Pence: U.S. Forces May Have to Fight Russians

There is only one political party in Washington: the War Party

Mike Pence, the unpopular former vice president and Republican presidential hopeful, said in a townhall that he believes American troops will eventually have to square off with the Russians.

Pence, like a good establishment boy, was interviewed by New Nation and considered what he believed would happen if Ukraine lost in its effort to turn back Russian forces in the country.

If the Ukrainian military doesn’t stop and repel that Russian invasion, it’s not going to be too long before that Russian army crosses a border that our men and women in uniform are going to have to go and fight (for) under our NATO Treaty,” he said. “I truly believe it.”

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Pence and other Republican hopefuls – like Nikki Haley and Chris Christie – have demonstrated how there is a ‘uniparty’ in Washington: the War Party. Both parties have tried to describe the war in Ukraine as some kind of mad effort by Russian President Vladimir Putin to conquer his neighbors.

John Mearsheimer, a distinguished professor in political science at the University of Chicago, and Sebastian Rosato, a professor of political science at Notre Dame, penned a column last week titled, “The Russian Invasion Was a Rational Act.”

They noted how – in the early days of the invasion – Putin was described as a madman. They quoted Nina Khruschcheva, a Russia expert, who said, “with his unprovoked assault, Mr. Putin joins a long line of irrational tyrants.”

Part of the reason that many in the West considered Putin irrational, was the thought that he would be unable to emerge victorious from the conflict. But the two scholars note that rationality “is not about outcomes. Rational actors often fail to achieve their goals, not because of foolish thinking but because of factors they can neither anticipate nor control.”

But they wrote that Putin’s concerns about Ukraine is not a “lone wolf” theory. It is shared in Russia – and understood by some in the West, like William Burns, the current CIA director who once served as ambassador to Russia.

In 2008, he called Ukraine’s entry into NATO the “the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests… I can conceive of no grand package that would allow the Russians to swallow this pill quietly.”

Ukraine is mainly flat farmland and has been used by Napoleon, Imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany to stage attacks under Moscow’s soft underbelly.

Thomas Friedman, The New York Times columnist, wrote an article back in May 1998—the year Poland became a member of the alliance—that included a quote from George Kennan, a diplomat credited for his strategy of U.S. Cold War containment:

“I think this is the beginning of a new Cold War. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. Of course, there’s going to be a bad reaction from Russia and then [NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are—but that is just wrong.”

He wrote that Russia, in turn, will turn to countries like Iran and China to counter the development. Kennan wrote in his diary that NATO expansion was the “greatest mistake of the entire post-Cold War period” and called it a “colossal blunder.”

His warning did not stop Warsaw, the Czech Republic, and Hungary from being added to the Alliance in 1999 and then countries like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Romania in 2004.