In 1939, as the USSR made land grabs in Poland and Finland, Franklin Roosevelt declared that the Soviet Union was a "dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world" and called for an embargo. Not long after, when America entered the war, we were formally collaborating with Josef Stalin -- a man who had slaughtered one million of his own countrymen during the Great Purge of 1937-38. The lesson is that, when faced with an existential threat, you bring all parties to the table. Even bad people if you have to. Not just to coordinate the fight, but to coordinate post-war planning with all the players. You have to wonder where that wisdom is, today. Certainly it isn't coming from...
↧