By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--August 29, 2014
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Mr. Obama seemed equally intent on managing expectations about what the United States may do in response to reports that Russia has sent forces into Ukraine. Although he said he expected to impose additional sanctions, he declined to call Russia’s latest moves an invasion, as Ukraine and others have, saying they were “not really a shift” but just “a little more overt” form of longstanding Russian violations of Ukrainian sovereignty.Many on the left are trying to run interference for Obama by insisting we "should not go to war with Russia over this," as if there are no steps you can take short of all-out war with Russia to deal with this situation. We're not even arming Ukraine, for goodness sakes. And as we saw yesterday, we don't even have a president who's willing to call an invasion what it is:
The Kiev government is calling this an "invasion," while NATO clings to "incursion," but that's a distinction without a difference. Russia invaded Ukraine in February by grabbing Crimea. It has since escalated its military intervention in multiple ways, including with special forces and by firing artillery at Ukrainian positions from both Russian territory and inside Ukraine. If Spanish-speaking men in army garb grabbed El Paso and Mexican artillery fired at the Texas National Guard, Americans would call it an invasion. The strategy behind Mr. Putin's move into Ukraine's southern coast is to open a land bridge between Russia and Crimea. The goal is to reduce Crimea's isolation so Russian military garrisons can be reinforced by land instead of by air, and the peninsula's economy can be knit more closely to Russia's.That's Putin's strategy. Obama's? Well why would you expect him to have one? As with ISIS in Iraq, Obama was completely unprepared for Putin's invasion of Ukraine, which owes largely to the fact that Obama finds international affairs an annoying distraction from his real priority of socializing the American economy and adding to the number of Americans dependent on government and thus locked in forever as Democratic Party voters. When bad actors like Putin and ISIS cause problems, Obama is annoyed, but not as much as he's annoyed at you and me for expecting him to know what to do about it.
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