Posted on 03/23/2014 1:33:52 PM PDT by Jim Robinson
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 of Western Europe.
“We live in a different world than we did less than a month ago,” NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told an audience in Washington last week. Russia's aggression is “a wake-up call for the Euro-Atlantic community, for NATO, and for all those committed to a Europe whole, free, and at peace.”
Russian brute force is a jarring diversion from Obama’s second-term agenda of combatting climate change...
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Previous American presidents had occasional quarrels with European leaders, “but never were we faced with a kind of indifference that Obama seems to exude,” Joffe said.
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Obama said Thursday that “America’s support for our NATO allies is unwavering.
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“We are going to have to think very hard in Europe and in the United States about how we are going to respond to the Ukrainian government’s legitimate requests to have the wherewithal to defend itself,” said Francois Heisbourg...
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In a conference call with reporters Thursday, an Obama administration official sounded quite non-committal on arming the Ukrainians.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
Flies know cheet when they see it!
How can Europe be against that?
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