Russia annexes Crimea, prepares to invade rest of Ukraine and possibly Estonia; Obama sanctions 8 individual Russians

A writer for the New Yorker spent some time on the road with Obama in late January, and wrote of a conversation he had with the Resident.  Obama, he concluded, was unperturbed by what would normally be considered ominous events in world affairs.  All would be right, said Obama, as soon as he found somebody to talk to: the right strategic partners.

In the aftermath of Obama's declaration of a "red line" in Syria, then his threat to take military action, with or without congressional approval, then his quiet back-down, no one takes U.S. threats seriously.  Nor should they.

Historically there are two ways to deter an enemy:  You can send in the military; or the enemy can *think you might,* and decide not to take the risk.  Obviously the second method is far less costly, in both money and lives lost.  But because Obama has totally ruled out any military action, the second method is no longer effective.

When the threat of military action is gone, no opponent bothers to worry whether you *might* act.   Under Obama, the world is confident that America's strongest response to aggression will be a strongly worded note.  The word is out: every thug government knows Obama is an appeasing screw-up and worse, one with delusions of grandeur.

Opponents know they are faced with the ultimate incompetent--the sort who keeps doubling down on a losing hand because he’s too vain to admit error.  As Jennifer Rubin wrote in the Washington Post: "Obama is never wrong, never responsible."  He can’t admit to a mistake. It will all work out if he can just find the right strategic partner.

New York Times writer David Sanger uses every trick of the writer’s art to soften Obama's foreign-policy failures.  He begins by listing the things Obama did differently and sadly concludes that none of them seem to have worked as planned. “For five years, President Obama has consciously recast how America engages with the world’s toughest customers. But with Russia poised to annex Crimea after Sunday’s referendum, with a mounting threat to the rest of Ukraine and with the carnage in Syria accelerating, Mr. Obama’s strategy is now under greater stress than at any time in his presidency.”

But so far those tools — or even the threat of them — have proved frustratingly ineffective.... Sanctions and modest help to the Syrian rebels [i.e. sending munitions to the jihadist beheaders] have failed to halt the slaughter; if anything, the killing worsened as negotiations dragged on.

The White House was taken by surprise by Vladimir V. Putin’s decision to invade Crimea, and 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.

In short, America’s adversaries are testing the limits of America’s post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan moment.

“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.

Sanger doesn’t even have the grace to say: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. You would have thought it was the least they could do.

Sanger and those like him have a profoundly unserious worldview.  They are people for whom everything has always been a game.

Obama was chosen by such "unserious" people to be president of the country that has led the fight for freedom.  They never considered the possibility that such an unqualified, unserious person would have to face serious, determined leaders like Vladimir Putin.  And American allies — those who face invasion if they oppose Russia or China — know it.

The intellectual elite who endorsed Obama have never been hungry or felt paralyzing danger. They've lived their whole lives under a Pax Americana, and seem to have considered this condition to be both permanent and effortless.  Having no personal knowledge of the costs and sacrifices required to bring that condition about, they were vain enough to believe no one else could know any more about it than they did.  Thus by their deliberate acts they have allowed Pax Americana to lapse--or more precisely, they've thrown it away.

Whether they did this because they felt guilty for being Americans or were just too stupid to recognize the astonishing value of the thing they trashed will be left to historians to deduce. 


Now, I don't know any military strategist who favored a U.S. military response to Russia's annexation of Crimea.  The point is that Putin didn't have to bother with a moment's concern with how the U.S. might respond to that move, because he saw how Obama reacted to the situation in Syria.

The United States I grew up in is rapidly disappearing under this sorry excuse for a president (ably assisted by Democrat control of the senate under the infamously crooked Harry Reid).  Those of us of a certain age look at what's happening and can only shake our heads. The Left and the Democrats, in their determined quest for a permanent majority, have turned the United States into a third world country.

H/t Wretchard at Belmont.