Does she have any good ones?
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) tweeted yesterday the U.S. leave NATO and should stop supporting Ukraine (see tweet below).
Raw Story played this story by saying, “Greene says it’s time to let Putin win” (see story here).
That’s not exactly accurate, because she didn’t say that, but it’s not completely unfair because her suggestion would have that practical effect.
On its face, this puts Greene in the isolationist and appeaser camps, two related but distinguishable approaches to foreign policy that Hitler succeeded in discrediting and rendering disreputable.
But with Greene, nothing is as it seems. She’s not a legislator, nor even much into constituent service. Her specialty is raising money, and she does that by getting attention by engaging in outrageous behavior, so she should be seen as a performance artist whose literal words are not to be taken seriously.
But that doesn’t make her any less odious.
And we’re entitled to take her words at face value, even though we have good reasons to believe she’s unserious, so let’s.
Putin is a murderer who’s waging an aggressive war of conquest against a neighboring country and has larger designs on more Eastern European countries. He’s attacking civilian targets, including hospitals and schools, and his troops are committing atrocities. In short, he’s waging an unjustified and immoral war.
Greene isn’t outright saying that’s okay, or siding with a vicious and immoral dictator. Rather, she’s afraid of getting nuked and running like a scared rabbit. And she’s naively swallowing whole Putin’s nuclear posturing, which has been a standard Kremlin play for a long, long time.
It isn’t a totally unreasonable fear. None of us want to get nuked. But we’ve already supplied Ukraine with billions of dollars of weapons that are being used to kill Russian troops, and I think if Putin were going to nuke us for this, he would’ve done it already.
Also, he has to weigh getting nuked in return, and I’ve read in reputable sources that Putin isn’t suicidal. He’s a guy who loves money, has stolen and stashed billions, and a nuked world isn’t one in which he can enjoy the material comforts that stolen money can buy.
And then there’s the matter of grand strategy. It’s much easier to defend Europe than lost it and have to take it back, as happened the last time someone wanted to conquer it. How much less safe would we be in our own homes if Putin dominated Europe?
That’s hard to quantify, but in this day and age, aggression doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. As powerful as we are, we probably couldn’t survive as an island without friends or allies in a world dominated by aggressive dictators, so we’d better keep the beachheads we have, and none is more important than Free Europe.
And don’t count on Marjorie to be a deep strategic thinker. By all appearances, she’s as shallow and superficial as they come.