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If Hitler's Nazi army had not invaded Gazastrip of Poland on 1st September, 1939 then
Answers
Well, Mr. Speaker, I believe that he was. I believe it was the first
piece on the giant geopolitical chessboard, the chessboard that our
President doesn't seem to think actually is in play any longer, that
Cold War chessboard.
But when I look at the map of that part of the world and look at the
flow of energy that goes back and forth, Ukraine and Georgia have
similarities. One is, they have ports.
The second one is that they are a nexus for energy, transmitting
energy through their countries with pipelines and, in the case of
Georgia, rail lines. It is important that if you can control Georgia
you can control a lot of the energy that comes through from the east,
and if you can control Yugoslavia, you can control a lot of the energy
that comes through from the east.
Those two things, plus the historical involvement of the Russians in
the Crimea. I take us back to the gentlelady from Ohio who laid out the
case of the 1994 treaty that the Russians signed and the interested
parties signed that all would respect the territorial and sovereign
borders of the Ukraine, and of course the Russians violated that.
I don't expect much of anything else to happen. I don't think they
are bound by their honor in any way. I think they are only bound by the
limitations of the static tension that comes from power, and that power
can be economic, it can be political. It is probably not very much
cultural, but it also is, in the highest degree it is military.
When there is no military deterrent in place, then Putin is going to
be determined to move forward and reconstitute the old Soviet Union. He
lamented years ago that the worst thing that happened in the 20th
century was the implosion of the Soviet Union, or the disintegration of
the Soviet union.
I would also point out that the world is not going to tolerate a lone
superpower, which the United States of America is, the unchallenged
greatest nation in the world, the strongest superpower there has been,
with global reach everywhere.
When the United States pulls back--first, Mr. Speaker, we project
power. We project power in the ways that I said, economically,
culturally, militarily and strategically, and when the United States
pulls back from that, when we decide that we are not going to exert
influence in parts of the world, then the lust for power that comes in
the embodiment of someone like Putin fills that vacuum. In fact, it is
pushing constantly. It doesn't need a vacuum to push in.
Russian pushed into Georgia in 2008. They gave us a preview of what
was to come.
Now, here we are, these few years later, these six or so years later,
and we are watching now, as Putin finished up with his Olympics, his
50-plus billion dollar endeavor, I think a lot of it had to do with
raising the spirits of the Russian people and their sense of support
for him so that he could get away with this cold tactic of a military
invasion and conquest of the Crimea.
I don't have any doubt that he has got his eyes on the balance of the
Ukraine, that he has got his eyes on the balance of the Soviet Union in
whatever order that he can pull this off.
If we show weakness, if we don't stand