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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; crimea</title>
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		<title>Putin’s Unchecked Aggression</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/putins-unchecked-aggression/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=putins-unchecked-aggression</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/putins-unchecked-aggression/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Sep 2014 04:12:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crimea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[invasion]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Putin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ukraine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=239947</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How to avoid Russia's checkmate. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/1392924232400.cached.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239961" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/1392924232400.cached-400x350.jpg" alt="1392924232400.cached" width="307" height="269" /></a>Russia has expanded the scope of its military intervention in Ukraine. Following on the heels of its illegal occupation and annexation of Crimea and arming of the separatists fighting the Ukrainian government in eastern Ukraine, Russian regular troops have now joined the separatists’ fight. They are equipped with heavy weaponry, including armored personnel carriers. And a new southeastern front has been opened by the Russian-backed separatists which would enable Russia to gain effective control over a vital land link between Russia and Crimea.</p>
<p>Determined not to allow Ukrainian forces to quell the separatist rebellion, which they were well on their way to doing, Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to use more Russian military might to tip the scales in the separatists’ favor.</p>
<p>On August 26<sup>th</sup> – the same day that Putin was meeting with Ukrainian President Poroshenko in Minsk, Belarus to talk about peace &#8211; satellite imagery showed Russian combat units southeast of Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine.  Ukraine also detained regular Russian Army personnel from the 9th brigade, whom Russia claimed had mistakenly wandered into Ukraine.</p>
<p>A separatist leader boasted that three or four thousand Russian soldiers have joined their fight, whom he claimed were using their vacation time to help their comrades. NATO has estimated that at least 1,000 Russian troops were present in Ukraine. Dismissing Russia’s “hollow denials,” NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on August 29<sup>th</sup> that</p>
<blockquote><p>it is now clear that Russian troops and equipment have illegally crossed the border. This is a blatant violation of Ukraine&#8217;s sovereignty and territorial integrity. It defies all diplomatic efforts for a peaceful solution.</p></blockquote>
<p>United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman, in his briefing to an emergency session of the UN Security Council on August 28th, referred to the “deeply alarming reports of Russian military involvement in this new wave of escalation. If confirmed, it would constitute a direct contravention of international law and of the UN Charter.”</p>
<p>Mr. Feltman added that, “as arms and heavy weaponry reportedly continue to flow unabated into Ukraine from Russia,” illegal armed groups operating in the Donetsk region</p>
<blockquote><p>have reportedly intensified their activities over the last two days, spreading violence along Ukraine’s southern coast, in the direction of the key strategic port of Mariupol…The southward spread of fighting, along the border with the Russian Federation and the Sea of Azov, marks a dangerous escalation in the conflict.</p></blockquote>
<p>After Mr. Feltman spoke, each member of the Security Council, as well as the Ukrainian UN representative, chimed in with their remarks. Lithuania, which had requested the emergency meeting, went first. Its ambassador accused Russia of committing multiple violations of international law in its “aggression” in Ukraine. She demanded that Russia remove its fighters from Ukraine.</p>
<p>U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power lambasted Russia for ignoring the repeated calls of the Security Council to stop its aggressive actions. “Instead of listening, instead of heeding the demands of the international community and the rules of the international order, at every step, Russia has come before this Council to say everything except the truth,” Ambassador Power said. “It has manipulated. It has obfuscated. It has outright lied.”</p>
<p>Ambassador Power warned that the United States and its partners will work together &#8220;to ratchet up the consequences on Russia.&#8221; France’s UN representative concurred.</p>
<p>British UN Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant, the Security Council president during August, said: &#8220;Now we see irrefutable evidence of regular Russian forces operating inside Ukraine.&#8221; He reeled off numbers of heavy weaponry in the hands of the separatists, most of which was supplied by Russia, including 100 tanks, 80 armored personnel carriers, 500 anti-tank weapons and more than 100 artillery pieces.</p>
<p>During the Security Council meeting, Russia’s UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin did his best to fend off the condemnations of Russia’s actions coming from other members of the Council and the Ukrainian representative.  Sure, there were Russian “volunteers” present in eastern parts of Ukraine, Ambassador Churkin said. &#8220;No one is hiding that,&#8221; he claimed. But then, in an apparent game of turnabout is fair play, Ambassador Churkin called on the United States to be more forthcoming about what he asserted to be the presence of 1000 Western advisers in Ukraine. He said that he wanted to &#8220;send a message to Washington: Stop interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign states.&#8221;</p>
