President Donald J. Trump participates in a bilateral meeting with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2019, at the InterContinental New York Barclay in New York City. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
Where is America in its relations with Ukraine? If you were listening to the impeachment hearings this week, you would have thought from the Democrats on the committee and the bureaucrats at the witness table that Ukraine was a NATO ally America is sworn to protect. That has never been the case, as Pat Buchanan points out to readers of The American Conservative. He writes (abridged):
Despite dramatic depictions of Ukraine as our embattled ally, Ukraine has never been an ally. We are not now nor have we ever been obligated to fight for its sovereignty or territorial integrity. Efforts to bring Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia into NATO have been repeatedly rebuffed in the United States and by our European NATO allies.
Kent(George) and Taylor(William) are honorable men. But they are career diplomats of the Department of State and veteran advocates of a foreign policy that sees Russia as an enduring aggressor and Ukraine as a fighting ally entitled to U.S. military assistance.
They have, in the old phrase, gone native. They champion the policies of yesterday and the embattled countries to which they are accredited and to whose causes they have become converted.
But Trump was elected to overturn the interventionist policies America has pursued since the century began. He was elected to end Cold War II with Russia, to reach a modus vivendi as Reagan did, and to extricate us from the endless wars into which Presidents Bush and Obama plunged the nation.
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