Articles

David A. Keene | Dan Negrea Feb 18, 2021 Throughout its history, Russia has been torn between its European and Asian roots. Today, autocratic Russia feels rejected and even threatened by democratic Europe and the West in general. To find a place in Europe, though, Russia would have to improve its democratic credentials and abandon its historic habit of threatening its neighbors. It can be done. Germany and France, historic European competitors and enemies have avoided war with each other for 76 years; France and England for 151 years. Rapprochement will be difficult with Putin in control, but he won’t be around forever, and the United States should prepare now for the day when Moscow’s leaders will realize that Russia’s national interests require a different foreign policy. This doesn’t mean we should abandon our continuing effort to discourage Russia’s dictatorial and expansionist actions through sanctions imposed together with Europe and the rest of the Free World. Moscow must realize that her behavior toward her neighbors matters and that bullies have few friends. It does mean that we should make it clear that we would welcome a friendlier Russia into the western family of nations and that we should avoid knee-jerk hostility to Russia. Whatever her faults, today’s Russia is not the existential enemy we faced down and defeated in an earlier day. It is important that we develop ties with a new generation of Russian politicians who will be the ones to eventually chart a new course for their country. Talking about “regime change” in Russia is counterproductive. A new Russian foreign policy will come from new leaders from within the existing establishment who recognize the need to change. This will eventually lead to lifting sanctions on Russia as part of comprehensive negotiations with the United States and Europe. Better future relations can also be aided by increased people-to-people contacts. Such contacts have diminished in recent years. It is time to reverse course. Our quarrel has never been with the Russian people but with the actions of some of her rulers. The United States has always polled well in Russia, but less so recently. Russian interference in U.S. and European politics has been real, harmful, and unacceptable. But exaggerating its impact and imagining Russian interference where it does not exist is not in our long-term interest. Before the authenticity of the Hunter Biden emails could be verified, for example, many politicians and media people rushed to label it Russian disinformation, an assertion contradicted by the then Director of National Intelligence. Making Russia a scapegoat for domestic political purposes is counterproductive to our important geopolitical goal of creating a wedge between China and Russia. Ordinary Russians as well as her leaders need to know that a Russia that respects international law will be welcomed as a friend by the United States, Europe, and the rest of the Free World. And that she will not be forever demonized for real and imaginary sins of the past. David Keene is a member of the Board of Directors of the Center of National Interest and was chairman of the American Conservative Union for 28 years. Dan Negrea served at the Department of State as the Special Representative for Commercial and Business Affairs and as a member of the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff in the Trump Administration. A defector from Communist Romania, he also formed and led a New York investment company. Image: Reuters.

Donna Wiesner Keene | Feb 17, 2021 At some point the market's profits will blow away like the foam on your next latte ANALYSIS/OPINION: As our elected government topples with record numbers of executive orders, whole industries are wiped out on the stroke of one man’s pen. America fought wars against command-and-control economies only decades ago. Without the Keystone Pipeline, Alberta’s Canadian oil will be sold to China, exactly what China wants. Nebraska to Texas and anyone who drives will pay. Decades of long-term private prison contracts have been declared null and void, although those guards are well-suited to new airport jobs. As of Jan. 13, according to the Federal Aviation Administration: Passengers who interfere with, physically assault or threaten to physically assault aircraft crew or anyone else on an aircraft face stiff penalties, including fines of up to $35,000 and imprisonment. This dangerous behavior can distract, disrupt and threaten crewmembers’ safety functions. No one defines “interfere with,” and it may include wearing a MAGA hat. Expect charter schools to die with a union secretary of Education. Meanwhile, billionaire Jeff Bezos objects to mail-in ballots for his business’ union vote because they are full of fraud — proving that billionaires see things eventually and are no brighter than the rest of us. President Biden has always favored unions; did you think, Mr. Bezos? But financial newsletters and advisers, multi-millionaires all, have not seen the light. They rave about biomedical breakthroughs, SaaS (subscription software), and hidden gems of well-run companies with undervalued stock. The assumption is that we are still in a capitalistic environment. Today, the government is picking winners and losers. BRAVO is now not the only television channel requiring a gay or transgender in every show, a la “The Matchmaker” or “Modern Family.” Men are metra-sexual and women “experienced,” no longer saving themselves for marriage. Even best-selling mystery writers bury liberal messages in subplots. The Sunday news shows, once a staple in Washington, repeat themselves within such a narrow band that each show mirrors the next, with variations of former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos the host arguing with Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, to call the last election fair on Feb. 7, but pick any Sunday. Businesses in Nazi Germany caved fast, too, as did the U.S. Chamber of Commerce this election, giving all their PAC money to Democrats to the ignorance then shock of the local memberships. During the last liberal era, student loans, the backbone of small banking, were nationalized. Big banks were bailed out and every effort was made to kill off community banking with massive regulations after their “government bailouts” changed hands. Refusing the money meant the IRS set up shop in the back office until the day Hillary Clinton did not slap her hand on the Bible on Inauguration Day. That chilling environment explains — but does not justify — why so many once-capitalistic firms are leaning left fast. Surviving command-and-control economies is not about being well-run, just ask Michael Lindell of My Pillow, whose Internet, social media and store contracts are being blocked — or any Trump business. As the dangerous trend to fractional shares (Blockbuster, GameStop, Hertz and silver prices) shows, people with too-little money to be responsible investors think differently. At some point, the market’s profits will blow away like the foam on your next latte, and responsible investing will return. A revised responsible — usually investors pare back to well-run companies, but in Biden World, they will invest in what the government likes. The Obama administration turned a small, poorly run regional bank Wells Fargo into the third-largest poorly run mega-bank with mega-fines (think goat offerings at the feet of the ruler) and government representatives on the board. Keeping a CEO was and is impossible and the best mortgage-servicing in the industry is a fiasco, with mortgagees like me paying off loans early just to be rid of them. But the stock? Up 50% since the election — because Wells Fargo is a darling of this administration. Virginia’s new law to level some 500 acres of forest for solar panels might be a good buy … but those are Chinese panels. Or invest in electricity and charging stations … but without oil and gas, exactly where will that “clean” electricity come from? From the Whiskey Rebellion through the Civil War to the present, urban has fought rural. Usually urban wins, fighting as unfairly as the syrup in Atlanta’s St. Stephens’ organ when Gen. Sherman raided, or the sugar in the gas tanks of Cash for Clunkers during the Clinton administration. When urban destroys rural, they use food to destroy … food created by rural citizens, as if it is easy to produce. Destroy energy and you destroy rural America, who voted for Mr. Trump. Biden World investing will be challenging; no wonder cryptocurrencies are thriving. • Donna Wiesner Keene was a Reagan, Bush and Bush appointee and landlord who has worked in the mortgage and banking industries.

