Pat Buchanan

During the Cold War, the United States took its friends where it found them. If they were willing to cast their lot with us, from the Shah to Gen. Pinochet, we welcomed them. Democratic dissidents like Jawaharlal Nehru in India and Olof Palme in Sweden got the back of our hand.

Putin could no more survive returning Crimea to Ukraine than Bibi Netanyahu could survive giving East Jerusalem back to Jordan.

I've just come back from Mississippi and over there when you talk about the West Bank they think you mean Arkansas.

Our elite believe in a new trinity of equality, democracy and diversity. Indeed, after the Cold War, we declared the spread of democracy worldwide to be our historic mission and national goal.

If there is a horrific attack on this country like 9/11, the American people will demand we go to war and settle accounts with those who did it. But America's appetite for intervention, for nation building, for democracy crusades, is fully sated.

The bipolar world of the Cold War is history. The new world order, however, is not the One World dreamed of by Wilsonian idealists. It is a Balkanizing world where race, tribe, culture and creed matter most, and democracy is seen not as an end in itself but as a means to an end - the accretion of power by one's own kind to achieve one's own dreams.

What would be the political benefits to Obama of an amnesty? It could weld Hispanics to the Democratic Party, would be wildly popular with the ideological and Christian Left, and quietly welcomed by those Chamber-of-Commerce Republicans who have silently supported amnesty and secretly want immigration off the table in 2016.

Bush II's democracy crusade and Obama's embrace of the Arab Spring have unleashed and empowered forces less receptive to America's wishes and will than the despots and dictators deposed with our approval.

Our Founding Fathers who created this republic did not believe in democracy. When did we come to worship this idol?

Whatever they did for democracy, the U.S. interventions in the Middle East and the vaunted Arab Spring have proved to be pure hell for Arab Christians.

Democracy requires common ground on which all can stand, but that ground is sinking beneath our feet, and democracy may be going down the sinkhole with it.

Much of the hostility toward Putin stems from the fact that he not only defies the West when standing up for Russia's interests, he often succeeds in his defiance and goes unpunished and unrepentant.