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No one wants to say so, but the Obama administration has backed the wrong horse in Ukraine, and the misguided wager is a big loss. It is hardly the presidents first failure on the foreign side, but it may prove the costliest of his many to date.
For a while it was possible to pretend, just barely, that supporting the coup against Viktor Yanukovych, the elected president hounded into exile in February, would prove a sound judgment. Obama always came across as a welterweight in the ring with Vladimir Putin, simply not up to the Russian leaders command of all available moves. But one could imagine Secretary of State Kerry clearing an exit corridor with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
For a while it looked as though the provisional government in Kiev might prove*worthy of bailout funds*from the U.S., the European Union, and the International Monetary Fund, despite the new regimes legitimacy problems. Putin took (back) Crimea and prompted little more than impotent bleating, true. But there was hope that this new bunch could hold together what remained of the nation at least until the elections scheduled for May 25.
It is all by the boards now. Regardless of how you may construe these past six months in Ukraine, we have just watched a failed effort to wrest the nation straight out of Russias sphere of influence and insert it into the Wests. It is now easy to conclude that the second-term Obama White House has not one foreign policy success to its credit and none in prospect. (The*first term*looks little better, for that matter.)
Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Mideast, Syria, China, and probably Iran in coming months: Nothing ad hominem here, but figuratively speaking, the failure-prone Kerry has crashed more helicopters in the desert than Jimmy Carter ever ordered airborne.
Success in Ukraine was never in the cards for this administration. But it slipped beyond all grasp late last week, when the provisionals ordered a military operation to quell dissent in the numerous eastern cities where proRussian sentiment tends to be strong. Touching and pathetic all at once,*an account of the result*is worth reading simply as a reality
There is no coming back when your soldiers and security forces not only refuse orders once in the east, but volunteer their ammunition, guns, tanks, artillery, and personnel carriers to the locals, saying they have no stomach for the mission. Readers may disagree, but I will never take the provisionals in Kiev as other than the opportunistic imposters I took them to be from the first. The first conclusion here: Kiev should get no money from anyone until a proper government is elected to office.*
Next*came the agreement*Washington, the E.U., Moscow, and the provisionals negotiated in Geneva last Thursday. Instantly it appeared to make even less difference than the little it was first expected to.
Washington immediately complained that Russia refused to call off its operatives in the east, who are supposedly to blame for all the unrest. Three big problems here.
Russias role is not completely clear, but when there are 40,000 Russian troops stationed around the Eastern perimeter of Ukraine, it gives insurgents a lot of confidence.It stretches credibility to suggest that the residents of eastern Ukraine are empty-headed such that Moscow has them all playing the same music without any thought of their own.Three,*a firefight Sunday*at a roadblock in the east almost certainly involved paramilitaries in support of the provisionals. Moscow asserted that they were from Right Sektor, the neo-fascists who rammed the provisionals into power three months back. It is a sad measure of Kievs credibility, but in any detached judgment the Russians account cannot be dismissed. If true, it took Kiev three days to breach the Geneva agreement.
Obama took an extraordinary step Saturday, and again there seems no turning back from it. As*The New York Times*reported, the president has just declared Cold War II, having concluded that there is no working with Putin even if a solution in Ukraine develops.
The project is to ignore the master of the Kremlin, minimize the disruption Putin can cause, and effectively make Russia a pariah state. All of this is advanced as position-of-strength imagery and strategy.
It can be read as such only by the gullible. Turn this around and Obama has just announced a pout that amounts to his surrender to a statesman who has boxed his ears in every round.
Apart from this, it is compounding error to bring back the confrontation at the Cold Wars core. Just as wrong is*NATOs new plan*to push its presence as close to Russias frontiers as it can.
Are we now watching the start of another generation of needless tension and division between Europe and its easterly neighbor? It is the obvious risk as of this past weekend, and it is already evident the economic costs will be formidable: wasteful military and security spending, redundant infrastructure in the hundreds of billions of dollars, opportunity costs that simply cannot be calculated.
