Borders have been on my mind lately. Unlike some of my friends on the Old Right, I do not think Russian President Vladimir Putin is a pious, virtuous man, although I do admire his obvious virility and understand his contempt for girly Western leaders. But this fellow has been up to mischief. Right now he is moving Russian troops into two Ukrainian breakaway regions, Donetsk and Luhansk, while 140,000 well-armed Russian troops have been massed on the Ukrainian border.
Putin, who is an expansion-minded Russian nationalist, is trying to retrieve whatever he can of the former Soviet empire—or, perhaps more accurately put, of the Russian empire before World War I. While I can appreciate Putin’s patriotism and talking back to cultural radicals in the West, I also think his geopolitical ambitions spell danger for Russia’s neighbors. It therefore strikes me as appropriate, although not necessarily an effective response, to place severe sanctions on the Russian government for being in the process of gobbling up two Ukrainian provinces. Russia conceded those territories to the Ukrainian republic in the Budapest Memorandum in 1994 in return for an agreement by the Ukrainians to divest themselves of nuclear weapons put there by the Soviet government.
This show of displeasure should be done without neoconservative boilerplate rhetoric about “saving democracy” and human rights. The Ukrainian government, which is corrupt, repressive, and which was installed by the Obama Administration, hardly constitutes a paradigm of self-government. Moreover, the police state that Justin Trudeau is now establishing north of our border should be of more concern to us than what is happening in two Russophone Ukrainian provinces on the Russian border. We may be justified in discouraging Russian expansion at the expense of vulnerable neighbors, but I’m not sure any vital American interest is at stake in this situation. The comparisons now being made between the Russian president and Hitler are grotesquely hyperbolic; and the denunciation of Putin on the front page of Tuesday’s New York Post as a “madman” who “rants” reads like the kind of blah-blah I have heard from the usual suspects before.
What is happening on Ukraine’s eastern border in any case pales in significance beside the planned disaster that is unfolding along our southern border.
This chaos, which has lasted more than a year, is deliberate and intended to further one obvious goal, which is to create a permanent Democratic majority in the United States. The Democrats transport their treasured illegal aliens to various parts of the country, where they are needed to increase the Democratic vote. While the Biden Administration is inserting a goodly number of “undocumented” visitors in Texas, it is flying other ones in the dead of night to, among other places, an airport in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, situated 70 miles from my home. This area was not chosen at random. Pennsylvania right now is a purplish state and if the newcomers can be processed quickly enough, they may help turn those areas where they are being deposited permanently blue.
Since the Democrats are pressed working on this demographic transformation, they are ignoring certain niceties, for example, whether those they are moving around the electoral chessboard are infected with COVID-19, connected to drug cartels, or marked by prior criminal convictions. The reason for this haste is apparent. Biden’s party will almost inevitably lose both houses of Congress in November. Even with the media trying to press its finger on the scale, the Democrats may also lose the presidential race in 2024. What this means is that the support for illegal border crossings has a near expiration date. By the beginning of next year there will be noisy pushback in Congress, which even weak links such as Senators Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) will not be able to stop.
I have also been struck by the failure or unwillingness of Republican politicians to note the obvious about Biden’s border policy. He is reducing border guards and providing passes for illegals to enter the country for a reason. To insist these policies are a “self-inflicted” mistake, as former Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf keeps suggesting, is to tell us nothing of significance. Encouraging masses of people to invade a rich country that provides multifarious social programs has had foreseeable results. It has allowed crime lords and drug cartels to run the operation, at a very high price.
But the bleeding border has not come about because of an incompetent Democratic president, who just can’t seem to get a hold of the situation. Biden is carrying out a clever plan of flooding the country with what his advisers hope will be future Democratic voters. Since this explanation is the first one that comes to mind, I am astonished that Republican critics are treating this invasion as some kind of inadvertent botched job. It is no more that than Putin’s move into the Donbass is an accident.