<p>Russia will be sending another “humanitarian” convoy into Ukraine, Ambassador Churkin declared. And he challenged the other members of the Security Council to adopt the text of his proposed press statement calling for an immediate unconditional ceasefire, inclusive dialogue and stepped up humanitarian relief. The Lithuanian ambassador said that her country would need more time to review the text, but it appeared to be deficient in not calling specifically for the separatists to stop impeding the flow of humanitarian aid.</p>
<p>Ambassador Churkin tried to maintain an even demeanor as he delivered the official Russian line in response to the sharply critical speeches that preceded his remarks. His strongest rhetoric was reserved for the Ukrainian government in Kiev, which he accused of engaging in “a war against its own people.” Ambassador Churkin also dismissed the Ukrainian government’s call for a ceasefire and for the separatists to lay down their arms as a sham.</p>
<p>President Putin’s decision to up the ante has reversed the tide of momentum that had been going the Ukrainian government’s way. Now the Ukrainian military forces are on the defensive and at risk of losing control of a wide area of coastal territory. Putin praised the separatists’ resurgence “in intercepting Kiev’s military operation.” He called the separatists the fighters of Novorossiya – meaning the territory Putin likes to refer to as “New Russia,” based on what he claims belongs historically to Russia.</p>
<p>Putin talks out of both sides of his mouth. While single-handedly providing enough weapons and troops to keep the rebellion going against the duly elected government of Ukraine in Kiev, he talks about opening humanitarian corridors and wanting peaceful dialogue. Putin has no interest in peace except on his terms. His goals are to take effective control over as much of the eastern portion of Ukraine as he can, keep the remainder of Ukraine as weak as possible to make it too much of a burden for Western Europe to bail out, and continue to expand the territory of “New Russia.”</p>
<p>“The question is to ensure the rights and interests of the Russian southeast,” Putin said in a nationally televised interview last April after his aggressive occupation of Crimea. He continued:</p>
<blockquote><p>It’s New Russia. Kharkiv, Lugansk, Donetsk, Odessa were not part of Ukraine in czarist times, they were transferred in 1920. Why? God knows. Then for various reasons these areas were gone, and the people stayed there. We need to encourage them to find a solution.</p></blockquote>
<p>Expanding the reach of the Russian empire to that of the czarist glory days is Putin’s idea of the right solution. And nobody should even think of taking any military actions against Russia in return. &#8220;It&#8217;s best not to mess with us,&#8221; he warned on Friday. “I want to remind you that Russia is one of the leading nuclear powers.&#8221;</p>
<p>To justify his imperialistic ambitions, Putin brazenly invoked Russia’s own suffering at the hands of the Nazis during World War II. Referring to Ukrainian current military actions against Ukraine’s southeastern cities, he told students last week that “[I]t reminds me of World War II, when German forces encircled Russian cities like Leningrad and hit residential quarters with heavy artillery.”</p>
<p>Putin’s Nazi reference in his remarks to students is ironic to the say the least, considering that his own Ukraine strategy is an echo of Hitler’s Anschluss. Also, he had no comment on the civilians killed by rockets imported from Russia or the depraved public parading and humiliation of captured Ukrainian soldiers by the separatists in violation of the Geneva Conventions. And Putin has apparently moved beyond the tragedy of the passengers and crew who lost their lives aboard the commercial Malaysian plane shot down by a surface-to-air missile launched from an area controlled by Russian-backed separatists.</p>
<p>The United Nations Security Council has met 24 times on the subject of Ukraine. It has turned into bad theater. All we hear is the predictable rhetoric from Russia and its critics. Russia’s veto power prevents anything of real substance from being accomplished.</p>
<p>Increasingly severe economic sanctions have been imposed by the United States and its Western European allies against Russian individuals, businesses and the financial and arms industries. However, aside from some tough-sounding rhetoric, European leaders are equivocating on exactly what new stronger economic measures they would be willing to take against Russia and when they would do so, worrying about the impact of such measures on their own economies. President Obama may impose more sanctions on his own if need be, but he would prefer to reach a consensus with Europe on next steps. Either way, as a senior U.S. diplomat told me, sanctions do not appear to be making much of a difference in changing Putin’s calculations.</p>
<p>President Obama has ruled out any direct overt U.S. military confrontation with Russia in Ukraine, which makes sense. But with economic sanctions not fazing Putin and direct military confrontation out of the picture, one U.S. official was quoted by The Telegraph as saying: &#8220;If Putin is immune to economic pain and we are not willing to use military force, then he&#8217;s got us in check mate, doesn&#8217;t he?&#8221;</p>
<p>Putin has us in check mate only if we ignore what Winston Churchill counseled about the Russians in his 1946 “Sinews of Peace” speech. He said that “there is nothing they admire so much as strength.”</p>
