Free Republic

AbstractOn February 28, Russian troops, aided by pro-Russian local militia, occupied important sites across the Crimean Peninsula under the pretext of “protecting Russian people.” Now Crimea is under Moscow’s de facto control and the Russian parliament has voted to annex the region into the Russian Federation. The failure of the Obama Administration’s Russian “reset,” the unilateral disarming of Europe, and the U.S. reduction of forces and disengagement from Europe have led Russia to calculate that the West will not respond in any significant way. The Administration can demonstrate America’s commitment to its NATO allies and support for the Ukrainian...

World leaders played an interactive nuclear war game designed to test their responses to a terrorist atomic "dirty bomb" attack that threatened the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. David Cameron joined Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and Xi Jinping and other world leaders to play a "nukes on the loose" war game to see how they would cope with a terrorist nuclear attack. The German chancellor grumbled at being asked to play games and take tests with the Prime Minister, US and Chinese presidents around a table with dozens of heads of state at a nuclear summit in The...

Checking out Rembrandts and checking in with European allies, President Obama seems blind to the rubble around him. The U.S. leadership vacuum has left NATO as ravaged as a post-World War II battlefield. In May 1945, a sizable force of Allied bombers flew photographers over European cities to document the destruction of what was then, and remains, the worst war in history. Their images of urban craters and flattened buildings are permanent reminders of the evils of totalitarianism. One can't help wondering, if Barack Obama had been on board, whether he would have looked down and remarked on the day's...

Some 150 Israeli Arabic-speaking Christians on Sunday demonstrated outside the European Union mission in Tel Aviv, demanding that the international community stop nitpicking against Israel and start combatting the severe persecution of Christians everywhere else in the Middle East. “Nations, organizations and international missions are quick to raise an accusing finger against Israel at every opportunity,” said Father Gabriel Nadaf, spiritual father of the Israeli Christian Recruitment Forum, which organized the rally. Those same nations and organizations “don’t life a finger against the ethnic cleansing of Christians in the Middle East,” the priest continued. Father Nadaf went on to explain...

Today, the G8 minus 1 met in the Hague and, rather than kick out Russia outright, simply reformed as the G7, thereby punishing (in their minds) Russia for annexing part of the sovereign nation of Ukraine. ("Countries of the G7 end their membership in the G8," read the headline of the Soviet-era wire agency ITAR-TASS.)Really, though, it was the organization--and Russia--returning to a more natural state: The G8 just went back to being the organization it was until 1998, when Bill Clinton invited Russia in, hammering what he hoped would be the final nail in the Cold War coffin. Since then, Russia underwent...

Europe’s far left is set to almost double its deputies in the upcoming European Parliament elections in May. Poll predictions indicate that the European United Left/Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) group is set to become the parliament’s third or fourth largest group, with the number of deputies rising from the current 35 to around 60. At third place, it would replace the liberals (ALDE), behind the center-left S&D and center-right EPP. […] The parties are against what they describe as neo-liberal policy-making at the EU level, want more funding for social programs, and want to create what they describe as “another...

Vladimir Putin running rampant in Ukraine showcases how the Obama administration's abdication of global leadership is making the world a more dangerous place. Instead of providing clarity to our nation and our allies, the Obama administration offers tortured semantics. "Kinetic action" glamorizes the failed policy of leading from behind in Libya. A "spontaneous protest" explains the coordinated al Qaeda attack on American officials in Benghazi. The interim agreement over Iran's nuclear program -- described by one of our closest allies as a "historic mistake" -- is in this universe referred to as a display of "international unity." And on Friday,...

President Obama promised Friday there would be “costs” if Russia moved troops into Ukraine, but he didn’t specify what those costs might be. Sen. John McCain has several suggestions for Obama, including the sanctioning of high-level Russian officials; restarting missile defense plans in Eastern Europe; and bringing Georgia, a former Soviet republic, into NATO. McCain said he plans to push from the Congressional side, he told The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview Saturday evening. McCain wants the administration to expand its threat to pull out of the G8 Summit in Sochi scheduled for June. That limited move is unlikely...

The leaders of the Group of Eight have suspended Russia's participation in the body over Moscow's activities in Ukraine, the French foreign minister said Tuesday. In an interview with Europe-1 radio, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said that "it is envisaged that all the other countries, the seven leading countries, will unite without Russia," The Associated Press reported. The other seven members had already pulled out of preparations for a G8 summit set to be held in June in the Russian city of Sochi. Fabius and French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian earlier postponed a trip to Moscow to meet with...

The world's leading industrial powers threatened further sanctions to deter the Kremlin from invading other parts of Ukraine and boycotted what was to be a Group of Eight summit hosted by President Vladimir Putin. Meeting for the first time since last week's annexation of Crimea by Russia, Group of Seven leaders said they won't attend the planned G-8 meeting which was to have to been held in Sochi, site of the Winter Olympics, and will instead hold their own summit in June in Brussels. "We remain ready to intensify actions including coordinated sectoral sanctions that will have an increasingly significant...

