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Bret Stephens says we got Putin just where we want him and we’re about to throw him into the briar patch.
Barack Obama thinks Vladimir Putin isn’t such a smart guy. “There’s a suggestion somehow that the Russian actions have been clever, strategically,” Mr. Obama said last week about Moscow’s bloodless coup de main in Crimea. “I actually think that this is not been a sign of strength.”
“Is not been a sign of strength” is not been a sign of grammar. Good thing it wasn’t George W. Bush doing the talking.
Let’s get to Mr. Obama’s main point about Mr. Putin’s alleged dumbness: “Countries near Russia have deep concerns and suspicions about this kind of meddling and, if anything, it will push many countries further away from Russia.”
Terrific. Maybe Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania can slip their Baltic moorings and row themselves west once Mr. Putin starts agitating on behalf of ethnic Russians in those once-Soviet, now NATO-member states. Kazakhstan, where ethnic Russians are in a majority in several districts bordering Russia herself, is also ripe for a Crimean-type caper. Has Mr. Obama worked out a plan for the Kazakhs to get away from Russia, other than by launching themselves en masse from the Baikonur Cosmodrome?
It’s funny, almost, to watch Mr. Obama and his friends in the media talk themselves into the conceit that they’ve gained the upper hand against Mr. Putin. “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake,” writes one of those friends, citing Napoleon. Really? Perhaps Mr. Putin will oblige us by seizing eastern Ukraine, too. Given this logic, by the time the armies of Vlad the Bad reach the Vistula, our victory will be all but complete. …
Jennifer Rubin has more.
… In putting forth Russian sanctions so slight that “pin prick” overstates their impact, President Obama merely cemented his image as a man who delivers empty threats but lacks the nerve or skill to exact a price for our foes’ aggression. Former ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton aptly assessed the president’s action as “so weak that it’s embarrassing.” Unsurprisingly, Vladimir Putin swiftly moved to annex Crimea.
The Wall Street editorial board pointed out that the seven sanctioned Russians did not include important names. “Defense Minister Sergei Shoygu, Mr. Putin’s chief of staff Sergei Ivanov and Alexander Bortnikov, who runs the FSB (formerly the KGB), belong to the circle of hard-liners on the Russian national security council, where the decisions on Ukraine are taken. Mr. Shoygu’s department has deployed some 20,000 men to Crimea. Mr. Bortnikov’s charges are running special operations in eastern Ukraine to whip up separatist demonstrators.” Obama gives new meaning to the phrase “too little, too late.”
Obama repeats the same empty phrases whether the adversary is Iran, Syria or Russia. “Country X will find itself isolated.” “Country X’s actions show its weakness.” “Country X will come to rue the day it defied the international community.” It never dawns on him that Country X doesn’t consider itself isolated (or doesn’t care), thinks it has shown up the United States and doesn’t give a fig about the international community. …
It was Lenin who coined the phrase “useful idiot” to describe westerners who, blinded by their hopes and their ignorance, could be counted on to inadvertently help the Soviet Union. The latest useful idiots are the three stooges; hagel, kerry and obama. Michael Barone shows how their lack of understanding creates what he calls cognitive dissonance. Putin is truly a lucky man. There is lots of low hanging fruit for him to harvest.
Cognitive dissonance is a phrase that describes what happens when the world turns out to operate differently from what you expected. It’s also a phrase that could be used to describe the state of mind of some of President Obama’s current and past foreign policy advisers, at least according to this David Sanger story in the New York Times. Excerpts:
The White House was taken by surprise by Vladimir V. Putin’s decisions to invade Crimea, but also by China‘s increasingly assertive declaration of exclusive rights to airspace and barren islands. Neither the economic pressure nor the cyberattacks that forced Iran to reconsider its approach have prevented North Korea‘s stealthy revitalization of its nuclear and missile programs. …
“We’re seeing the ‘light footprint’ run out of gas,” said one of Mr. Obama’s former senior national security aides, who would not speak on the record about his ex-boss. …
Still, some senior officials who left the White House after the first term concede — when assured of anonymity — that Mr. Obama erred in failing to have a plan to back up his declaration that [Syrian] President Bashar al-Assad had to leave office.
