Gone are the days when the American president was capable of articulating the American interest.
Vladimir Putin seized Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula on Thursday, and Barack Obamadelivered a short statement about it on Friday. The former tells us nothing we didn’t know already about Russia’s strongman. The latter tells us everything we need to know about a weak president’s feckless foreign policy.
Let’s take a look at what Mr. Obama had to say:
“I also spoke several days ago with President Putin, and my administration has been in daily contact with Russian officials.”
OK, but why? What’s the point of talking if you won’t even make use of what’s said?
On Oct. 18, 1962, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko visited President Kennedy in the Oval Office and told him that the Soviet Union would never deploy offensive military capabilities in Cuba. This was a lie, as Kennedy already knew, and four days later he called Gromyko out on the lie in his famous “quarantine” speech, usefully embarrassing the Soviets and rallying U.S. public opinion at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Fifty-plus years later, Mr. Putin told Mr. Obama that Russia had intervened in Crimea because “the lives and health of Russian citizens and the many compatriots” were at imminent risk. That, too, was a transparent lie, as every report out of Crimea attests. The difference this time is an American president who registers no public complaint about being brazenly lied to by a Russian thug.
“We’ve made clear that they can be part of an international community’s effort to support the stability and success of a united Ukraine going forward, which is not only in the interest of the people of Ukraine and the international community, but also in Russia’s interest.”
In case Mr. Obama hadn’t noticed, Mr. Putin isn’t exactly keen on “the stability and success of a united Ukraine going forward.” It is precisely because a stable, successful and united Ukraine is inimical to Russia’s ethnic, ideological and geopolitical interests that Mr. Putin seized the moment to strike.
Presidents Obama and Putin at the G-8 summit in Northern Ireland in June.AFP/Getty Images
Give the Russian president this much: He pursues Russia’s national interests, baldly and expediently, as he sees them. The American president, by contrast, does nothing more than patronizingly lecture other countries about where their respective interests should lie.
Yet at no point in his statement did Mr. Obama make an effort to define, much less explain, the U.S. interest in all this. Why should Americans be alarmed that Russia is carving territory from a country they know little, and care even less, about? It would be good to hear the president give an account of just what is at stake for the American people. Instead, the closest he gets to identifying the American interest is to refer to the views of “the international community.” Why should U.S. foreign policy be conducted according to the imaginary views of an imagined community?
“The United States will stand with the international community in affirming that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine.”
Is there any reason for Russia to think Mr. Obama means business? What were the costs to Russia for harboring Edward Snowden ? When the Kremlin was considering in June what to do with the fugitive NSA contractor living in a Moscow transit lounge, Mr. Kerry warned that there would be “consequences” for giving him asylum. He got asylum; there were no consequences.
Two months later, Mr. Obama was happy to accept Russian mediation for a face-saving deal on Syria’s chemical weapons rather than impose the consequences he had promised if Bashar Assad used them. A few months after that, the administration quietly eased its enforcement of the Magnitsky Act sanctioning corrupt Russian officials.
It’s probably asking too much of this president to see a connection between his Syria capitulation and this month’s events in Ukraine. But Republicans who contributed to last September’s fiasco might consider where their isolationist dalliance has led.
“I also commend the Ukrainian government’s restraint.”
The Ukrainian government isn’t showing restraint; it is merely tragically impotent in the face of blunt aggression and domestic disarray. It used to be that defiance, not restraint, was considered the appropriate response to a foreign invasion.
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The liberal press is now filled with news analyses about America’s limited policy options, beyond perhaps expelling Russia from the G-8. Nonsense. “In Russia,” the historian Dietrich Geyer once wrote, “expansion was an expression of economic weakness, not exuberant strength.” Mr. Putin’s Russia is a petro-oligarchy whose survival depends on high oil prices and privileged access to the West for the politically connected elite. Raise interest rates, investigate the finances of Mr. Putin’s inner circle, impose travel bans on Putin’s cronies and broaden the scope of the Magnitsky Act, and we’ll see just how resilient the Moscow regime really is. Only a president as inept as Barack Obama could fail to seize the opportunity to win, or even wage, the new Cold War all over again.
