In a Breitbart column insisting that Ronald Reagan was not as assertive as commonly believed on military and foreign policy issues, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) mentions, in passing, “I met Ronald Reagan as a teenager when my father was a Reagan delegate in 1976.”
The column carried the Rand Paul warning to “Stop Warping Reagan’s Foreign Policy,” even while citing the Reagan connection to his own father.
But his father, Ron Paul, is hardly a Reaganite today. Indeed, he is now claiming that Crimea has a right to leave Ukraine and join Russia, and that U.S. sanctions against the Russian regime are “criminal.”
“That’s just people looking to start a war,” Paul said. “This is criminal, it’s stealing and will just aggravate things and escalate things. Sanctions are acts of war…to freeze assets if you’re at war with Hitler and there’s a declared war, that’s a little different, but to do this so easily and casually as we do, that’s just looking for a fight.”
In a story about these extraordinary comments, U.S. News & World Report said that Senator Paul “does not seem to share his father’s position on Crimea.” It noted that, in a February 28 statement, Senator Paul said, “The United States should make it abundantly clear to Russia that we expect them to honor the December 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which the U.S., Russia, and the United Kingdom reaffirmed their commitment to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.”
But this wasn’t the senator’s first comment on the crisis in Ukraine.
On February 25, the senator had sounded like his isolationist father, saying to The Washington Post that he “believes the United States should seek ‘respectful’ relations with Russia and avoid antagonizing” Russian President Vladimir Putin. Post reporter Robert Costa quoted Paul as saying, “Some on our side are so stuck in the Cold War era that they want to tweak Russia all the time and I don’t think that is a good idea.”
The phrase “stuck in the Cold War” suggests Russia had changed for the better since the collapse of the Soviet empire. That is clearly not the case. It appears that Rand Paul quickly switched gears once he realized his pro-appeasement position would not go over well with conservatives.
Despite Ron Paul serving as a Reagan delegate, it should be noted that his close friend, Murray N. Rothbard, described as the founder of modern libertarianism, had written a piece entitled, “Ronald Reagan, Warmonger.” The article attacked Reagan for resisting communism in Central America. Rothbard even suggested that Reagan should have been impeached over the issue of seeking the overthrow of the Communist regime in Nicaragua.
In this context, some important analysis of the continuing “Ron Paul Revolution,” featuring a discussion of “Ron, Rand, and the [Ludwig von] Mises Institute,” is coming from an unusual source—the website of the New York Young Republican Club. “The Mises Institute, like Ron and Rand, has a powerful distaste for all American activity abroad,” one article asserts. It notes that “For his obstinate stance against all American activity abroad Ron Paul was offered and accepted a spot on RT (formerly Russia Today) television,” a topic we addressed back in 2011 in the article, “Why is Russian TV Backing Ron Paul?” (Ron Paul serves as a “Distinguished Counselor” to the Mises Institute, named after Ludwig von Mises, the Austrian School economist.)
In regard to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ron Paul argues in a column that “the elected parliament in autonomous Crimea voted last week to hold a referendum to decide its future,” and that this is an exercise of the principle of “self-determination,” which is “enshrined in international law.” This is the position of Vladimir Putin, after sending his troops into the country, and making secession or annexation the certain result.
The article on the New York Young Republican Club site makes several interesting points in this context, including that “the Mises Institute’s intellectual oeuvre is their close tracking to neo-Confederate themes, including secession,” as applied to the United States. It also notes that the institute published an article advocating secession shortly after the election of Barack Obama, and that it “closely tracks the prediction of a Russian Professor and former KGB analyst [Igor] Panarin a few months earlier.”
That prediction was included in a Wall Street Journal article describing Panarin as “not a fringe figure,” noting, “A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.”
The map included in The Wall Street Journal article about Panarin’s prediction has Alaska going to Russia. “It would be reasonable for Russia to lay claim to Alaska; it was part of the Russian Empire for a long time,” Panarin said.
The article at the New York Young Republican Club site goes on: “The Mises Institute employs Yuri N. Maltsev, a Russian economist with degrees from Moscow State University—the same University where Aleksandr Dugin teaches ‘Conservative Revolutionary’ studies.” Maltsev was a member of a team of Soviet economists that worked on Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika, his bio says.
This article links back to another article noting that Aleksandr Dugin, the same Russian thinker we have mentioned in several recent articles, is a mentor to Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin, and highly influential within the Russian Orthodox Church. It says, “Dugin professes the Fourth Political Theory, a program for ‘conservative revolutionaries’ that closely mirrors the work of Italian Fascist Julius Evola. Rejecting Communism, which ruined Russia, and capitalism, which according to Dugin destroys all culture, the Fourth Way is a Christian-centered fascist state… almost like Russia today.”
This article, “Who is Aleksandr Dugin?,” provides some of the background that we need desperately from the major media, in order to understand Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and those who excuse or apologize for it.
Major points include:
· At the time of the South Ossetian War in 2008, Dugin actually declared war on the United States and NATO.
· While openly hostile to the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, Dugin and his acolytes esteem Shiite Islam for its traditionalism against and strength against the tide of capitalism. Hence, Moscow and Tehran remain close allies.
· Dugin’s grand geopolitical plan is known as Eurasianism. It seeks the unification of Europe and Russia under an Orthodox Christian government.
We have commented on Dugin’s relationship with former KKK leader David Duke, who has traveled to Russia. We have now learned that he traveled to Russia for the first time in 1995 and met Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the Russian “nationalist” who supports retaking Alaska from the United States. He says Crimea is now reuniting with its “homeland.”
As amazing as it sounds, residents of Alaska are raising the alarm about Russian designs on our 49th state. One says that in the last five years hundreds of Russians “have migrated here…they have their very own enclaves and what they are doing is driving the locals out of business.” One adds, “If it really came down to it and Mother Russia called, who would they really support? This I do know—as a weak America gets weaker we will become a tempting target.”
Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org