ARE YOU BELIEVING THIS?  ARE YOU REALLY BELIEVING IT?  – AT 8:32 P.M.:  The dense John Kerry is stirring up a storm by some comments he made in defense of...Russia.  We await Kerry's comments in defense of the United States:

Foreign policy experts contacted by HUMAN EVENTS sharply criticized Sen. John Kerry’s recent assertion that the United States could trust Russia to tighten sanctions on Iran because “Russia is in a different position today than it was under Bush.”

“This is all happy talk,” said Robert Kagan, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in an interview. “We think we know what Russia needs and doesn't need, and from that we extrapolate that they must be sincerely cooperating, because we think it's in their interest. This is a solipsistic discussion we are having with ourselves.”

During a press breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor last week, I asked Sen. Kerry (D.-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, why he felt the Obama Administration should trust Russia regarding UN sanctions against Iran and its nuclear program when Moscow had not delivered on similar promises in the past.

Specifically, I cited a column in the Washington Post by Kagan which noted that “the Russians have not said or done anything in the past few months that they didn’t do or say during the Bush years.” Russia has most recently agreed “for the fourth time in five years to another vacuous UN Security Council Resolution.”...

...“I think Russia is in a very different position today from when it was during the course of the Bush years,” Kerry replied. “They were riding pretty high on their energy income and their economic resurgence. That’s turned on them to a large measure. They’ve got some serious challenges and they know it.

COMMENT:  Oh please.  This is such garbage.  It's the old "they don't have the resources" argument that precedes every international tragedy.  Look, Nazi Germany didn't have the resources.  The Japanese certainly didn't have the resources.  The North Koreans didn't have the resources.  And the jihadist terror groups today often don't have great resources.

And talking about challenges:  The Soviet Union in World War II was essentially a third-world country.  It couldn't even feed its own people.  Yet, it made mincemeat of the German armies. 

Economic challenges are often in the eye of the beholder.  If a nation is willing to allocate a good chunk of its economy to military forces, it can do terrible damage, even though the store shelves are bare. 

Kerry should stick to what he knows, although I'm hard pressed to say what that is.

June 2, 2010