<p>What we need to do is to find creative ways to display the kind of strength that will get Putin’s attention and give him pause.</p>
<p>First, we can provide more sophisticated arms and training to Ukraine’s beleaguered military forces together with more sharing of intelligence information. Second, we can utilize covert operations in support of dissidents in Crimea and anti-Russian Ukrainians in eastern Ukraine to create a counter-force that would undercut Putin’s assumption of a low-cost occupation.</p>
<p>Third, and perhaps most important of all, Obama should now deploy the mobile missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, which he had mistakenly decided not to do in his first term as part of his failed attempt to “re-set” relations with Russia in a more positive direction. In fact, Obama should add Hungary and the Baltic states to the list. In other words, do to Putin what he has been most afraid of. Contain him with an encirclement strategy.</p>
<p>There are no guarantees that these measures will work.  But one thing is for sure. If we do nothing but add a few more sanctions, Putin will not stop his aggression with eastern Ukraine.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Perils of International Idealism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-perils-of-international-idealism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-perils-of-international-idealism</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 12 May 2014 04:32:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crimea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[foreign policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[international community]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Syria]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ukraine]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=225292</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[American foreign policy could use a dose of hard-nosed realism.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/9240864824_d023181ae4_z.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-225293" alt="9240864824_d023181ae4_z" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/9240864824_d023181ae4_z.jpg" width="320" height="200" /></a><em>Originally published by <a href="http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/176941">Defining Ideas</a>. </em></p>
<p>United States foreign policy has been defined lately by serial failures. Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and appears to be preparing a reprise in eastern Ukraine, and possibly in the Baltic states. Syrian strongman Bashar al Assad is poised to win the civil war in Syria at the cost so far of over 200,000 dead. Negotiations with Iran over its uranium enrichment program have merely emboldened the regime and brought it closer to its goal of a nuclear weapon. And yet another attempt to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs has failed. In all these crises the U.S. has appeared weak and feckless, unable to direct events or achieve its aims, even as its displeasure and threats are scorned.</p>
<p>The responsibility for these setbacks is often laid at the feet of President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. The political calculations, ideology, and character flaws of both do indeed deserve much of the blame for America’s weakness and ineffectiveness abroad. Yet another factor is larger than any one individual, administration, or party––the flawed and often incoherent ideals shaping our understanding of interstate relations and our expectations of state behavior. Those ideals comprise a set of global norms that assume a universal morality shared by all countries despite the variety of cultures, religions, and governments in the world’s 196 nations. And those norms in turn are embodied in the international order that encompasses the various multinational institutions, tribunals, organizations, conventions, declarations on human rights, and treaties, the purposes of which is to regulate state behavior, deter or stop oppression and violence, promote peace and prosperity, and adjudicate conflict.</p>
<p>Official remarks and commentary on the current crises have been informed by this notion of a global consensus about which state behaviors are legitimate and which are not. John Kerry’s comments on Russia’s conflict with Ukraine, for example, scolded Putin, “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped up pretext.” Similarly, President Obama protested, “Russia’s leadership is challenging truths that only a few weeks ago seemed self-evident––that in the 21st century, the borders of Europe cannot be redrawn with force, that international law matters, that people and nations can make their own decisions about their future,” for such aggression “is not how international law and international norms are observed in the 21st century.”</p>
<p>Critics of the president’s handling of the crisis have endorsed this same international order they feel has been weakened by the U.S.’s timid or inept response. Fareed Zakaria of <i>The Washington Post</i> referred to “broader global norms––for example, against annexations by force. These have not always been honored, but, compared with the past, they have helped shape a more peaceful and prosperous world.” So too David Rivkin and Lee Casey in <i>The Wall Street Journal</i> evoked “the three basic principles of international law, reflected in the United Nations Charter and long-standing custom,” which “are the equality of all states, the sanctity of their territorial integrity, and noninterference of outsiders in their international affairs.”</p>