Most immediately, Washington and the European allies ought to be reversing course and turning Ukraine into a field of cooperation with Russia by way of a commonly supported bailout devoid of geopolitical motivation. This kind of thinking is now antique idealism, of coursesomething to hang in a museum. *
A decade and a half into a new century and the place of foreign policy has already shifted. A good one is essential to any nations well-being in this new era. As things stand now, Ukraine is due to show us the damage a bad one can do.
obama made a disastrous mistake when he and Kerry decided to resolve Ukraine by devising an off ramp for Putin to gracefully be able to withdraw. They assumed, wrongly, that Putin was interested in withdrawing at all. Clearly Putin was thinking victory while obama assumed it was a graceful surrender.
obama has been so wrong for so long that there is no way we could get out of this under the obama regime.
Well backing a coup when clearly a country is as divided as the Ukraine was the first biggie.
I just hope he doesn't draw another line in the sand, because you know he'll never back it up.
No one wants to say so, but the Obama administration has backed the wrong horse in Ukraine, and the misguided wager is a big loss. It is hardly the presidents first failure on the foreign side, but it may prove the costliest of his many to date.
For a while it was possible to pretend, just barely, that supporting the coup against Viktor Yanukovych, the elected president hounded into exile in February, would prove a sound judgment. Obama always came across as a welterweight in the ring with Vladimir Putin, simply not up to the Russian leaders command of all available moves. But one could imagine Secretary of State Kerry clearing an exit corridor with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
For a while it looked as though the provisional government in Kiev might prove*worthy of bailout funds*from the U.S., the European Union, and the International Monetary Fund, despite the new regimes legitimacy problems. Putin took (back) Crimea and prompted little more than impotent bleating, true. But there was hope that this new bunch could hold together what remained of the nation at least until the elections scheduled for May 25.
It is all by the boards now. Regardless of how you may construe these past six months in Ukraine, we have just watched a failed effort to wrest the nation straight out of Russias sphere of influence and insert it into the Wests. It is now easy to conclude that the second-term Obama White House has not one foreign policy success to its credit and none in prospect. (The*first term*looks little better, for that matter.)
Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Mideast, Syria, China, and probably Iran in coming months: Nothing ad hominem here, but figuratively speaking, the failure-prone Kerry has crashed more helicopters in the desert than Jimmy Carter ever ordered airborne.
Success in Ukraine was never in the cards for this administration. But it slipped beyond all grasp late last week, when the provisionals ordered a military operation to quell dissent in the numerous eastern cities where proRussian sentiment tends to be strong. Touching and pathetic all at once,*an account of the result*is worth reading simply as a reality
There is no coming back when your soldiers and security forces not only refuse orders once in the east, but volunteer their ammunition, guns, tanks, artillery, and personnel carriers to the locals, saying they have no stomach for the mission. Readers may disagree, but I will never take the provisionals in Kiev as other than the opportunistic imposters I took them to be from the first. The first conclusion here: Kiev should get no money from anyone until a proper government is elected to office.*
Next*came the agreement*Washington, the E.U., Moscow, and the provisionals negotiated in Geneva last Thursday. Instantly it appeared to make even less difference than the little it was first expected to.
Washington immediately complained that Russia refused to call off its operatives in the east, who are supposedly to blame for all the unrest. Three big problems here.
Russias role is not completely clear, but when there are 40,000 Russian troops stationed around the Eastern perimeter of Ukraine, it gives insurgents a lot of confidence.It stretches credibility to suggest that the residents of eastern Ukraine are empty-headed such that Moscow has them all playing the same music without any thought of their own.Three,*a firefight Sunday*at a roadblock in the east almost certainly involved paramilitaries in support of the provisionals. Moscow asserted that they were from Right Sektor, the neo-fascists who rammed the provisionals into power three months back. It is a sad measure of Kievs credibility, but in any detached judgment the Russians account cannot be dismissed. If true, it took Kiev three days to breach the Geneva agreement.
Obama took an extraordinary step Saturday, and again there seems no turning back from it. As*The New York Times*reported, the president has just declared Cold War II, having concluded that there is no working with Putin even if a solution in Ukraine develops.
The project is to ignore the master of the Kremlin, minimize the disruption Putin can cause, and effectively make Russia a pariah state. All of this is advanced as position-of-strength imagery and strategy.
It can be read as such only by the gullible. Turn this around and Obama has just announced a pout that amounts to his surrender to a statesman who has boxed his ears in every round.