For liberals who believe in utopia, imaginary views are considered as “real”. BHO thinks and believes he can “change” the world situation through good speeches. Besides this, he didn’t have an experience to be a POTUS. It is too much to expect him do anything courageously in the best interest of USA
in places like Ukraine and others. He doesn’t want to engage in a war out of his leftist ideological conviction and lack of experience in diplomacy/politics. Under this US Administration every country (US ally) is left alone to defend itself.
He may continue to pressure Israel, as he may think that Israel may be pressured to do his bidding’s.
The west may not take aggressive steps against Russia because it would have a boomerang effect on their own economy.
However, Russia on its own may limit its occupation of Ukraine to Crimea or occupy the eastern part of Ukraine with impunity.
The west’s rhetoric seems meaningless for now.
A message to the Ukrainian state and its poly-national population:
For your sake, I sincerely hope you don’t take too seriously the Ukraine-oriented foreign policy comments by America’s first and probably last Affirmative Action president and his wordy secretary of state.
Russia now has firm control over the Crimea. Chances are that they have plans to do the same with all of Eastern and Southeastern Ukraine and anywhere else in your country where a significant Russian-speaking population resides.
And Russia, I remind you, never disgorges territory except on those few occasions when their empire breaks up, as in 1917-1921 and again in 1990-1991.
So if you are counting on what we in the USA fully understand are empty threats from politicians, then your country is leaning against a weak reed at the edge of a marshland.
Russia, now openly backed by China and by Russia’s recently organized Eurasian Union, directly controls almost one-sixth of the land surface of Earth, along with vast and all but endless supplies of more or less every vital resource. Notably, that includes the natural gas without which you people in Southeastern Europe and much of the rest of that continent depend so heavily. No superstate such as theirs ever has been defeated by trade sanctions, and none ever will be so defeated. And everybody in the USA is at least partially aware that the Chinese now control our economy and even worse, our money supply.
So the West will not make war to restore whatever Russia takes back from Ukraine, and they will give up on the threat of economic sanctions when the German bankers privately tell then what will happen if they push their threats too far.
So why don’t you try a different approach? You must know from witnessing the way the rest of the world is organized that no multinational state ever survives very long, or if they do, with any degree of stability. And your Ukrainian state has come to resemble former Jugoslavija: four languages, two alphabets, three mutually hateful religions and a population ready to fight to the death.
You are not ever likely to have a stable commonwealth under those conditions. The Russians will not let you alone unless and until they get tack Kharkov, the Donbas, Odessa and wherever else in Ukraine where they can get a significant number of Russians to ask them for protection, and ultimately, for reincorporation back into the Russian state and its expanded Eurasian Union.
You Ukrainians have lived as a functional part of the Russian tribes for thousands of years, including most of the time since Orthodox Christianity came to your part of the world from Constantinopolis. If anyone by now understands their mindset, it should be you. So act accordingly and don’t be surprised what happens to you if you do not.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI USA
Mr. Stephens seems to overlook the fact that Russia’s great trump card in this is natural gas. He can’t directly threaten the USA with it as we import no gas from him, but he could cripple Europe if he shuts off the taps – and given the state of the Euro right now, would push some major countries (Spain, Italy, maybe even France) over the edge into default, and collapse the Euro. A collapsed Euro likely brings the world economy down with it.
Russia has massive foreign reserves of cash (almost $500 billion) and could afford to shut the cash flow off to bring Europe to its knees.
By the way, I normally fill my car with gas at a Lukoil gas station. Lukoil is Russian, although who knows where the local station actually gets his gas (the owner of the gas station is Indian, which is common here in NJ). I’d still rather fill up at Lukoil that at (Hugo Chavez’) Citgo.