I'm not really sure how Obama is planning on selling the demonizing of Russia over Crimea when he just a few months ago legitimized Putin as an honest broker viz Syria where much much worse abuses of human rights and freedoms are ongoing. I'm not saying what's happened in Crimea is legitimate, I'm saying measured against the manifestly weak incoherence of Obama's overall foreign policy getting all puffed up over Crimea doesn't really make sense. What democratic principles are we supposedly cheering on here? We deal with Iran in a putatively progressive way and that's a bogus democracy that by the way just attempted to ship a shit load of dangerous weapons to terrorists threatening a supposed ally of ours - we force Israel, said ally and a real democracy, to negotiate with a fake one that in no way can be trusted and is headed up by a guy who has simply stayed on in power even though his term 'officially' ended years ago - has this administration said anything about what's going on in Venezuela, a place where democracy and democratic principles are as phony as can be and abused without remorse? We treat China as a legitimate near peer even though it doesn't even bother with the mere pretense of democracy, holds a knife made of missiles over the heads of fractious Tibet and Taiwan, enables one of the most despicably oppressive regimes in the world in North Korea and is unilaterally making claims in the China Sea that pay little attention to international norms and the competing claims of their neighbours - and yet we're gonna make a big fuss over Crimea?
Sanctions, devotion to the often delusional promise of international norms and the giving of pretty speeches fade in relevance when compared to an appreciation for the real value of military power, the practice of cunning diplomacy and the long term benefits of a well thought out marco strategy - and all three of those attributes just mentioned are completely lacking in the Obama administration. That we're stuck without good options in the Ukraine is more a reflection of that sad state of affairs than the fact that Putin, as Kerry utterly missing the point complained last week, wants to govern as if the last 100 years never happened. Putin has objectives and he targets the weaknesses of those standing in the way of them - if we had acted in the same coherent way we would never have done a 'reset', we would never have put Putin in charge of what happens in Syria, and most importantly before meddling in Ukraine we would have thought through the consequences of that, realized Putin and possibly no Russian president would ever accept it and then focused in on Putin's prime weakness and vulnerability, an economy entirely dependent on energy sales, and figured out a way to apply pressure there. But of course we didn't because Western democracies are governed by idiots who seem convinced that they're all just so damn clever that nothing bad can ever happen.
[to be fair, as bad of a foreign policy president I think Obama has been, and I think history might remember him as the worst foreign policy president ever, fact is his immediate predecessors weren't much better - Clinton muddled through, apparently trying to triangulate foreign policy the way he triangulated everything else, an approach that at least had the virtue of not doing too much harm while it was busy trying to not do too much good either - Bush had more heft and legitimate purpose but of course went all to hell with the mismanaged clusterfuck that was Iraq - I do think critics of Iraq tend to be ideologically motivated backseat drivers who conveniently ignore how dire the immediate post 9/11 security dynamics were and that pretty much all intelligence agencies believed Saddam had an advanced WMD program including his own generals - but that doesn't excuse the abysmal failure by the Bush administration to come up with a post invasion strategy that made sense and was doable - and let's not forget that it was Bush who first looked into Putin's eyes and saw something he liked - whereas a more thoughtful person well grounded in the harsh realities of history and the way the world works would have seen what SecDef Gates saw: a cold blooded killer]
Sanctions, devotion to the often delusional promise of international norms and the giving of pretty speeches fade in relevance when compared to an appreciation for the real value of military power, the practice of cunning diplomacy and the long term benefits of a well thought out marco strategy - and all three of those attributes just mentioned are completely lacking in the Obama administration. That we're stuck without good options in the Ukraine is more a reflection of that sad state of affairs than the fact that Putin, as Kerry utterly missing the point complained last week, wants to govern as if the last 100 years never happened. Putin has objectives and he targets the weaknesses of those standing in the way of them - if we had acted in the same coherent way we would never have done a 'reset', we would never have put Putin in charge of what happens in Syria, and most importantly before meddling in Ukraine we would have thought through the consequences of that, realized Putin and possibly no Russian president would ever accept it and then focused in on Putin's prime weakness and vulnerability, an economy entirely dependent on energy sales, and figured out a way to apply pressure there. But of course we didn't because Western democracies are governed by idiots who seem convinced that they're all just so damn clever that nothing bad can ever happen.
[to be fair, as bad of a foreign policy president I think Obama has been, and I think history might remember him as the worst foreign policy president ever, fact is his immediate predecessors weren't much better - Clinton muddled through, apparently trying to triangulate foreign policy the way he triangulated everything else, an approach that at least had the virtue of not doing too much harm while it was busy trying to not do too much good either - Bush had more heft and legitimate purpose but of course went all to hell with the mismanaged clusterfuck that was Iraq - I do think critics of Iraq tend to be ideologically motivated backseat drivers who conveniently ignore how dire the immediate post 9/11 security dynamics were and that pretty much all intelligence agencies believed Saddam had an advanced WMD program including his own generals - but that doesn't excuse the abysmal failure by the Bush administration to come up with a post invasion strategy that made sense and was doable - and let's not forget that it was Bush who first looked into Putin's eyes and saw something he liked - whereas a more thoughtful person well grounded in the harsh realities of history and the way the world works would have seen what SecDef Gates saw: a cold blooded killer]
