Russia Returns to America’s Back Door

As the struggling U.S. administration thrashes around to save a sinking U.S. ship, an old enemy sails up to its back door.
 

“Bother me tomorrow, today I’ll buy no sorrows, Doo, doo, doo, lookin’ out my back door.” So sang a mop-haired young John Fogarty in the Credence single back in the flower-power days of 1970. That was eight years after President Kennedy had looked out America’s back door and spied Russian nuclear missile stations being erected on Cuba’s soil. Now, 47 years later, Russia is once again floating up to America’s Cuban back door. This time it’s to drill for oil in the hotly contested Cuba Basin oilfield.

Latest official estimates by the U.S. Geological Survey indicate that up to 9 billion barrels of oil and 21 trillion cubic feet of gas lie beneath the North Cuba Basin. Cuba has parceled out contracts in this region to a motley group of foreign powers currently bent on developing the field. China, Iran and the EU member nation Spain, in addition to Russia, are all being courted by the downtrodden Communist outpost as it struggles to hold together its broken economy.

For all these nations there are far broader strategies at work here than just the pleasure of doing business with the butchering Raúl Castro, who, in tandem with his ailing brother Fidel, has proven so expert at making his political opponents disappear overnight. The Cuban strategies being enacted by these nations—two of them, China and Iran, sworn enemies of the U.S., with Russia’s legacy hardly one of being America’s best friend—are certainly not in the foreign-policy interests of America.

But let us dwell on Russia in particular, for it has a long history of meddling in Cuban affairs to the detriment of the United States.

Just two months into President Obama’s presidency, Russia sent a political shot across America’s bows when the chief of staff of Russia’s long-range aviation, Maj. Gen. Anatoly Zhikharev, told reporters that Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez had offered Russia “a whole island with an airdrome, which we can use as a temporary base for strategic bombers.” Zhikharev also included Cuba as another option for hosting the long-range nuclear-capable bombers.

To have such a challenge issued so blatantly to this current administration by Russia shows just how far down the power scale the U.S. has slid since 1962, when Nikita Kruschev caved in under challenge from President Kennedy and pulled his nuclear weapons off Cuban soil!

Now, just four months on from that announcement, Russia has signed a deal with Cuba to begin oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. According to Cuban state media, “Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin signed four contracts securing exploration rights in Cuba’s economic zone in the Gulf. … Russia and Cuba have been working to revitalize relations, which cooled after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia’s Zarubezhneft oil concern will work alongside the Cubapetroleo monopoly in the deep waters of the Gulf” (bbc News, July 29).

So here’s the scenario. Within the first six months of President Obama becoming U.S. commander in chief, Russia, America’s old nemesis, has announced the prospect of its strategic nuclear bombers being located off the Caribbean Sea and now signed a deal that will permit it to drill for oil right off the U.S.’s Cuban back door.

At the time that Russia was inking the oil exploration deal with Cuba, legislators attending a congressional hearing in Washington were hearing from the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian affairs that “the United States and Russia have begun cooperating in several areas of common interest …. Obama’s call back in December for a ‘resetting’ of relations, based on the belief that cooperation is possible on issues of shared concern, he said, has already begun to be realized” (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, July 30).

Well, in the light of Washington’s “belief that cooperation is possible on issues of shared concern,” it is interesting to note that Russia has not indicated any intention other than to pursue the Venezuelan offer to have its nuclear bombers stationed on Venezuelan soil. And now, Russian ships will have clear right of passage right up to America’s back door courtesy of the Cuban oil deal.

Russian oil exploration vessels are just as capable of conducting clandestine surveillance of the U.S. during a time when they are ostensibly “cooperating in several areas of common interest” as Russian fishing trawlers were in the North Atlantic during the Cold War. It’s just that the Cuba Basin is a lot closer to the U.S. than the vast expanse of the North Atlantic is.

Yet, even as the U.S.’s enemies entrench themselves at America’s southern gateway, those charged with the responsibility of U.S. security pursue their naive appeasing foreign policy. As one European source recently opined, “Those aren’t smiles on the faces of U.S. competitors. They’re smirks!”

Meanwhile, it’s as though the foreign-policy gurus in Washington view the scene developing in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean basin as though in a false dream in the mode of the old Credence song, “Bother me tomorrow, today I’ll buy no sorrows, Doo, doo, doo, lookin’ out my back door ….”

The plain truth is that the anti-U.S. liaisons that are building, increasingly rapidly, in the Caribbean and in the Cuba Basin are destined to end not only in a future threat to U.S. security. Bible prophecy indicates they will lead directly to the mounting of a siege at America’s very back door!

For the real history on just how the once most powerful and feared single nation on Earth has reached a point of no return to its prior superpower status, and for an outline of the profound changes that America faces as a result, obtain your free copy of The United States and Britain in Prophecy. The information it contains will aid you in understanding how the U.S. has reached a point where it can no longer confidently secure its vulnerable back door.