Posted on 03/19/2014 5:51:23 PM PDT by Jim Robinson
IT’S EASY to conclude that Vladimir Putin’s passionate defense of Russia’s takeover of Crimea “just didn’t jibe with reality,” as Secretary of State John F. Kerry put it. In a speech on Tuesday, the Russian ruler repeated mendacious charges that the Ukrainian government had been hijacked by “nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites”; voiced his paranoid conspiracy theory about supposed Western sponsorship of popular revolutions, including the Arab Spring; and brazenly compared Russia’s abrupt annexation of Ukraine with the reunification of Germany.
It’s necessary, however, to take some of what Mr. Putin said seriously, because of the implicit threat it poses to European and global security. Mr. Putin advanced a radical and dangerous argument: that the collapse of the Soviet Union left “the Russian nation” as “one of the biggest, if not the biggest ethnic group in the world to be divided by borders.” That, he suggested, gave Moscow the right to intervene in Crimea, and, by extension, anywhere it considers ethnic Russians or their culture to be threatened.
Mr. Putin’s doctrine would justify Russian meddling not just in other parts of Ukraine — he claimed that “large sections of the historical south of Russia” now “form the southeast of Ukraine” — but also in other former Soviet republics with substantial populations of ethnic Russians.
Western officials seem to be betting that Mr. Putin won’t dare to extend his aggression beyond Crimea. But then, just last week they were saying they did not expect Moscow to move quickly on Crimean annexation. The Obama administration and its European allies have been too slow to grasp that Mr. Putin is bent on upending the post-Cold War order in Europe and reversing Russia’s loss of dominion over Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
The only ambitions Obama grasps are his own.
“Putin is opposing Bad America, therefore Putin must somehow be a good guy...”
2016: DEAD ON BULL’S-EYE.
Obama doesn’t “grasp” anything. Obama is a front.
Valerie Jarrett grasps everything very well. She is there to destroy America as we know it.
Fundamentally changing America = destroying what you know to be America. Different wording, same meaning.
Well...Obammy is more flexible now after the election.
Russia is a great power. With 150 million people, it would always be certain to dominate Europe. We can’t change this but we could shape the kind of great power Russia ought to be.
Whether a common European home is ever realized depends on the choices Russians make. Crimea aside, I do not see Europe going to back to the Cold War days. Every one has too much to lose.
That is why no one is taking really irreversible steps that could plunge Europe into another world war. And we can all hope that never does happen.
Where was Valerie Jarrett born? Oh yeah. Shiraz, Iran.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Yep.....neo-Eurasianism.
It’s laid out here pretty well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
Mind you, the book was written in the mid to late 1990s, so some minor aspects of it might have changed, but I’m seriously thinking the neo-Eurasianist idea has become Russia’s guiding ideology.
We never would have had a cold war if Roosevelt had not stopped Patton from rolling into Berlin. Roosevelt believed that Russia had an ultimate right to seize Berlin.
Velly intelesting.
Obama is going to call a timeout on Ukraine, the Baltics, the Malaysian airliner, and all that. Time out until March Madness is done. First things first.
Is it time for another round of golf yet?
Obama grasps Putins ambitions.....
He simply doesn’t care....
Well, they both agree on bringing down the USA.
That means not having a pill pedeling homo as a president.
What we can do now is what Sarah Palin said (though she was wasn't the first, any thinking American would come up with it.) Drill and sell our own natural gas and other fossil fuels.
We get Money, Jobs, Undercut Russia's Massive profits, and get new customers In Europe.
There is no downside to it at all.
Good diplomacy = strength through superior firepower.
Obama’s going with flower power and fairy dust.
Reagan broke the Soviet Union’s bank with a defensive buildup and “starwars” that the SU couldn’t compete with. Now Obama announces proudly that US defenses will be reduced to pre-WWII size. What do Libs expect?
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