Obama vs. Putin: The Mismatch. By Charles Krauthammer. National Review Online, March 27, 2014. Also at the Washington Post.
Krauthammer:
“The United States does not view Europe as
a battleground between East and West, nor do we see the situation in Ukraine as
a zero-sum game. That’s the kind of thinking that should have ended with the
Cold War.”
—
Barack Obama, March 24
Should.
Lovely sentiment. As lovely as what Obama said five years ago to the United
Nations: “No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation.”
That’s
the kind of sentiment you expect from a Miss America contestant asked to name
her fondest wish, not from the leader of the free world explaining his foreign
policy.
The
East Europeans know they inhabit the battleground between the West and a Russia
that wants to return them to its sphere of influence. Ukrainians see tens of
thousands of Russian troops across their border and know they are looking down
the barrel of quite a zero-sum game.
Obama
thinks otherwise. He says that Vladimir Putin’s kind of neo-imperialist
thinking is a relic of the past — and advises Putin to transcend the Cold War.
Good
God. Putin hasn’t transcended the Russian revolution. Did no one give Obama a
copy of Putin’s speech last week upon the annexation of Crimea? Putin railed
not only at Russia’s loss of empire in the 1990s. He went back to the 1920s:
“After the revolution, the Bolsheviks . . . may God judge them, added large
sections of the historical South of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine.” Putin
was referring not to Crimea (which came two sentences later) but to his next
potential target: Kharkiv and Donetsk and the rest of southeastern Ukraine.
Putin’s
irredentist grievances go very deep. Obama seems unable to fathom them. Asked
whether he’d misjudged Russia, whether it really is our greatest geopolitical
foe, he disdainfully replied that Russia is nothing but “a regional power” acting “out of weakness.”
Where
does one begin? Hitler’s Germany and Tojo’s Japan were also regional powers,
yet managed to leave behind at least 50 million dead. And yes, Russia should be
no match for the American superpower. Yet under this president, Russia has run
rings around America, from the attempted ingratiation of the “reset” to
America’s empty threats of “consequences” were Russia to annex Crimea.
Annex
Crimea it did. For which the “consequences” have been risible. Numberless 19th-
and 20th-century European soldiers died for Crimea. Putin conquered it in a
swift and stealthy campaign that took three weeks and cost his forces not a
sprained ankle. That’s “weakness”?
Indeed,
Obama’s dismissal of Russia as a regional power makes his own leadership of the
one superpower all the more embarrassing. For seven decades since the Japanese
surrender, our role under eleven presidents had been as offshore balancer
protecting smaller allies from potential regional hegemons.
What
are the allies thinking now? Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and
other Pacific Rim friends are wondering where this America will be as China expands its reach and claims. The Gulf states are near panic as they see America
playacting nuclear negotiations with Iran that, at best, will leave their
mortal Shiite enemy just weeks away from the bomb.
America
never sought the role that history gave it after World War II to bear unbidden
burdens “to assure the survival and the success of liberty,” as movingly
described by John Kennedy. We have an appropriate aversion to the stark fact
that the alternative to U.S. leadership is either global chaos or dominance by
the likes of China, Russia, and Iran.
But
Obama doesn’t even seem to recognize this truth. In his major Brussels address Wednesday, the very day Russia seized the last Ukrainian naval vessel in
Crimea, Obama made vague references to further measures should Russia march
deeper into Ukraine, while still emphasizing the centrality of international
law, international norms, and international institutions like the United
Nations.
Such
fanciful thinking will leave our allies with two choices: bend a knee — or arm
to the teeth. Either acquiesce to the regional bully or gird your loins, i.e.,
go nuclear. As surely will the Gulf states. As will, in time, Japan and South
Korea.
Even
Ukrainians are expressing regret at having given up their nukes in return for
paper guarantees of territorial integrity. The 1994 Budapest Memorandum was
ahead of its time — the perfect example of the kind of advanced 21st-century
thinking so cherished by our president. Perhaps the captain of that last
Ukrainian vessel should have waved the document at the Russian fleet that took
his ship.
