Partisan critics routinely cite Obama’s decision to announce a date certain for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan as evidence of his military incompetence and political naiveté. More to the point, they invariably juxtapose this disregard for Obama with reverential regard for Russian President Vladimir Putin – as if the former is to the latter as Darius III was to Alexander the Great.
Therefore, I wonder what these critics make of Putin’s decision to announce a date certain for ending the sanctions he just imposed against the West:
Russia retaliated on Thursday for Western sanctions against Moscow, announcing that it was banning imports of a wide range of food and agricultural products from Europe and the United States, among others. The move raised the level of confrontation over Ukraine with measures that seemed likely to affect Russian consumers at least as much as European farming.
Dmitri A. Medvedev, the prime minister, announced that Russia would ban all beef, pork, fruit, vegetables and dairy products from the European Union, the United States, Canada, Australia and Norway for one year.
(Washington Post, August 7, 2014)
After all, if Obama undermined his military warfare against the Taliban by announcing a date certain to withdraw troops, hasn’t Putin undermined his economic warfare against the West by announcing a date certain to end sanctions…?
Mind you, given that Russians have become as dependent on Western food as Americans used to be on Mid-eastern oil, Putin probably had to announce a date certain to make his sanctions more palatable to Russians than they are punitive to Westerners.
Apropos of oil, I’m on record (in “Checkmated on Crimea, Obama Plays for Rest of Ukraine,” March 6, 2014) ridiculing Europeans for dithering over levying punitive sanctions against Russia for annexing Crimea. They feared Putin would retaliate by cutting off Russian oil and gas supplies to Europe. I scoffed, however, that Putin would be cutting off Russia’s nose to spite its face if he did.
In a similar vein, the only thing Putin is doing by banning these food imports is returning Russians to the old Soviet days, when fruits and vegetables were considered bourgeois Western indulgences. If that isn’t cutting off nose to spite face, nothing is.
But Putin is clearly sensible enough to appreciate that imposing these sanctions indefinitely would constitute a blunder ten times worse than Prohibition. Nothing betrayed this quite like him dispatching Medvedev, his heretofore unseen and unheard prime minister, to announce them.
Poor Medvedev: he looked more like a POW reading Western propaganda than a Russian second in command announcing plans for a retaliatory strike. More to the point, though, his face, not Putin’s, will now be associated with this self-denying folly. And his will be the face Russians target when their longing for these banned foods triggers their political wrath….
Alas, on a far more ominous note, reports are that Putin is redeploying troops on the Western front.
Mind you, I suspect he’s only doing this as a military feint – knowing full well that an actual invasion of Ukraine, no matter his pretext, would be even more self-defeating than his ban on Western food.
Unfortunately, Putin has proved himself such a spiteful, bullying, rabble-rousing strategist that I fear he may have blustered and boxed himself into a corner, leaving him no choice but to invade Ukraine in a genocidal attempt to save face. In other words, in checkmating the West on Crimea, Putin may have checked himself:
Putin’s propaganda has done such a terrific job of convincing Russians that Westerners are undermining their culture at home and threatening the safety of fellow Russians in former republics of the Soviet Union, the credibility of his presidency now depends on backing up his neo-Stalinist rhetoric with avenging military action.
(“Checkmated on Crimea, Obama Plays for Rest of Ukraine,” The iPINIONS Journal, March 6, 2014)
That said, here’s all you need to know about the major powers vying to be respected as the world’s most influential nation today:
- The United States has deployed troops to Iraq to provide humanitarian relief and protection for hundreds of thousands of non-Sunnis Iraqis (mostly Yazidis and Christians) who have fled their homes to escape religious cleansing by rampaging jihadists calling themselves ISIS/ISIL;
- Russia has deployed troops to threaten full-scale invasion of Ukraine because it believes it has a geopolitical right to determine that country’s leadership; China has deployed troops to every continent, disguised as foreign laborers, as part of its 100-year plan to dominate the world economically … then militarily; and Europe is engaged in an untenable balancing act, trying to appease all three … at once.
Who gets your respect?
Does it matter to you, as much as it does to me, that the Russians would be hard-pressed to cite a single instance in modern history where they provided humanitarian aid (through government agencies or NGOs) that was not directly pursuant to their own political, economic and/or military interests? At least the Chinese can cite their “health diplomacy,” which has seen as many Chinese doctors go to Africa over the years on medical missions as American priests have gone on religious ones. But why, for example, didn’t it occur to the Russians to redeploy some of the troops now menacing Ukraine to provide the humanitarian aid and protection for those displaced Iraqis the Americans felt it was their (“exceptional”) burden to bear … yet again?
Related commentaries:
Checkmated on Crimea…
Int’l court declares Putin a liar…
Everyone’s blaming Putin, but…