ’96 by the overwhelming temptation to enlist the Polish vote in Milwaukee.’” Clinton carried Wisconsin by just over ten percent in ‘96, so he didn’t really need to lay the groundwork for a new cold war, currently growing hotter by the day, for the sake of squeezing out a few extra votes in Milwaukee, but he did it anyway. Harris faces a tougher race in Pennsylvania and other rustbelt states, so maybe threats of confrontation with a nuclear superpower will pay off. Whether the gambit will “keep us safe” is another matter. |