Bidens pivot from nuclear war to civil war -- danke

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

The timing was poetic: President Biden’s Philadelphia speech comparing states curtailing election fraud to the Confederacy was delivered the same week he hosted outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a kindred spirit who imposed migrant waves on her own population and tried to force other European Union states to do the same. (She might have been more successful had she followed Mr. Biden’s lead and employed the Luftwaffe in the task.)

On arresting voter fraud protesters at the Capitol instead of violent rioters on our streets or, in Germany’s case, arresting anti-rape protesters instead of, as the New York Post put it, “rapefugees,” the two leaders again seem to be of like mind. The main sticking point? Russia.

Specifically, Germany’s Nord Stream 2 deal with Moscow, the culmination of an objection Ms. Merkel filed to a 2017 U.S. sanctions bill to stop the project. The House version of that bill promised “to oppose the Nord Stream 2 pipeline given its detrimental impacts on the European Union’s energy security,” a cloak for keeping Russia a poor cousin and not an economic rival.

“Europe’s energy supply is a matter for Europe, and not the United States of America,” a joint German-Austrian declaration correctly objected at the time.

Understanding that Germany’s deal renders Russia a more cumbersome target for our defense industry, Mr. Biden redirected Democratic hostility and our generals’ aggression inward in his speech last month. He called the Republican insistence on legal voting “the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.” Mr. Biden even skipped right over that “worst attack on our democracy since 9/11” â€" Russia’s purported meddling in the 2016 election.

With this, the president has chosen the right fight: the real one that has been brewing at home rather than the projected and catastrophic one we’ve been manufacturing against Russia. He is, of course, on the wrong side of that fight, but rather than move us closer to a war that could bring the end of the world, he has chosen a war that, if his side loses, could bring the end of Bolshevism in America.

Indeed, why not trade a cataclysmic war that doesn’t need to be fought for one we’ve been putting off since at least 2000, when a 6-year-old Cuban boy found a federal agent’s rifle in his face and wondered if his drowned mother sent him to the right place. (The right-leaning Cubans are one “Latinx” nationality that doesn’t benefit from our open-borders policy.)

Instead of seeing the cannibalistic pivot of bolshocrat aggression for the saving grace it potentially is, conservatives reflexively pounced. Even smart ones like Greg Gutfeld, the closest thing the right has to a late-night comedian, took the bait. He replayed Mr. Biden saying, “I swore an oath … to defend Americans against all threats foreign and domestic,” and retorted, “Dude, you wouldn’t know a foreign threat if a shirtless Putin rode his horse into the Oval Office and took a dump on your desk.”

Picking up on Russia where the Democrats left off â€" putting us two steps back for every one step forward by a president â€" Mr. Gutfeld elaborated: “Who does our fearless … commander in chief see as being the chief threat? You and me. … So as a new report reveals that our Navy is unprepared to defend our country but is full speed ahead on anti-racism, we’re being told that the enemy is within.

“Never mind Russia or even China …,” he added. “The real monsters drive Chevy trucks, wear red hats and listen to Toby Keith.”

That Navy story was broken last month in a Wall Street Journal article headlined “If War Comes, Will the U.S. Navy Be Prepared?” But war doesn’t have to “come” if you’re actively out looking for it, most recently by way of a spy plane fly-along with our motherland’s ironically named HMS Defender, the British destroyer that sailed into Crimean waters near Russia’s Sevastopol naval base in June to assert Ukrainian sovereignty and probe Russia’s reaction.

The reaction? Warning shots and bombs in the ship’s path miles away so it would change course after a radioed advisory was ignored. It was also a warning that a bomb might hit a ship the next time.

The joint provocation came not two weeks after the congenial Geneva meeting Mr. Biden had with Mr. Putin, when Western journalists pulled out their hair trying to get a menacing quote from the U.S. president. (One reporter in Brussels finally asked, “Is it still your opinion that he’s a killer?” Mr. Biden demurred with “Well, he has made clear that, uh, he has done some things.”)

The summit was too amicable for others as well. A day later, woke Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin instructed the commander of U.S. Central Command” to “pull missile defense systems and other military hardware and personnel from Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle East,” CNN reported. “The change reflects a broad shift within the Defense Department to focus its efforts on countering China and Russia as the threats of the future, moving away from the wars of the past in the Middle East.”

Our Middle East issues â€" you know, deep-past stuff. Unlike the Cold War, which is the future, only hotter.

The Putin-Biden meeting was requested by the American side and mystified the world. But the Unz Review website reported that Mr. Biden “made an unexpected request. The U.S. asked for temporary military bases to be established in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan … to facilitate the withdrawal of U.S. troops and to keep supplying the Kabul government with arms and ammunition after the withdrawal.”

It takes chutzpah to ask favors of a country on whose back you’ve painted a target and magnanimity from a leader to tolerate the request. Indeed, Mr. Biden’s appeal to Mr. Putin to never hack 16 critical infrastructures isn’t the sort of thing you ask of someone you believe has no soul.

John McCain’s own play on the George W. Bush quote that he saw a soul in Mr. Putin’s eyes was “I looked in Mr. Putin’s eyes, and I saw three letters: a K, a G and a B.” Not to split hairs, but Mr. Putin had been a KGB counterintelligence officer stationed in East Germany. He was intercepting Western intelligence, as opposed to spying or disseminating “Pravda.” For that task, East Germany had a promising young Angela Merkel.

Her pastor father, in a rather singular step among the Protestant clergy, had moved the family there from West Germany, and young Angela eventually became secretary for agitation and propaganda in the Free German Youth organization at the Academy of Sciences, the equivalent of Soviet Young Pioneers or Hitler Youth. According to a 2013 Der Spiegel article quoting the book “The First Life of Angela M.,” as late as September 1989 “German unification was still inconceivable [to her and her father] ‘because they strictly rejected the Western system of society.’”

This gives us a window into her soulmate, Mr. Biden, about whom the following may as well have been written vis-a-vis our own states: “Merkel, arguably, drove Britain out of the EU. Then her migrant quotas alienated Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia,” Gerald Warner wrote in a 2018 Reaction magazine article. “Why did she do it? Because of her Communist past. … Once the totalitarian mentality has been embedded in a politician’s psyche, although it may lie concealed for more than a decade of opportunist vote-seeking [and] … superficial conformity to Western ‘democratic’ totems, the will to exercise power is never extinguished. … To any normal person it was madness to encourage the already alarming irruption of migrants into Europe. To a politician bred in the totalitarian tradition of Marxism-Leninism, with its long-standing penchant for using migration and ‘internationalism’ to subvert the West, the dimly perceived opinions of the lumpen-electorate were of no account.”

Vladimir Putin isn’t the big anti-Westerner here; less-scrutinized Western leaders are. The primary fight between the West and anti-West is domestic. Although another American Civil War would be devastating, it wouldn’t wipe out life on the planet. It would also tell us where we and the world stand: Is there still an America as such, or not?

• Julia Gorin was a child refusenik and is editor of the humor volume “Hillarisms: The Unmaking of the First Female President.

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