Apart from this, it is compounding error to bring back the confrontation at the Cold Wars core. Just as wrong is*NATOs new plan*to push its presence as close to Russias frontiers as it can.
Are we now watching the start of another generation of needless tension and division between Europe and its easterly neighbor? It is the obvious risk as of this past weekend, and it is already evident the economic costs will be formidable: wasteful military and security spending, redundant infrastructure in the hundreds of billions of dollars, opportunity costs that simply cannot be calculated.
Most immediately, Washington and the European allies ought to be reversing course and turning Ukraine into a field of cooperation with Russia by way of a commonly supported bailout devoid of geopolitical motivation. This kind of thinking is now antique idealism, of coursesomething to hang in a museum. *
A decade and a half into a new century and the place of foreign policy has already shifted. A good one is essential to any nations well-being in this new era. As things stand now, Ukraine is due to show us the damage a bad one can do.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/obama-white-house-lost-ukraine-093000155.html
Well backing a coup when clearly a country is as divided as the Ukraine was the first biggie.
Yup.
Russia does not want Ukraine in the EU: understandable from their position.
now post the other editorial on the subject, the con vs. pro...for once be equal in representation of an issue..
I just hope he doesn't draw another line in the sand, because you know he'll never back it up.
No one wants to say so, but the Obama administration has backed the wrong horse in Ukraine, and the misguided wager is a big loss. It is hardly the president’s first failure on the foreign side, but it may prove the costliest of his many to date.
For a while it was possible to pretend, just barely, that supporting the coup against Viktor Yanukovych, the elected president hounded into exile in February, would prove a sound judgment. Obama always came across as a welterweight in the ring with Vladimir Putin, simply not up to the Russian leader’s command of all available moves. But one could imagine Secretary of State Kerry clearing an exit corridor with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
For a while it looked as though the provisional government in Kiev might prove*worthy of bailout funds*from the U.S., the European Union, and the International Monetary Fund, despite the new regime’s legitimacy problems. Putin took (back) Crimea and prompted little more than impotent bleating, true. But there was hope that this new bunch could hold together what remained of the nation at least until the elections scheduled for May 25.
It is all by the boards now. Regardless of how you may construe these past six months in Ukraine, we have just watched a failed effort to wrest the nation straight out of Russia’s sphere of influence and insert it into the West’s. It is now easy to conclude that the second-term Obama White House has not one foreign policy success to its credit and none in prospect. (The*first term*looks little better, for that matter.)
Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Mideast, Syria, China, and probably Iran in coming months: Nothing ad hominem here, but figuratively speaking, the failure-prone Kerry has crashed more helicopters in the desert than Jimmy Carter ever ordered airborne.
Success in Ukraine was never in the cards for this administration. But it slipped beyond all grasp late last week, when the provisionals ordered a military operation to quell dissent in the numerous eastern cities where pro–Russian sentiment tends to be strong. Touching and pathetic all at once,*an account of the result*is worth reading simply as a reality
There is no coming back when your soldiers and security forces not only refuse orders once in the east, but volunteer their ammunition, guns, tanks, artillery, and personnel carriers to the locals, saying they have no stomach for the mission. Readers may disagree, but I will never take the provisionals in Kiev as other than the opportunistic imposters I took them to be from the first. The first conclusion here: Kiev should get no money from anyone until a proper government is elected to office.*
Next*came the agreement*Washington, the E.U., Moscow, and the provisionals negotiated in Geneva last Thursday. Instantly it appeared to make even less difference than the little it was first expected to.
Washington immediately complained that Russia refused to call off its operatives in the east, who are supposedly to blame for all the unrest. Three big problems here.
Russia’s role is not completely clear, but when there are 40,000 Russian troops stationed around the Eastern perimeter of Ukraine, it gives insurgents a lot of confidence.It stretches credibility to suggest that the residents of eastern Ukraine are empty-headed such that Moscow has them all playing the same music without any thought of their own.Three,*a firefight Sunday*at a roadblock in the east almost certainly involved paramilitaries in support of the provisionals. Moscow asserted that they were from Right Sektor, the neo-fascists who rammed the provisionals into power three months back. It is a sad measure of Kiev’s credibility, but in any detached judgment the Russians’ account cannot be dismissed. If true, it took Kiev three days to breach the Geneva agreement.