<p>Rivkin and Casey allude to the two main sources of international law: treaties of the sort that created the United Nations, and “long-standing custom.” Both have their weaknesses and questionable assumptions. As Robert Bork writes in<i> Coercing Virtue</i>, “There is nothing that can be called law in any meaningful sense established by custom. If there were, it would not restrain international aggression; it is more likely to unleash it . . . if custom is what counts, it favors aggression.” This judgment is empirically validated by the incessant warfare, ethnic cleansing, civil wars, invasions of neighbors, and genocide that have attended the modern international order since its birth in the 19th century.</p>
<p>As for treaties, a sovereign nation can refuse to sign a treaty. The United States, for example, has not signed the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel mines. Nations can ignore or undermine treaties too, just as Russia violated the 1994 Budapest Memorandum giving “security assurances” to Ukraine in exchange for the surrender of its nuclear arsenal. Or a nation can withdraw from a treaty if it no longer serves its interests. North Korea did this in 1994 when it withdrew from the International Atomic Energy Agency on its way to acquiring nuclear weapons. This behavior surprises no one who recognizes the wisdom expressed by George Washington, who said of the new nation’s alliance with France, “It is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation can be trusted farther than it is bounded by its interests.”</p>
<p>Internationalism, in contrast, assumes that “customary norms,” and the terms of a treaty like those creating international institutions, encode the universal morals and values that over time have emerged as the human race has progressed and become more civilized. Yet there is little evidence supporting this optimism, and much that shows Washington was right: national or regime interests determine whether these norms and terms, either customary or codified in treaties, are ignored, endorsed, or violated. We should not be surprised at this lack of consensus, given the variety of cultures, religions, and interests that shape both the means and the ends a state will pursue.</p>
<p>For example, violence as an instrument for pursing national aims, including intentional violence against non-combatants, is proscribed by international law and agreements like the Geneva and Hague conventions. Yet different peoples can have different conceptions of when such violence is legitimate. In many Middle Eastern countries, for example, guerilla attacks against non-combatants far from any battlefield are called terrorism by Westerners, yet dubbed legitimate “resistance” by those like the Palestinian Arabs, who name parks and streets after notorious terrorists, celebrate their deeds in school curricula, and subsidize them and their families with stipends. This disagreement about the legitimacy of violence and its acceptable victims reflects radically different beliefs that cannot be harmonized in some larger set of global “norms.”</p>
<p>The primacy of national interest likewise explains the failure of states to consistently intervene in order to punish those violators of international “norms” such as “noninterference of outsiders” in another nation’s affairs, or respect for “territorial integrity.” China’s absorption of Tibet, or Turkey’s annexation of northern Cyprus, was met with diplomatic censure but left unpunished. Today these ongoing occupations––like Putin’s earlier violation of Georgia’s territorial integrity–– are <i>faits accomplis</i>, rarely mentioned even as Russia’s similar annexation of Crimea is condemned. So too with violations of the universal prohibition against genocide, perhaps the most grievous crime in international law.  Over 400,000 people in Darfur have been killed by Arab militias at the instigation of the Sudanese government, and 800,000 were slaughtered in Rwanda.</p>
<p>These horrific crimes and violations of international law were not stopped or punished because it was not in the national interests of any major power to expend the necessary money and lives of its citizens, or to risk the unforeseen geopolitical consequences and blowback of such an intervention, to do so. These political calculations of national interests, which more often than not conflict with those of other nations, when camouflaged by public protestations of fealty to international norms and law, has opened up Western nations to the charge of hypocrisy and cynicism, and consequently eroded their moral authority. Given that “international law is not law but politics,” Bork writes, “it is dangerous to give the name ‘law,’ which summons up respect, to political struggles that are essentially lawless.”</p>
<p>A further incoherence bedevils the idea of international norms binding on all peoples. The cultural relativism dominant in the West proscribes making negative judgments about the cultures and practices of other nations. Such criticisms are thought to bespeak a lingering imperialist and colonialist, if not racist, arrogance—an attempt to impose Western morality and values on peoples with their own distinct and cherished cultures. Yet the foundational ideals of internationalism, such as human rights that exist apart from any particular regime or culture, imply not just a universalism contradicting cultural relativism, but also a moral ranking of cultures determined by their adherence to human rights, sex equality, tolerance for religious minorities, honesty in negotiation, individual freedom, and the stigmatizing of brutality and violence.</p>
