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How do we think Beijing would respond if Corker & Co. openly declared not only their right but their intent to funnel U.S. funds to civic organizations to bring about an end to single-party Communist rule?

The Russian people, today backing Putin by 80 percent, seem happier with their government than we Americans do with ours.

But it may be this idea of installing a ballistic missile defense, an ABM system, in Poland and the Czech Republic, that is most dangerous of all.

Putin has already signaled that this would cross his red line, that if we start implanting antimissile missiles in Eastern Europe, he will reply by installing offensive missiles.

The Reagan-Gorbachev INF treaty to eliminate all intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe—the USSR’s triple-warhead SS-20s, and our Pershing II and cruise missiles—could wind up in the dumpster.

We could have a mini-Cuban missile crisis in Eastern Europe.

And how would our German allies react to Russian missiles rising in Kaliningrad, the former Prussian capital of Konigsberg, wedged between Lithuania and Poland?

Russia and Ukraine have been like Siamese twins for a thousand years. When did where and how they separate become our strategic concern?

Under Obama, the U.S. has declined to intervene in civil wars in Syria, Ukraine and Libya, or to go back in force in Iraq. He is pulling us out of Afghanistan.

The American Imperium is folding up. Retrenchment is underway.

If the Republican counteroffer to Obama’s is a return to the compulsive interventionism of Bush II, this is where some of us will be getting off.