It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled. Mark Twain
George Rebane
As long heralded in these pages, President Obama’s ignorance of foreign policy (we’ll give him the benefit of our doubts) is coming into full bloom in Ukraine. He has made it clear to all but the country’s progressive numbskulls that the US is no longer a reliable partner to anyone in maintaining world order.
The lamestream’s pundits and ‘journalists’ are still talking about Russia’s “plans to invade” and partition Ukraine, and Obama’s feckless threats that warrant tears and laughter from across the world. But Putin has already invaded the Ukraine and partitioned the country, taking Crimea back under Russia’s sovereign umbrella. And more Russian troops are poised on Ukraine’s eastern border to either complete the territorial partition or make it an effective Anschluss by installing ethnic Russians into all positions of power and prepared to execute whatever Moscow wants.
Our response at this point has been worse than silence. We have threatened to pull out of a planning meeting for the G-8 conference scheduled later this year in Sochi (no need to read this again, it’s true). Putin and his foreign minister Lavrov are rolling in laughter on the floor of the Kremlin. Meanwhile SecState Kerry is being dispatched to Kiev to offer the new Ukrainian government nothing that will save their sovereignty according to the 1994 agreement with Russia and the US. This visit will heighten the peals of laughter in Moscow and the tears in Brussels where the EU is having trouble getting its act together in a civilized but now leaderless world.
Putin’s plan to re-establish Soviet style hegemony over its ‘near abroad’ is going full throttle forward. Every one of its bordering countries has sizeable Russian minorities as their cancerous relics from the collapse of the USSR. And Putin will use the age-old excuse of sending in a dominant military to ‘protect the lives and property’ of his ethnic rump populations whenever the situation is sufficiently soft to guarantee exercising that as a no/low cost option.
The Baltics are quivering in their snowboots right now. All of them have sizeable Russian minorities (e.g. Estonia’s 1.3M people include 300,000 Russians) who will march to any order from Moscow, and thereby create situations of any flavor or magnitude to warrant Russia’s military intervention. That all these countries are members of NATO is worth about the same warm bucket of spit that they enjoyed in 1939 with the mutual defense agreement the Baltics then had with Great Britain.
In the meantime, under Obama’s leadership we are beating our swords into food stamps. Please take time to review your ‘Duck and Cover’ drills.
[4mar14 update] George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years was prophetic. Stratfor is now reprising summaries from that 2009 book (here). I wrote a major post on it at the time (here) that covered not only Russia’s aims, but also Mexico’s. Viewed in that light, the strategically silly reset button with which Hillary embarrassed herself in front of Lavrov and the world takes on new meaning as it made a global declaration that the United States had installed a foreign policy naïf in the White House. The years that followed have more than confirmed that early assessment, and every day brings in fresh news on how a trained KGB thug from a second world country runs circles around our Chief Community Organizer and the intellectual dwarves that surround him.
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