Obama took an extraordinary step Saturday, and again there seems no turning back from it. As*The New York Times*reported, the president has just declared Cold War II, having concluded that there is no working with Putin even if a solution in Ukraine develops.
The project is to “ignore the master of the Kremlin, minimize the disruption Putin can cause,” and “effectively make Russia a pariah state.” All of this is advanced as position-of-strength imagery and strategy.
It can be read as such only by the gullible. Turn this around and Obama has just announced a pout that amounts to his surrender to a statesman who has boxed his ears in every round.
Apart from this, it is compounding error to bring back the confrontation at the Cold War’s core. Just as wrong is*NATO’s new plan*to push its presence as close to Russia’s frontiers as it can.
Are we now watching the start of another generation of needless tension and division between Europe and its easterly neighbor? It is the obvious risk as of this past weekend, and it is already evident the economic costs will be formidable: wasteful military and security spending, redundant infrastructure in the hundreds of billions of dollars, opportunity costs that simply cannot be calculated.
Most immediately, Washington and the European allies ought to be reversing course and turning Ukraine into a field of cooperation with Russia by way of a commonly supported bailout devoid of geopolitical motivation. This kind of thinking is now antique idealism, of course—something to hang in a museum. *
A decade and a half into a new century and the place of foreign policy has already shifted. A good one is essential to any nation’s well-being in this new era. As things stand now, Ukraine is due to show us the damage a bad one can do.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/obama-white-house-lost-ukraine-093000155.html
Interesting...what should the US and EU have done?
Wrong! It's called 'The Budapest Memorandum' signed by President Clinton in 1994., we had no treaty with the Ukraine,.
I just hope he doesn't draw another line in the sand, because you know he'll never back it up.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/obama-white-house-lost-ukraine-093000155.html
Interesting...what should the US and EU have done?
Stay out of it. Bottom line if you look at the two offers made to the Ukraine to bolster their economy Russia simply made the better offer by far.
ETA: Canada and Britain should have kept out of this as well. I'm royally pissed that my Conservative government is involved in this bullshit. I've been slagging everyone in a very bipartisan fashion.
Wrong! It's called 'The Budapest Memorandum' signed by President Clinton in 1994., we had no treaty with the Ukraine,.
Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
According to the memorandum, Russia, the U.S., and the UK confirmed, in recognition of Ukraine becoming party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and in effect abandoning its nuclear arsenal to Russia, that they would:
1.Respect Ukrainian independence and sovereignty within its existing borders.
2.Refrain from the threat or use of force against Ukraine.
3.Refrain from using economic pressure on Ukraine in order to influence its politics.
4.Seek United Nations Security Council action if nuclear weapons are used against Ukraine.
5.Refrain from the use of nuclear arms against Ukraine.
6.Consult with one another if questions arise regarding these commitments
The Budapest Memorandum was negotiated as a political agreement. It refers to assurances, not defined, but less than a military guarantee of intervention.[1][2][10] According to Stephen MacFarlane, a professor of international relations "It gives signatories justification if they take action, but it does not force anyone to act in Ukraine."[9] In the U.S. neither the George H. W. Bush administration nor the Clinton administration was prepared to give a military commitment to Ukraine, nor did they believe the U.S. Senate would ratify an international treaty, so the memorandum was agreed as a political agreement.[10]
Short of sending in troops, I don't see what he could do. And rule 2 is never get involved in a civil war.
Putin at best will carve off a chunk as he did in Georgia, when the RW darling occupied the WH. Putin suffered no negative econ consequence for that. I suspect this time he'll end up with a very hostile, but smaller Ukraine, totally hostile to Russia and aligned with NATO. I don't think that's really good for us, but it really would suck for Putin.
The One's line in the sand act is very old, however.
Considering that an entire country's borders can be within the confines of a space the size of Vatican City, and national borders are nothing more than imaginary lines in the dirt, why is it such a big deal to rewrite these imaginary lines and let new nations form? If eastern Ukraine wants to join with Russia, let them. If western Ukraine wants to join with the EU, let them. If northern Afghanistan wants to form a Kurdish nation, who is anyone else to tell them they can't? If Iraq wants to split into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish nations, so be it.
