With twin suicide bombings in Volgograd, at a train station and on a trolley, 34 Russians are dead and scores are injured and hospitalized.
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Moscow and the world have been put on notice by Doku Umarov, the Chechen Islamic terrorist, that the winter Olympics in Sochi, six weeks away, may not now be safe for visitors.
How should friends of Russia respond?
President Obama, in a gesture of solidarity with the Russian people, who have suffered more than any European people from Islamic terror since 9/11, should announce he has changed his mind and will be going to Sochi.
The impact would be dramatic. The Western boycott of the winter Olympics would collapse. The attention of the world’s television cameras, along with the rest of mankind, would turn to Sochi. Success of the games would be assured.
And who would get the credit? President Barack Obama.
A message would be sent to the world that no matter where America disagrees with Russia, terrorists do not tell us where we can or cannot go, and we stand in solidarity with the Russian people in our detestation of and determination to combat terror.
Vladimir Putin, who has his prestige fully invested in the Sochi games, would see this as a magnanimous gesture, a reaching out of America’s hand, to him and to Russia.
What would be the downside?
Those who have been calling for stiffing Putin and boycotting his Sochi games to protest Russia’s law prohibiting distribution of pro-homosexual propaganda to youth have already had their point made.
In an in-your-face gesture, the U.S. delegation is headed by Billie Jean King, tennis legend and lesbian, who will travel to Sochi with gay athletes Brian Boitano, the ice skating gold medalist, and Caitlin Cahow, a two-time hockey medalist.
“This is the grandest of snubs, to Putin and to Russia,” exults Chad Griffin of the Human Rights Campaign.
Yet U.S. relations with the world’s largest nation, stretching across a dozen time zones from the Baltic to the Bering Sea and holding thousands of nuclear weapons, are too serious to allow petty quarrels to prevent our working together. Earlier presidents showed the way.
Three years after Nikita Khrushchev’s tanks ran over the Hungarian freedom fighters, Eisenhower invited him to tour the United States. Six months after Khrushchev put missiles in Cuba, JFK extended his hand in his American University speech.
Months after Leonid Brezhnev had sent Warsaw Pact armies to crush the “Prague spring,” President Nixon was sounding him out on arms control and reciprocal summits. Though the Red Army was brutalizing Afghanistan, President Reagan sought from day one to meet with the Soviet leaders and finally did at Geneva and Reykjavik.
Those were serious men dealing with a serious world.
These Cold War presidents recognized that their distaste for Soviet tyranny aside, U.S. vital interests and the peace of the world dictated that they meet with their coequal nuclear power.
Moreover, as measured by freedom of speech, religion, assembly and the press, China in 2008 was a far more repressive place than is Putin’s Russia. Yet that did not prevent George W. Bush from showing up for the summer Olympics in Beijing.
And U.S. presidents have been able to work with Putin.
Putin approved NATO strikes on Libya. He has gone along with U.N. sanctions on Iran. He has held off sending Russia’s most advanced air defense system to Iran. He has assisted the United States in the war in Afghanistan. He pulled Obama’s bacon out of the fire in Syria when the American people and Congress told Obama that, red line or no red line, he had no authority to bomb Syria.
We are now working with Russia on Syria’s chemical weapons. And her cooperation is crucial in handling North Korea and negotiating a deal to keep Iran away from a nuclear bomb.
Russia’s assistance in the investigation of the Boston Marathon bombing by the Tsarnaev brothers was also immediate and extensive.
Moreover, Russia is a part of our civilization. Before World War I, which began a century ago this August, Russia was an ally of France and Britain against Germany.
And when it comes to the war on terror, we are in it together. If Russia’s end of the boat sinks, how long do we think ours will stay afloat?
A quarter century ago, Ronald Reagan was being cheered as he strolled through Red Square. Is Putin responsible for the fact that the Russian people themselves no longer view America as a friend?
Or did we, by pushing NATO onto Russia’s front porch and cutting her out of the Caspian Sea oil, contribute as well? And did not Americans collude with the oligarchs who, in the Boris Yeltsin years, looted Russia of much of her national wealth?
Obama going to Sochi would turn a page, start a new chapter.
Perhaps it would not be reciprocated. But what does Obama have to lose with such a brave and bold beau geste?
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