McIntyre Re Weissmann's Crimea Hangup

Stephen McIntyre has a very nice 23 part thread on Andrew Weissmann’s fixation on Trump and Crimea, as manifested in Weissmann’s book. Hey—hats off to McIntyre. He read the book so the rest of us wouldn’t have to.

McIntyre does a good job exposing the shallowness of Weissmann’s views. Weissmann knows little about Russian—and Ukrainian—history, nor is he willing to recognize that Russia has legitimate security interests with regard to either neighboring countries. The breakup of the old Soviet Union was bound to lead to difficult relations at times among the now separate countries. One needn’t assume that Russia is always right or always benign to recognize as legitimate interests in its ‘near abroad’. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of Crimea, which has never had any real historical or cultural ties to Ukraine. Indeed, there are even questions regarding the legality of the administrative transfer of Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in 1954, without any consultation with the local population and, obviously, without envisioning the future independence of Ukraine.

Instead, the insistence of the US war party that all interests in the world are vital to US national security—and that our interests must be paramount even at the cost of war and subversion of legitimate governments—is the most serious destabilizing factor with regard to Ukraine and Russia. In actual fact, the interest of the US in Ukraine appears to be in extracting money from corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs for the enrichment of US politicians. Not surprisingly, Weissmann’s side in this squabble happens to be with the corrupt US and Ukrainian politicians, with little concern for the local populations. Trump, by contrast—as McIntyre convincingly argues—espoused a truly constructive policy for stabilizing our relations with Russia and the entire region.

Toward the end of the thread, McIntyre points out that Weissmann, both in writing the book but also previously while part of Team Mueller, tried to drag Trump’s foreign policy views into a strictly law enforcement matter—as if stabilizing our relations with Russia was in ipso facto illegitimate goal. He even, apparently, sought to cross examine Trump regarding the whole Crimean matter—ignoring the fact that Russia’s takeover of Crimea occurred under Obama.

McIntyre is overall very even handed in his presentation. The real motivations for Weissmann and his political patrons were probably more devious than ignorant. Give McIntyre a read—it’s a worthwhile partial reprise of events that will probably come up again, as the Dems search for ways to revive the Russian Hoax to counter Trump’s comeback.