Posts tagged Sen. Rand Paul

Is it a cold, apathetic heart that says we should avoid entangling alliances?  Or is it a compassionate, thoughtful, long-sighted man who says we should mind our own business and let the bravest and youngest fight the wars the oldest and richest choose?

This week Senator Marco Rubio tried to grant the small country of Georgia (the former Soviet one, not The Georgia Satellites one) entrance into the entangling morass of diplomacy and war hawks known as NATO.

As the following article details, this is a move headed by the foisted  and fought for by the foolish.

*From Jack Hunter and DailyCaller.com

When John McCain proclaimed in 2008, “Today, we’re all Georgians,” unfortunately he was not talking about the Southern state. No, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee was declaring his — indeed, all of our — support for the nation of Georgia, which that year became involved in a brief military conflict with neighboring Russia over who had claim to the region of South Ossetia.

Which country’s soldiers fired first became a matter of international dispute, but the Bush administration made clear that this would not become America’s dispute; there would be no military response by the United States. Defense Secretary Robert Gates stressed that America had successfully avoided a shooting war with Russia during the Cold War and he saw “no reason to change that approach today.”

A few days ago, some Republican senators attempted to lay the groundwork for a shooting war with Russia. I wish I were exaggerating.

Last week, while most senators were focused on the important national issues of war funding and Americans’ constitutional liberties, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) seemed more concerned with the fate of a foreign country. Behind the scenes, Rubio moved to have a unanimous consent vote that would have hastened Georgia’s entry into NATO.

The unanimous consent vote never happened because Senator Rand Paul single-handedly prevented it.

This is not a triviality. Make no mistake: Bringing Georgia into NATO could lead to a new military conflict for the United States, which is why any move that would facilitate Georgia’s entry into the alliance should be publicly debated. Rubio’s attempt to push this through by unanimous consent — that is to say, without any formal debate or vote — is highly suspect and calls into question the senator’s better judgment.

But what Sen. Rubio is advocating is nothing new. Examining the political context of McCain’s declaration of solidarity with Georgia in 2008 should give Americans pause about the Washington establishment’s foreign policy agenda. After the 2008 South Ossetia conflict, Pat Buchanan wrote:

Who is Randy Scheunemann? He is the principal foreign policy adviser to John McCain and potential successor to Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security adviser to the president of the United States. But Randy Scheunemann has another identity, another role. He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man.

Continued Buchanan:

From January 2007 to March 2008, the McCain campaign paid Scheunemann $70,000 — pocket change compared to the $290,000 his Orion Strategies banked in those same 15 months from the Georgian regime of Mikheil Saakashvili. What were Mikheil’s marching orders to Tbilisi’s man in Washington? Get Georgia a NATO war guarantee. Get America committed to fight Russia, if necessary, on behalf of Georgia. Scheunemann came close to succeeding.

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