By
Charles Krauthammer
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Barack Obama’s 949-word response Monday to a question about foreign
policy weakness showed the president at his worst: defensive, irritable,
contradictory and at times detached from reality. It began with a complaint about negative coverage on Fox News, when, in fact, it was the New York Times’ front page that featured Obama’s foreign policy failures, most recently the inability to conclude a trade agreement with Japan and the collapse of Secretary of State John Kerry’s Middle East negotiations.
Add to this the collapse of not one but two Geneva conferences
on Syria, American helplessness in the face of Russian aggression
against Ukraine and the Saudi king’s humiliating dismissal of Obama
within two hours of talks — no dinner — after Obama made a special
2,300-mile diversion from Europe to see him, and you have an impressive
litany of serial embarrassments.
Obama’s first rhetorical defense, as usual, was to attack a straw man: “Why is it that everybody is so eager to use military force?”
Everybody? Wasn’t it you, Mr. President, who decided to attack Libya
under the grand Obama doctrine of “responsibility to protect” helpless
civilians — every syllable of which you totally contradicted as 150,000 were being slaughtered in Syria?
And wasn’t attacking Syria for having crossed your own chemical-weapons “red line” also your idea? Before, of course, you retreated abjectly, thereby marginalizing yourself and exposing the United States to general ridicule.
Everybody
eager to use military force? Name a single Republican (or Democratic)
leader who has called for sending troops into Ukraine.
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The critique by John McCain and others is that
when the Ukrainians last month came asking for weapons to defend
themselves, Obama turned them down. The Pentagon offered instead MREs,
ready-to-eat burgers to defend against 40,000 well-armed Russians. Obama
even denied Ukraine such defensive gear as night-vision goggles and
body armor.
Obama retorted
testily: Does anyone think Ukrainian weaponry would deter Russia, as
opposed to Obama’s diplomatic and economic pressure? Why, averred Obama,
“in Ukraine, what we’ve done is mobilize the international community. . . . Russia is having to engage in activities that have been rejected uniformly around the world.”
That’s a deterrent? Fear of criticism? Empty words?
To
think this will stop Putin, liberator of Crimea, champion of “New
Russia,” is delusional. In fact, Putin’s popularity at home has spiked 10 points since the start of his war on Ukraine. It’s now double Obama’s.
As for the allegedly mobilized international
community, it has done nothing. Demonstrably nothing to deter Putin from
swallowing Crimea. Demonstrably nothing to deter his systematic campaign
of destabilization, anonymous seizures and selective violence in the
proxy-proclaimed People’s Republic of Donetsk, where Putin’s
“maskirovka” (disguised warfare) has turned Eastern Ukraine into a
no-man’s land where Kiev hardly dares tread.
As for Obama’s vaunted economic sanctions, when he finally got around to applying Round 2 on Monday, the markets were so impressed by their weakness that the ruble rose 1 percent and the Moscow stock exchange 2 percent.
Behind all this U.S. action, explained the New York Times
in a recent leak calculated to counteract the impression of a foreign
policy of clueless ad hocism, is a major strategic idea: containment.
A
rather odd claim when a brazenly uncontained Russia swallows a major
neighbor one piece at a time — as America stands by. After all, how did
real containment begin? In March 1947, with Greece in danger of collapse
from a Soviet-backed insurgency and Turkey under direct Russian
pressure, President Truman went to Congress for major and immediate economic and military aid to both countries.
That
means weaponry, Mr. President. It was the beginning of the Truman
Doctrine. No one is claiming that arming Ukraine would have definitively
deterred Putin’s current actions. But the possibility of a bloody and
prolonged Ukrainian resistance to infiltration or invasion would surely
alter Putin’s calculus more than Obama’s toothless sanctions or empty
diplomatic gestures, like the preposterous Geneva agreement that wasn’t
worth the paper it was written on.
Or does Obama really believe that Putin’s
thinking would be altered less by antitank and antiaircraft weapons in
Ukrainian hands than by the State Department’s comical #UnitedforUkraine Twitter campaign?
Obama
appears to think so. Which is the source of so much allied anxiety:
Obama really seems to believe that his foreign policy is succeeding.
Ukraine has already been written off. But Eastern Europe need not worry. Obama understands containment. He recently dispatched 150 American ground troops
to Poland and each of the Baltic states. You read correctly: 150. Each.
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