Hugh Hewitt confirms that the panic over Obama’s “flexibility” remarks is a product of outdated Cold War-era thinking, which he demonstrates by explicitly making absurd Cold War-era comparisons:

Analogies might work if any of them have basic history down.

Imagine Ike telling Molotov in ’55 that he was facing his last election next year and that he needed some space, and the Soviet foreign secretary assuring him he’d transmit the information to Uncle Joe.

Or JFK saying the same thing to Gromyko, he agreed to pass it on to Khrushchev.

Or Nixon saying to Zhou forty years ago during his trip to China “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.” And Zhou replying, “I will transmit this to Chairman Mao.”

These are all horrible comparisons, not least because Stalin would have been two years dead in 1955, and one wonders just how much “basic history” Hewitt understands. Leaving aside the underlying stupidity of thinking that Obama’s comments have great significance, Hewitt’s more important mistake is that he is likening the current U.S.-Russian relationship to the intense rivalry the U.S. had with the USSR. If it were just Hewitt saying this, it could be dismissed as irrelevant, but Hewitt’s favorite candidate has been saying much the same thing this week. It’s as if nothing has changed in the last half-century for Hewitt, and more worryingly Romney seems to think in similar terms.

The comparison with Nixon is bizarre in a different way. Nixon pursued the opening to China at the start of an election year, and the decision to go to China was itself an act of unusual “flexibility” in dealing with a major communist power when doing so served U.S. interests. Had Romney been politically active at the time, he probably would have accused Nixon of being a “near supplicant” to Mao. Indeed, some of Nixon’s greatest foreign policy successes came when he ignored the usual suspects crying about appeasement. Improved relations with Russia are not as significant as Nixon’s opening to China, but they are similarly valuable to the U.S.

Is it true that “on nearly every issue they [the Russians] are working to destroy our position in our world and subjugate former allies”? No, it isn’t. This is simply nonsense. Opposing foreign intervention in Syria, for example, has nothing to do with harming America’s position in the world and a great deal to do with preserving Russian interests in Syria. Russia resists Western policies that threaten its interests and intrude on what it considers its sphere of influence, and it supports its clients even when these states are antagonistic to the U.S. For these reasons, Russia is sometimes an adversary, but it is neither an implacable foe nor is it a state with which the U.S. must have poor relations. Trombly has a useful discussion of the difference between “real” and “absolute” enemies:

For Russia to be America’s “number one” geopolitical foe, it would make absolutely no sense to cooperate with Russia to wage a war of counterinsurgency and campaign of counterterrorism against the Taliban and al Qaeda. By contrast, when Russia genuinely was the subject of America’s most ferocious enmities and source of its most pressing threats, during the Cold War, America was arming the mujahideen, despite inchoate political differences with its partners in this enterprise. Russia today is a mere adversary, rather than an inescapably dangerous foe.

What does Hewitt not understand about Russia? Apparently everything.