Sunday, September 21, 2008
Spock: “Jim, there is a historic opportunity here.”
Kirk: “Don’t trust them! Don’t believe them!”
Spock: “They’re dying.”
Kirk: “Let them die.”
The exchange above is from the 1991 movie “Star Trek VI.” It’s science fiction on the outside, but it’s brimming with contemporary political commentary underneath, and its theme is the end of the Cold War.
With the Klingon Empire crumbling (an unsubtle metaphor for the collapsing Soviet Union), Spock wanted to engage the Klingons to help them and to foster the development of a Klingon Empire more friendly to Starfleet. Kirk wanted to step on their throats.
In the real world, Spock’s approach carried the day, and when the Soviet Union collapsed, America engaged Russia, lending aid in reconstructing its ruined economy and hoping that a liberal, progressive Russia would emerge to play a constructive role in the international system.
We now know how that worked out. It was a colossal blunder.
Klingons, as Captain Kirk warned, are not to be trusted. Neither are Russians. Look at the evidence.
All of Russia’s recent activities on the international stage indicate an unrepentant hostility to the American-led international order. It brazenly invades its democratic neighbors and shows little regard for the rights, lives and aspirations of minorities in its border areas. It uses its oil and gas lines as tools of economic blackmail against its Western neighbors. It provides arms to Syria and nuclear fuel to Iran. It threatens Poland with nuclear attack, and it schedules naval exercises with Venezuela.
Inside Russia, things look no more promising. Economically and politically, it resembles the petrodollar autocracies of the Middle East more than the liberal, dynamic states of Western Europe.
Culturally, it is almost medieval in outlook. Russian women have a second-class status, and instances of rape and battery are frequently regarded by Russian police and bureaucrats as too insignificant to warrant investigation. Racist violence occurs in Russian cities with “alarming regularity,” according to Amnesty International. Stable family structures are rare. Unwanted and neglected children are common and a shocking 56 percent of all pregnancies in Russia are aborted.
Whatever the architects of American policy envisioned, it wasn’t this. And that’s why I propose the Captain Kirk Plan: Instead of engaging the Russians, we should crush them.
The United States is well positioned to pressure the Russian state to destabilize. Russia is internally weak and vulnerable to disintegration from within because the foundation of its security resides in the vast distances with which it shields itself from external invasion and insulates itself from destabilizing foreign influences.
Neither Hitler’s armies nor Napoleon’s could successfully traverse the vast Russian steppe, but America shrewdly neutralizes this geographic advantage in piecemeal fashion, pushing east by absorbing former Soviet states into NATO. Ukraine, too, will soon fall into the Western orbit.
This will open the way and will bring Western culture and ideas to Russia’s doorstep, delegitimize its government and promote democracy and self-determination in its secession-minded provinces. Only such a reinvigorated containment policy, vigilantly implemented and carried to its logical end, will finally close the curtain on the Cold War.
Armstrong is a Dallas senior in business.
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Comments
Armstrong: Go 'Captain Kirk' on Russia
yea, that makes sense for the world economy and world peace. let the country destroy itself and stoke the flames of anti-americanism, risking war with a country that is still a nuclear superpower and has an unstable nationalist leader. that's a good idea.
Armstrong: Go 'Captain Kirk' on Russia
Actually the robot is right here about invading democracies, especially in overthrowing Democratically elected regimes. See: Chile, Nicaragua, Panama, Guatemala, etc...
Armstrong: Go 'Captain Kirk' on Russia
Armstrong you are truly a typical uneducated MORON of the first order so full of CRAP. At most you are qualified to be a school janitor. yet you BS like there is no tomorrow.
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