Obama’s central mistake, as I tried to argue in this recent Washington Examiner column, is solipsism, to “assume others see the world as you do and will behave as you would.” It would be nice if Putin, Assad and the Chinese leaders saw the world as Obama does and behaved as he would, but unfortunately they don’t.
Roger Kimball says Aristotle saw this coming.
In a melancholy passage of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle observes that we can follow certain courses of action which will put us in situations where there is no right response. Whatever we do, it will be wrong, or at least unhappy.
Confronted with the West’s habitual acquiescence in the face of Russian (and not only Russian) swagger and belligerence, Aristotle would no doubt have said, “See what I mean,” or words to that effect.
Skillful diplomacy might have headed off the crisis in Crimea. But we did not field skillful diplomats. We sent John Kerry, backed up by Barack Obama, Susan Rice, and Joe Biden. As in 1854, “someone had blundered.” Tennyson recorded the result. Today, the “reset button” turns out to have been disconnected at the source. Obama really did push it. Comrade Putin paid it no heed. He had taken the measure of the man long ago. And if there was any doubt, in 2012, in a candid-camera moment, Obama pleaded with Putin’s protege Dmitry Medvedev to give him more “space” about missile defense. “This is my last election,” Obama confided quietly to Medvedev, “After my election, I have more flexibility.” Noted.
The microphones weren’t supposed to pick that up. In any normal world, the remark would have gone a long way towards sealing Obama’s defeat in 2012. But this isn’t any normal world. It is the world according folks like Wolf Blitzer, who mocked Romney for describing Russia as, “without question, our number one geopolitical foe.” …
Jennifer Rubin again.
The New York Times describes Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea dramatically: “If there had been any doubt before Tuesday, Mr. Putin made clear that within what he considers his sphere of interest he would not be cowed by international pressure. And the speed of his moves in Crimea, redrawing an international border that has been recognized as part of an independent Ukraine since 1991, has been breathtaking.” This is a humiliation for the West and a collapse of 22 years of American foreign policy in which the former states of the Soviet Union were allowed to reclaim their place in a whole and free Europe.
White House spinners (past and present) and their media handmaidens have already begun making excuses and attacking critics, who for years have criticized the president’s handling of Russia.
“You can’t criticize the president without offering an alternative!” Who made that rule? The president, after five years of serial errors (pulling anti-missile defenses from Eastern Europe, ignoring Russian arms violations, off-loading the Syria stand-off to Moscow, turning Russia’s internal repression, failing to check Russian support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and slashing defense spending), can hardly put the onus on critics to figure a way out of the mess. In any event, these same critics have been suggesting much stronger sanctions and actions (ranging from expulsion from international bodies to flooding Europe with liquefied natural gas to sink Putin’s gas monopoly). It’s pathetic, when you think about it, that the president’s answer to an international debacle is to claim that critics have no answers. It’s almost as if someone else is president. …
Michael Rubin sums up with a post titled The Reverberations of American Weakness. The result of five years of president dither is the world has become a very dangerous place. If, in our lifetimes we see an nuclear weapon used, we can lay that at the feet of president bystander who preened for the Nobel committee, but never could make a courageous decision.
… What happens in Crimea doesn’t stay in Crimea. In 1994, Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ukraine signed the Budapest Memorandum. In short, Russia recognized Ukrainian sovereignty over Crimea, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons, and the United States and Great Britain offered Ukraine security guarantees. In hindsight, only the Ukrainians kept their promise; everyone else broke their pledge.
The problem is not simply potential Russian aggressiveness against former Soviet states like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldova, but rather the notion that U.S. and European security guarantees are meaningless: Russia invaded a sovereign state and Obama reacted by putting Russian President Vladimir Putin on the diplomatic equivalent of double-secret probation. …
… Putin acted in Ukraine against the backdrop of stagnation in the Russian economy. Whipping up nationalist sentiment seems to have successfully distracted Russians from Putin’s own domestic incompetence. If sparking a crisis can distract from economic woes without fear of reprisal, why shouldn’t the Argentine government make its move against the Falkland Islands? After all, the age of Reagan and Thatcher is over. Israel, too, must recognize that American security guarantees aren’t worth the paper upon which they are written, …
The cartoonists get it too.