David A. Keene | Feb 16, 2021 Democratic leaders talk about the working- and middle-classes, voters they neither understand nor respect ANALYSIS/OPINION: Since the 1960s, the two major U.S. political parties have been trading constituencies. The Democratic Party of Kennedy, Roosevelt and Truman focused in a quasi-populist manner on working- and middle-class Whites and on minority voters who became a key part of the party’s coalition after World War II. The party’s candidates talked about freedom, bread and butter issues, and patriotism. Their voters worked the nation’s mills and factories, fought our wars, attended church regularly and lived in vibrant urban, and the new suburban neighborhoods that sprung up in the ’50s and ’60s. The Republicans were businessmen, farmers, Wall Streeters, and a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment that had dominated the politics and the economy of the nation in an earlier age. Their patriotism was subdued but just as strong. They tended to be more highly educated and as a group earned more. Republicans tolerated the New Deal and a more activist government than their parents because they had to but talked more about balanced budgets and the economy in ways that resonated more with their voters than with those who voted for Democrats. Prior to the Goldwater campaign of 1964, the gate keepers of the GOP were to be found in corporate board rooms, banks and on country club golf courses. After Goldwater, the country clubbers were replaced by volunteer housewives and the men and women who ran the corner cleaners and other small businesses. By 1969, Republican President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew were appealing to many of their voters as a “silent majority.” Pollster Arthur Finkelstein was urging Republican candidates to appeal to voters he described as “peripheral urban ethnics.” These were mainly Catholic Irish, Italian and Polish men and women in and around urban centers like Chicago, New York City and Pittsburgh; the sons and daughters of immigrants who had been dependable Democratic voters but who were drifting away from their party. President Reagan, a converted Irish Democrat seemed to speak for many of these voters when he said that in switching parties, he hadn’t abandoned the Democratic Party because it was the Democratic Party that abandoned him. Sen. George McGovern as the Democratic presidential candidate in 1972 spoke for a new Democratic Party that was abandoning traditional positions to appeal to the students of the ’60s generation. Highly educated younger activists replaced the old party bosses. Missouri Sen. Tom Eagleton told columnist Bob Novak before his ill-fated selection as McGovern’s running mate that McGovern’s candidacy was turning his party into the party of “amnesty, abortion and acid.” By 1980, Nixon’s “silent majority” and Finkelstein’s “peripheral urban ethnics” had become “Reagan Democrats,” increasingly more comfortably voting for other Republicans. The same cultural and foreign policy positions that were driving some Democrats into the GOP were attracting highly educated and wealthy voters to the Democrats. By last fall, the transition was almost complete for both parties. A political analyst from the ’60s would be amazed by the demographics of the 2020 vote as each party’s base was voting for the other party’s candidates for president, the Senate and Congress. However, the leaders of both parties grew up in an earlier era. They still talk about how they represent the interests of groups who have long since abandoned them. Democratic leaders talk about how their goal is to further the interests of the working- and middle-classes, comprised of voters they neither understand nor respect. Democrats do, rhetoric aside, cater to their new constituents at the policy level as witness President Biden’s move to the left since his swearing-in. Republicans, except for Donald Trump, have not been nearly as responsive to their new base. Republican Party leaders were willing to appeal to and accept their votes on election day but are still don’t seem prepared to do much for them between elections. Fortunately for Republicans, the voters driven out of the Democratic Party by the obnoxiousness of its now dominant factions found Democrats even more hostile to their interests, views and, finally, to them, as the years passed, but as they began to suffer economically by 2016 and the communities in which they lived and raised their families were collapsing around them, and no one seemed to care. Donald Trump may at first have seemed an unlikely champion but recognized the plight and frustrations of these voters. persuaded them that at long last they had a leader who cared, would listen and who would try to do something for them. It won him the presidency and their loyalty as the very people who had dismissed them as ignorant “deplorables” ganged up on Mr. Trump. With Mr. Trump gone, Republicans are going to have to develop policies and candidates that will appeal to these new Republicans without abandoning the principles they claim to hold dear. It won’t be easy, but the working- and middle-class voters they need to win will no longer give them their votes just because they aren’t Democrats. • David A. Keene is an editor at large for The Washington Times.