by LEE SMITH
With President Joe Biden’s poll numbers at all-time lows and the midterm elections just around the corner, it should hardly come as any surprise that the Democratic Party will go back to its playbook and once again make Russian President Vladimir Putin the centerpiece of campaign season. But in order to blame Putin for Biden’s sinking presidency, the party and its media retinue are going to have to bury the fact that Biden and Putin are a team, tied together by the Iran deal.
In 2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign devised a plan to smear her rival and deflect attention away from her self-sabotaging use of a private email server—they got the press and FBI to say that Donald Trump had been compromised by Putin. In 2020, the media and former U.S. spy chiefs protected Biden’s campaign by loudly and falsely claiming that damning evidence of his family’s ties to corrupt foreign enterprises and officials found on Hunter Biden’s laptop was “disinformation” leaked by Putin’s spy services. Both attempts to blame Putin for the Democratic Party’s own messes were false.
And now the White House claims that the historic levels of inflation and surging food and energy prices that have turned voters against Biden are Putin’s fault. Never mind the insane amounts of money the U.S. government has been printing since the outbreak of COVID, or Biden’s decision to kill the Keystone pipeline on day one of his term and tell domestic energy producers to go jump off a bridge. These are Putin’s price hikes!
Up until now, the Democrats have been able to dine with Vladimir Putin and have their political cake, too. They blame Russia’s brutal despot for their domestic political screw-ups and then pay him off for doing their dirty work in the Middle East. Given that Putin couldn’t care less what lies Democrats tell on CNN, or how he is depicted by writers for The Atlantic, this arrangement has worked out just fine for all concerned—as long as campaign season bluster doesn’t affect a mutually profitable business relationship.
Unfortunately for the Democrats, the collision of Biden’s ghastly poll numbers with a real-life shooting war in Ukraine makes the enemy-by-day, proxy-by-night routine more difficult to sustain. What Biden’s protectors and validators in Washington can no longer conceal is that Biden is dependent on Putin to secure his chief foreign policy goal: reentering the Iran nuclear deal from which Trump withdrew. And once the deal is struck, Putin and his oligarchs stand to profit handsomely. As Sen. Ted Cruz put it, Biden intends to subsidize Putin’s war with a cash windfall worth at least $10 billion that will offset any sanctions Biden has imposed for invading Ukraine.
Typically, statesmen rationalize working with despots to achieve a greater good, even as these choices rankle the conscience of thoughtful men and women. Sure, Stalin is evil, but he is throwing millions of men against a greater evil, Hitler. We can work with him; we have to work with him. So surely Biden must think that Putin can help America achieve some vital geopolitical goal that somewhere down the line will foster greater things? Or else why work with a man who makes a habit of bombing schools and hospitals and other civilian facilities in Chechnya, in Syria, and now in Ukraine?
No, in this case American policymakers are countenancing havoc to beget chaos. By guaranteeing Iran’s ability to destabilize the Persian Gulf region and jolt energy markets by legalizing its nuclear weapons program, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is a direct threat to American prosperity and domestic peace, not to mention to the entire Middle East. But because the Iran deal was Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy initiative, the Biden team has made restoring it their top foreign policy priority.
Yet faced with the Biden administration’s overeager desire to reenter Obama’s Iran deal as soon as possible, the Iranians played hard to get. Their pride was wounded. And with a buyer firmly on the hook, the price could only go up. The obscurantist regime decided to teach the Americans a lesson by refusing to negotiate directly with the Biden team, even though it is staffed by Obama aides with whom it first struck the JCPOA in July 2015. The person chosen to mediate between America and Iran was Vladimir Putin.
[the_ad id=”157875″]
It was not the first time the Obama-Biden team had tasked Moscow with managing Iran policy on its behalf. As the Syrian war broke out in March 2011, U.S. allies beseeched the White House to stop Bashar Assad’s bloody campaign against his own people. But since Assad was an Iranian client as well as a Russian one, Obama knew that if he stepped in against Assad, there would be no Iran deal. So he brushed off petitioners and told them to go talk to Putin instead. Obama then repeatedly used the Russians as a veto by proxy to defeat anti-Assad resolutions at the United Nations. When the Russians shot down a Turkish air force jet on the Syrian border, the White House backed Moscow’s account of the incident and left its NATO ally twisting in the wind.
Perhaps most famously, Russia protected Obama’s nuclear deal when it offered to rid Assad of his chemical weapons arsenal—an offer that kept Obama from having to enforce the redline against the use of chemical weapons. Because keeping Assad in power was an Iranian strategic necessity, the equation circa mid-2014 was clear to everyone involved: no Russia, no Iran deal. When Putin bit off Crimea and chunks of Donbas, Obama barely blinked an eye.
When Putin again escalated the number of Russian ground forces in Syria shortly after the JCPOA was struck, Obama administration officials celebrated Putin as America’s new partner in the fight against terror—that is, the war to defend Iranian interests in the eastern Mediterranean. If Iran couldn’t protect its “equities” in Syria on its own, then Russia could protect them, with American help.
It was only natural that the same people who relied on Russia to protect the Iran deal the first time around knew they could count on Putin once again when it came time for the United States to reenter the JCPOA. In December 2021, Putin and Biden aides met in Vienna to coordinate their negotiating postures over the Iran deal. Biden and Putin then discussed their arrangements together directly in a video summit. “Russia is an important partner in these talks,” a State Department spokesperson told the press in January. “We engage very constructively with Russia … on a mutual return to the JCPOA.”
The same month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed his gratitude to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov for the “opportunity to discuss Iran.”
Biden and Putin Partners in Crime
Damn, describing how utterly stupid these people are gets REALLY tiresome, but it must be done. Gutless, chest-thumping Obama drew his red line in Syria over the use of chemical weapons and Assad went out and pissed on it. Putin grabbed his opportunity and told Obama HE would take care of the chemical weapons, giving little chickenshit liar Obama a way out, which he wasted no time scurrying down. Putin said he would pack up all of Assad’s chemical weapons and take them away. How’d that work out?
Not too long afterward, Assad was gassing people again. Obama had nothing to say… or do.
So, obviously, Putin is a trustworthy partner. I mean, just look at how he honored the security guarantees given Ukraine.
Now, the idiot of idiots Biden has chosen someone that is so weak in the conventional forces department that he threatens the world with his nukes to help him keep Iran (Russia’s ally, by the way) from attaining nuclear weapons and becoming a nation with weak conventional forces and threatens the world with nukes. If this makes sense to you… seek help. NOW.