American Trash Talk — against Russia’s Military Movements in Crimean Ukraine — Demonstrates again that Drawing Lines Is Foolishly Provocative — when We Cannot Effectively Back Our Threats Up

01 March 2014

Has no one in American political leadership learned from playground pecking order experiences?

You don’t talk trash, when you can’t back it up.

So, why did President Obama threaten the Russian Federation with “costs” — when Russia entirely predictably moved into Crimea to hold onto territory (and the warm water port) that it has owned or influenced in Ukraine for centuries?

"The United States will stand with the international community in affirming that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine," Obama said in the White House briefing room.

Oops

A handful of hours pass and Obama’s bluff is called:

Russia's parliament voted unanimously on Saturday to approve a request from President Vladimir Putin to deploy troops in Ukraine, defying warnings from U.S. President Barack Obama and other Western leaders not to intervene.

Russian lawmakers also asked Mr. Putin to recall the country's ambassador to the U.S. Mr. Obama has publicly warned Russia that there would be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine.

Though a major escalation in the openness of Russia's commitment, Saturday's move comes as Russian troops and their local allies have already largely taken control of Crimea, a restive province of Ukraine that belonged to Russia until 1954 and remains predominantly pro-Russian.

America’s seemingly perennial ignorance of geopolitical realities, combined with its overweening arrogance, is eventually going to do us all in

Smart people do not escalate fights that they are inevitably going to lose.

Expecting the Russian Federation to walk away from its Crimean warm water naval base at Sevastopol, and the anti-invasion buffer zone that Ukrainian territory itself provides, demonstrates the height of historical and geopolitical stupidity on the part of both the United States and the European Union — the latter of which should, of all peoples, know better:

Crimea is an autonomous republic of Ukraine located on the northern coast of the Black Sea on a peninsula of the same name. It has a population of 46 million, while Crimea has a total area of 10,100 square miles (26, 200 sq. km) and a population of approximately 2 million.

Russians represent 69 percent of Crimea’s population and about 25 percent of Ukraine’s total population.

Russia exerts substantial power in Ukraine. The Crimean peninsula is the site of the main naval base for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and the region has a large and powerful ethnic-Russian majority. For this reason, most Crimeans are especially patriotic towards Russia.

Russia has seen an American presence there as a threat to its power on the peninsula and in the region.

Ukraine has sent a powerful message that once Russia’s lease of the Crimean port Sevastopol ends in 2017, the Black Sea Fleet will have to leave.

However, Russia has no other suitable warm water ports. For the first time in centuries, Sevastopol would cease to be a Russian Navy town.

The Russians have repeatedly sent the message that they will not budge from the port.

The easy way in which Russian President Vladimir Putin outmaneuvers the United States’ ignorant, macho and warmongering leadership irritates me at every turn

President Putin, an old-fashioned realpolitik-thinking, former KGB agent is running easy circles around his mouthy, crybaby political adversaries in the West.

Ironically, it is the Russian president, who today arguably best embodies US President Teddy Roosevelt’s admonition to “speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.”

The truth that no Western nation apparently wants to admit

No one is going to challenge Russia militarily on essentially its own turf.

History has made it clear that a backward-appearing Russia always has the might to defeat its more technologically advanced neighbors, when they invade.

Only someone wanting to begin a nuclear war would dare challenge Russia’s insertion of troops into a territory it has controlled for centuries.

So, who are President Obama’s implied economic sanctions going to harm?

Are they not more likely provoke the Russian Federation into rattling our Western chain at every conceivable opportunity — at nasty payback costs to us?

Russian memory

Part of President Putin’s hostility toward the EU and the United States is his justifiable impression that both have been feeding off Russian weakness since the fall of the Soviet Union.

It was NATO, the US and EU that began trying to nibble off the Russian Federation’s neighboring states — formerly parts of the Soviet Union — under the Western impression that, “ya kick ‘em, when they’re down.”

These efforts have taken the form of inviting former Soviet Union states to join NATO and/or the European Union and the United States proposing to put a missile defense system, purportedly against Iran, in Romania and Poland:

The U.S. plans to protect its assets, personnel, and allies in Europe using the European Phased Adaptive Approach (EPAA)—a system utilizing the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) system and including two land-based interceptor sites in Romania and Poland, each to be equipped with 24 variants of Standard Missile-3 interceptors when they are fully deployed (in 2015 and 2018, respectively).

It is these land-based sites to which Russia has long objected, and it has unsuccessfully sought official guarantees that any European missile defense shield not be used to target its strategic missile forces. For their part, the U.S. and NATO have always maintained that the EPAA shield is designed to deal with the threat posed by short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles from rogue regimes such as Iran.

Conveniently forgotten in this Western encroachment on territory historically within the Russian sphere of influence is that Americans would react swiftly and militarily against any adversary similarly intruding into Mexico, Canada or the Caribbean. To wit, for example, the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Yet, even with that unmistakable geopolitical reality staring them in the face, the United States and the EU have been trying to insert their coy political feet along the Russian border, under the naive expectation that the Russian Federation would tolerate it.

Now, President Putin is calling the West’s bluff. And he is almost certainly going to win because we have been hypocritically stupid.

What game is President Obama really playing?

As usual, President Obama is trying to fend off the warmongers to his right by pretending to be a tough guy.

Unfortunately, his perspective is always so short term — and limited to himself — that he completely overlooks the geopolitical consequences of his posturing.

With his talk about costs to Russia yesterday, he only further irritated the Federation. If President Putin had any reservations about following through with his Ukrainian entry, I am pretty darn sure that they are gone now.

The Russian president has a great opportunity to rub Obama’s Ivy League face in the grime of Russian history and homeland might.

Putin will not pass this opportunity up. Neither would I. President Obama is the kind of arrogant, elitist type that realistic, genuinely tough guys like to mess with.

China

Obama’s vacuous posturing is also posing a lesson for the People’s Republic of China. Like Putin, China’s leaders are adept at realpolitik. And they are equally tired of America’s arrogant puffery.

So, guess who is going to be encouraged to powerfully flex its Pacific region muscle?

The moral? — If you act like a trash talking ass, you are going to fall like one

President Obama — and other characteristically ignorant American and European leaders — are going to find out the hard way that realpolitik, expertly played, will defeat you every time.

Unless, of course, you want to pony up the nukes and blast us all to Hell.

PeteFree.com

American Trash Talk — against Russia’s Military Movements in Crimean Ukraine — Demonstrates again that Drawing Lines Is Foolishly Provocative — when We Cannot Effectively Back Our Threats Up