By Theodore R. Malloch
March 28, 2023
(Views expressed by guest commentators may not reflect the views of OAN or its affiliates.)
Just for the record, I am a life-long, card carrying, and practiced anti-Communist.
As a proud Cold Warrior, I grew up in the heat seeking years of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin Airlift and the infiltration of world capitals by communist revolutionaries.
At my church I was a member of a kid’s youth group known as the Jet Cadets, which met on Sunday nights, and our theme song was, “We are Jet Cadets for Jesus, we are pilots for our Lord, we will strafe and bomb …” You get the gist: the enemy was godless Soviet Russia.
My entire education right through my Ph.D. in international political economy was a study of the evils of communism and the perils of following Marxist economics. In my career as an academic, diplomat, and strategist, my Cold Warrior tendencies followed over and I proudly debated, acted, and took the front lines against the evil empire—the USSR. I have the battle scars to show for it.
I still recall, while a Republican staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, taking on the brash, young, then Foreign Minister (later Prime Minister) of Mozambique, about the horrible errors of his Marxist ways.
As a diplomat, I was at the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie days after it fell in November 1989. It is with pride that I counted myself as a member of the Reagan team that brought down the Soviet Union while I served in the UN for America in Geneva, Switzerland from 1988-1992.
My time with the notoriously capitalist Salomon Bros – makes me all the more righteously indignant for assailing the moneylenders. Capitalism is after all, a moral system that rewards effort and insight and allows people and nations to prosper.
Communism is precisely the opposite. We should stop it and call it out whenever and wherever it rears its ugly head, in Russia, Cuba, North Korea, and especially in RED China, our most serious enemy.
And today, in 2023, a weak, feeble, and badly compromised President Biden, has failed to recognize that the even weaker Russian, well former and future Soviet leader, is working overtime in the Ukraine and elsewhere to bring back our former nemesis—the very Soviet Union. At minimum, it sounds like it is time for some containment again.
I thought the Wall had fallen. I was physically there, on Friedrichstrasse, when it did and watched the evil empire disintegrate before my eyes. In reality, it never was the superpower they pretended to be. Its economy was a farce and its’ worn out ideology, disbelieved. Why didn’t we put it to rest forever?
How can it be that under Putin it wants at all costs to reemerge from the ashes of 1991? And that its autocratic leader for life — is still in power. We defeated them once and now we have to do it all over again, another time. Perhaps, it’s time to relisten to Ronald Reagan’s famous speech on the evil empire again. See: https://youtu.be/FcSm-KAEFFA
I saw a cartoon picture of Putin on the toilet in a restaurant bathroom in San Diego. It brought a laugh and a wince. This guy is the all-time crapper. He is a kleptocratic maniac (net worth of $1 trillion stollen assets) with pretensions to take back, by force, all of the former borders, the Baltics, and much of eastern Europe. This isn’t just a Ukrainian atrocity it could lead to WWIII. He does still have nuclear missiles—thousands of them, 5977 to be rather precise.
What is going on?
Has our country gone insane or has communism become our default progressive ideology now-a-days? And not just in the US and on the Democrat Left but in Russia as well? Face it, Putin never really changed. He was always a thug, KGB goon, and a Marxist-Leninist, clothed in Russian imperial nationalism. Putin is a revanchist, which means he wants to reverse past territorial loses incurred by his country after the end of the Cold War. He has now been declared a war criminal. We can’t let him get away with it. Today his guest in Moscow is Chinese President Xi Jinping. They are colluding to establish a new world order and to strengthen ties, including China’s taking of Taiwan.
Our enemy is not the Russian people but their mad dictator. He must be stopped. We are attempting this end in an unnecessary territorial war which is tragic and ongoing in the Ukraine. It should be negotiated out without a Russian victory or more death and suffering.
As Putin’s idol, Vladimir Illich Lenin himself once wrote, “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”
We can’t give these latter day Putinist-Soviets any rope. They were and remain our enemy. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Ted Roosevelt Malloch is CEO of Roosevelt Global Fiduciary LLC. He served as Research Professor for the Spiritual Capital Initiative at Yale University, Senior Fellow Said Business School, Oxford University and Professor of Governance and Leadership at Henley Business School where he co-led the Director’s Forum. His most recent books concern the nature of virtuous enterprise, the practices of practical wisdom and “virtuous business,” the pursuit of happiness, the virtue of generosity and the virtue of thrift. His latest book is Common Sense Business, co-authored with Whitney MacMillan, former Chairman and CEO of Cargill, the world’s largest privately held company. He has served on the executive board of the World Economic Forum (DAVOS); has held an ambassadorial level position at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland; worked in the US State Department and Senate; did capital markets at Salomon Brothers on Wall Street, and has sat on a number of corporate, mutual fund, and not-for-profit boards. He was very active in the Trump campaign of 2016. Ted earned his Ph.D. in international political economy from the University of Toronto and took his B.A. from Gordon College and an M.Litt. from the University of Aberdeen on a St. Andrews Fellowship.