Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is an affront to human dignity and to liberty everywhere. How to further pressure Russia to desist?
Bring on a Ukrainian-led reconstituted liberal Soviet Union, displacing Moscow's former Soviet leadership and displacing the Russian Federation on the U.N. Security Council.
I am an O.G. Reagan “Peace Through Strength” Republican who served in the Reagan White House (not in foreign or defense policy). I was a relentless foe of the Evil Empire.
I am also the co-author of The Capitalist Manifesto, co-founder and chairman of the 200,000+ follower Capitalist League. Per a Washington Post columnist, "the second most conservative man in the world."
And I am a staunch ally of the Ukrainian resistance, co-founder, together with Ukrainian resistance leader Rev. Vitaliy Smolin and two Christian leaders Margaret Wooten and William Collier, and the blogger for, UkrainianGlory.org. It has drawn almost two million visitors.
Ukrainians are there shown as Spiritual Justice Warriors heroically fighting the evil Putin and his quisling allies. An anti-Putinista, I am also a Russophile, determined to do whatever possible to help the Russian people break free from Putin’s brutal psychopathic anti-Ukrainian trance.
I am appalled when outlier isolationist CINOs (Conservatives in Name Only) propose to renege on America’s commitment to equip Ukraine for self-defense. What else can we do to back Ukraine?
Let us take the Russian Federation’s international prestige down another peg for tolerating Putin's brutal assault on a peaceful neighbor. This could be a potent way of further undermining the Russian people’s gullible allegiance to their monstrous dictator and ending the invasion.
The West expelled Russia from the G-8 (now G-7). Yo, Vlad, no seat at the cool kids’ lunch table for you!
There's an even more potent way to highlight Russia’s current earned-pariah status. At a recent D.C. convocation, a sophisticated geopolitical observer suggested that the Russian Federation be disqualified from holding the former USSR’s seat as a permanent (and veto-wielding) member of the U.N. Security Council.
The U.N. Charter has no clear provisions for succession when a nation-state, like the USSR, dissolves. After that dissolution, the Russian Federation assumed the USSR’s permanent membership on the Security Council.
For practical reasons, nobody challenged that at the time. Now, there are those who credibly question its legitimacy.
Moreover, since the U.N. Charter gives the Security Council “primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security,” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine voids any pretext of legitimacy for permanent Security Council status claimed by the Russian Federation.
And now let's recall Ukraine’s surrendering the thousands of abandoned Soviet nuclear weapons within its territory “in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the United States, and other countries.” The USA to now forcefully urge the U.N. to replace Russia with Ukraine on the U.N .Security Council surely would make for an appropriate added security guarantee.
I see the proposal to remove the Russian Federation from the U.N. Security Council. And raise it.
Let Ukraine, another (and the second largest) constituent republic of the former USSR, be installed to lead the Soviet Union's reform and reconstitution ... and take the Security Council seat in Russia’s stead.
Before he broke bad, one of the things I found myself in broad agreement with Mr. Putin was his observation that the breakup of the post-communist Soviet Union was a tragedy.
Gorbachev failed to ditch communism and keep the USSR together. Instead, he dissolved the Soviet Union and, in effect, allowed for the replacement of communism with something possibly worse: an oligarchical kleptocracy.
Now, a small but concerning constituency for breaking up the Russian Federation is growing. Understandable.
Yet that would only compound the tragedy. Let’s do the opposite.
Let me be the first, at least the first American archconservative, to propose a counterintuitive but compelling alternative course. Resurrect the Soviet Union.
In the process, moving its capital from Moscow to Kyiv, the mother of all cities in Rus’. Let a reconstituted liberal republican USSR designate current Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy interim head of the newly reconstituted Soviet Union.
Invite all former constituent republics, including a future liberalized, reformed, post-Putin Russian Federation, to rejoin and reconstitute by plebiscite a profoundly republicanized liberal USSR with a freely elected new national leadership. Welcome a new USSR, initially led by Ukraine, as an authentic liberal republic into NATO. And the EU.
In sum, to facilitate bringing peace to Ukraine and restoring dignity to Russia? Reconstitute a liberal republican Soviet Union under Ukrainian, then full constituent-republican, leadership. Have the Ukrainian-led new USSR reclaim, from the Russian Federation, its status as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
Then, let the U.N. send the Blue Helmets into Ukraine to establish, and keep, the peace. As it did in Korea.
Glory to Ukraine.
Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $94T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.
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