A “Special Report” panel today discussed how G7 leaders met today in The Hague and announced that they would be excluding Russia from the G8 and boycotting a planned summit in Sochi. Jason Riley, of the Wall Street Journal, said Russian President Vladimir Putin is rebuilding the Russian empire while President Barack Obama and our allies in Europe are sitting around discussing international law and “kicking Putin out of clubs he doesn’t care about in the first place.” Riley said Putin knows that the administration doesn’t have the stomach for confrontation and will continue to take advantage of that.

President Barack Obama and leaders of the world’s largest industrialized countries expelled Russia from the group until it “changes course” in Ukraine and formally canceled plans to attend an economic summit in Russia in June. The move was aimed at Russian President Vladmir Putin’s plan to host the G-8 group of economic powers at Sochi, Russia, which would have been its second starring role on the world stage after this winter’s Olympics. Instead, the G-7 leaders will meet in Brussels without Putin. At the same time, the group said it would not send its foreign ministers to a planned G-8...

Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) preferred plan for Ukraine: let the market fix it. The Texas Republican wouldn’t commit to voting for aid for the country fending off Russian President Vladimir Putin’s army — or say whether there would need to be a financial offset to get his support — but argued that neither this nor conservative calls for military exercises are the right approach. Instead, Cruz argued for immediately passing a new free trade treaty with Ukraine and “looking at existing treaties between the United States and Russia, and considering abrogating those treaties.” “More important than aid is expanding economic...

THE HAGUE—Leaders of the world's largest economies agreed Monday to effectively remove Russia from the Group of Eight nations in response to Moscow's military intervention in Ukraine. The leaders, meeting in emergency session, also agreed that they would begin to exert punitive sanctions on Russia's energy, banking, finance and arms industries unless Moscow dialed back plans to seize the region of Crimea from Ukraine. "This group came together because of shared beliefs and shared responsibilities. Russia's actions in recent weeks are not consistent with them," the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Canada, Japan and Italy said in a joint statement. "We...

Russia is winning the Ukraine crisis. While Moscow may have suffered some economic sanctions, the world saw a disobedient Russian neighbor being forcibly brought to heel. The land grab was no doubt designed to encourage the others—Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, Georgia – all those unfortunates who live nearby. And it will. There are other winners, even on the side of the somewhat hapless angels. Like Germany, which is currently less an angel, and Poland, which is currently more. Before taking a mildly more aggressive position on sanctions Friday, Germany had been the least enthusiastic major European power about aggressively confronting Russia....

William Hague has warned Russia that it faces long-term "isolation and stagnation" over the crisis in Ukraine. The foreign secretary said it was time to consider a "new state of relations" different to that of the past 20 years. Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, he said the UK and its European allies would not "run scared".

Leadership comes in many forms and with many levels of risk, but history gives us a few moments when leaders stood alone and were proven right. [...] In late June 1948 the Soviets cut all road, rail and water access to Berlin, a city controlled by the Western Allies yet surrounded by Soviet-controlled territories. The Soviet’s goal: take Berlin from the Allies by forcing the US-UK-French alliance into one of two options: try to protect a city of 2.1 million starving Germans, or war. The Soviets expected the West to surrender the city quickly. [...] The US was in the...

STOCKHOLM—A dispute between the Swedish armed forces and ThyssenKrupp AG TKA.XE +1.39% threatens one of the German industrial giant's most-profitable operations and could shake up the growing global submarine business. The row, which is partly over export possibilities, has prompted Sweden to yank contracts for the next generation of Swedish submarines from ThyssenKrupp, the world's largest exporter of nonnuclear submarines. Sweden has signaled that it instead is considering giving the work to Swedish defense company Saab AB. Currently, Saab doesn't build manned submarines, but it acknowledges it is trying to poach engineers from ThyssenKrupp's submarine unit, which is based around...

resident Barack Obama flies Sunday to a Europe shaken by Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea and his threats against eastern parts of Ukraine. At a summit conference at The Hague on preventing nuclear terrorism – scheduled long before the Ukraine crisis – Obama will confer with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other leaders. On Monday afternoon Obama will meet with President Xi Jinping of China, Russia’s neighbor and sometime rival. Putin has forced the United States and Europe to refocus on the origins of the modern transatlantic alliance -- the 1949 NATO defense partnership designed to prevent a Russian invasion...

Germany on Saturday accused Russia of trying to splinter Europe, as a Cold War-style struggle over the future of ex-Soviet Ukraine ratcheted up following the Kremlin’s defiant annexation of Crimea. The haunting warning from a nation whose friendship Russian President Vladimir Putin had nurtured over his 14 years in power came amid Western efforts to shore up backing for the besieged interim leaders in Kiev who toppled a Kremlin-backed regime last month. […] The foreign minister of Germany—its economic power playing a decisive role in forging Europe’s response to Putin’s increasingly belligerent stance—warned that the continent’s entire future was at...