You only have to go back to the last US Presidential election to find the US Democrats mocking any suggestion that Russia was any kind of threat.

Sarah Palin was lampooned by Saturday Night Live, misquoted as saying ‘I can see Russia from my house’, which then led to a predictable round of mockery for something she never said.

Mitt Romney received predictable condemnation for daring to call Russia the US’s ‘greatest geo-political foe’. Mediaite has a good roundup of the MSM reaction, including videos.

Even Barack Obama himself weighed in during the 2012 Presidential Debates, with the ‘hilarious’ gibe that the ‘80’s called, they want their foreign policy back‘.

How the world turns. Fast forward 4 years and suddenly who is using foreign policy from the 80s? The Democrats, including Barack Obama himself.

The Obama administration on Thursday announced its retaliation for Russian efforts to interfere with the US presidential election, ordering sweeping new sanctions that included the expulsion of 35 Russians.

And of course in the years from 2012 till now we’ve seen the Russian annexation of the Crimea, which led Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2014 (just 2 years after the aforementioned mockery of Romney) to make comparisons between Russia and Hitler.

Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the 30s,” she [Secretary of State Hillary Clinton] said. “All the Germans that were … the ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they’re not being treated right. I must go and protect my people and that’s what’s gotten everybody so nervous.

Now I don’t disagree with her assessment… but is it fair to mock Hillary by saying ‘The ’30s called, they want their foreign policy back’?

And then since the situation in the Crimea, the US and Russia have been drawn into Cold-War style proxy war in Syria.

Intelligence assessments circulated in Washington that the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, was losing his grip on power.

But then the Russians arrived, bludgeoning C.I.A.-backed rebel forces with an air campaign that has sent them into retreat. And now rebel commanders, clinging to besieged neighborhoods in the divided city of Aleppo, say their shipments of C.I.A.-provided antitank missiles are drying up.

For the first time since Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Russian military for the past year has been in direct combat with rebel forces trained and supplied by the C.I.A. The American-supplied Afghan fighters prevailed during that Cold War conflict. But this time the outcome — thus far — has been different.

“Russia has won the proxy war, at least for now,” said Michael Kofman, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.

Make no mistake, the US under Obama and Sec State Clinton were very much headed back to the 80s on foreign policy, just 2 years, and then again 4 years after mocking Republicans for their ‘foreign policy from the past’, they had replicated the policies and mistakes of the cold war era for themselves.

But self-awareness isn’t a strong suit among politicians, and foresight is one of the greatest weaknesses of progressives / leftists world wide, so don’t expect an apology or acknowledgement that they were wrong anytime soon. They’ve switched effortlessly from mocking ’80s’ era foreign policies to pursuing them. They’ve moved on from the Russian ‘reset’ to reds-under-the-cyber-bed hysteria. They’ve progressed from dismissing fears of hacks against Sec Clinton’s home server, to ‘Russia hacked the DNC and stole the election!!!‘, all without so much as a shred of embarrassment.

And – here’s the irony, it’s the newly elected Republican President Trump who is now almost alone in singing from the ‘let’s just get along’ song book.

Trump suggested he might do away with the sanctions – imposed by the Obama administration in late December in response to Moscow’s alleged cyber attacks – if Moscow proves helpful in battling terrorists and reaching other goals important to Washington, the Journal reported.

Democrats support ‘action’ against Russia, Republicans (with a long history of rushing into war) are egging each other on to raise the stakes with Russia, and it’s Donald Trump, long accused of being a loose cannon, long said to be dangerous for world peace because of his lack of political and foreign policy experience who is now the one putting cold water on the embers of war.

Oh the irony.

Oh the reversal!

It’s a fools errand to try and predict the geopolitical future. A wise person once said to me that the definition of a foreign policy ‘expert’ is “Someone who can tell you all the reasons why they were wrong”… but I’m going to make a fool of myself and try anyway.

I’m of the view that the election of Donald Trump makes war less likely, not more. Clinton, as Secretary of State, has a long history of botched foreign policy maneuvers and being drawn into wars and conflicts that didn’t need to happen. She also is on record, on video no less, saying she would attack Iran if she were President.

Yes that was 8 years ago when she was running against Obama, and as we’ve seen above she’s quite capable of reversing her entire view of the world in half that time, so there’s no knowing what her ‘position’ would be on Iran today, but combine those sentiments with her actions in the last 8 years… and the phrase ‘warmonger’ seems appropriate. As President she would have been likely to either blunder into war, or go to war over her ego or to ‘protect her legacy’.

Now as I read the above I realize it might make me sound like a Trump supporter. To be clear, I’m not. His economic policies could be disasterous for the US and the world, his enthusiasm for militarized police and the ‘drug war’ are a bad sign for law abiding Americans, and beyond some superficial rhetoric he’s no friend of liberty or freedom. And in fact Trump and Putin may well be autocratic birds-of-a-feather and Trump may prove to be a disaster for freedom in the US. Time will tell.

But on foreign policy, on the likelihood of World War III… I think the world got lucky with the election of President Trump.

There’s now a good chance of a de-escalation between the US and Russia, and whilst Russia will only ever be a fickle friend, we may soon see the kind of US-Russia relations that the Democrats pretended they had 4 years ago.

You could even call it a ‘reset’…

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