Despite the outcry of many Republicans like Gingrich in 2014 that Obama was doing too little to defend Ukraine, the president in the end did deploy forces and military assets to many of the front-line states in the NATO alliance. This creates a kind of trip wire if Russia ever were to attack these countries with conventional forces. It is an example of deterrence, a concept of statecraft that Republicans used to understand.
It’s worth asking whether Trump or Gingrich would say now that Obama went too far — that he took too much of Gingrich’s advice. After all, as the former Bloomberg View columnist Josh Rogin reported this week, Trump apparats stripped language from the Republican platform that called for lethal defense assistance to Ukraine.
There are two ironies in all of this. The first is that this squishiness on Russia is coming from a nominee who poses as a super hawk. The same guy who muses about killing the families of terrorists is open to abrogating America’s treaty commitments to an alliance that has prevented a major European war for the last 70 years. We have to suspect his hawkish proposals are just for show. (Michael Hayden, who served as CIA director under George W. Bush, and John Brennan, who is currently CIA director, have both said they would not implement such an order.)
But the second irony is that Trump’s stated position on NATO puts him far to the left of Hillary Clinton, who as secretary of state implemented a “reset” in relations with Russia that was opposed by most Republicans.
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