<p>Yet how can these privileged norms be coherently integrated with the idea of national sovereignty and self-determination, and the imperative to respect and tolerate the cultural differences that define a unique national identity? If we are unwilling to say that ideals like respecting the territorial integrity of neighbors are superior to, not just different from, the cultures of other nations that violate such ideals; and if we cannot affirm that they trump the “sanctity” of the offenders’ territorial integrity and so justify our interventions to stop or punish violators––even if the aggressor’s behavior is motivated by beliefs and values integral to that nation’s culture and identity––then the foundations of the international order are built on sand, and our foreign policy will appear to be yet another hypocritical perfuming of <i>realpolitik</i> with idealistic rhetoric, or the empty diplomatic gestures of a weak state eager to avoid conflict.</p>
<p>In all the current crises, these contradictions and inconsistencies have compromised our responses and limited our actions, with the result that our interests and security have been endangered by the perception of weakness such failures invite. We need to recognize that the belief in norms established by custom or by treaty will not truly exist until nations share, as Bork writes, “a common political morality or are under a common sovereignty. A glance at the real world suggests we have a while to wait.” And as we wait for that utopian day unlikely to ever arrive, we should not be surprised that global predators continue to scorn “customary norms” and violate treaties, governed only by the timeless Thucydidean maxim–– “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Former President of Ukraine Belatedly Realizing Inviting in Russia was a Bad Idea</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/former-president-of-ukraine-belatedly-realizing-inviting-in-russia-was-a-bad-idea/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=former-president-of-ukraine-belatedly-realizing-inviting-in-russia-was-a-bad-idea</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/former-president-of-ukraine-belatedly-realizing-inviting-in-russia-was-a-bad-idea/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 04 Apr 2014 13:22:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crimea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president of ukraine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vladimir Putin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Yanukovych]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222586</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Yanukovych said he hoped to persuade Putin to return Crimea.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ap69749892900-211ae73e25a1241437c065369e656734c2bd4ed7-s4-c85.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-222588" alt="ap69749892900-211ae73e25a1241437c065369e656734c2bd4ed7-s4-c85" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ap69749892900-211ae73e25a1241437c065369e656734c2bd4ed7-s4-c85-450x336.jpg" width="450" height="336" /></a></p>
<p>It&#8217;s not like there&#8217;s ample precedent for realizing that inviting in a country known for invading in its neighbors to help you out is likely to end with them helping themselves to your country.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/04/02/298385578/yanukovych-i-was-wrong-to-ask-russian-troops-into-crimea?">How could he have known</a>?</p>
<blockquote><p>Former Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted after asking Russian troops into Crimea, admits that his decision was wrong, calling Moscow&#8217;s annexation of the Black Sea peninsula &#8220;a major tragedy.&#8221;</p>
<p>In an interview with The Associated Press and Russian channel NTV, he said he made a mistake when he asked Russia to intervene, a move many Ukrainians view as treason.</p>
<p>&#8220;I was wrong,&#8221; he said through a translator. &#8220;I acted on my emotions.&#8221;</p>
<p>Yanukovych, who is currently residing in Russia, said he hoped to persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin to return Crimea.</p></blockquote>
<p>Good luck with that.<a href="http://www.nysun.com/foreign/putin-pockets-patriots-ring/16172/"> Bob Kraft is still waiting for his ring</a> back from Putin.</p>
<blockquote><p>In the weeks leading up to Yanukovych&#8217;s removal from power, more than 100 people were killed by gunfire – many by snipers — but the former leader denied he had any role in their deaths.</p>
<p>&#8220;I personally never gave any orders to shoot,&#8221; he said.</p></blockquote>
<p>He probably was set up. Putin wanted to push the conflict as far as possible and create a state of chaos.</p>
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		<title>The False Iraq-Crimea Analogy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/the-false-iraq-crimea-analogy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-false-iraq-crimea-analogy</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 01 Apr 2014 04:55:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[crimea]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Who's playbook is Putin really following? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/140303155802-ukraine-military-armed-men-story-top.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-222289" alt="&gt; on March 3, 2014 in Perevalne, Ukraine." src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/140303155802-ukraine-military-armed-men-story-top-442x350.jpg" width="309" height="245" /></a>Of all the strained analyses offered by the Left on the Crimea crisis, none is quite so ludicrous as the comparison of Putin&#8217;s invasion of the former Soviet territory to the 2003 Iraq War. As the Atlantic&#8217;s Peter Beinart </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/vladimir-putin-russian-neocon/284602/">put it</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Putin is just like &#8220;the American hawks who hate him most</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">.&#8221;</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> This sentiment was vocally </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/24/opinion/confronting-putins-russia.html?_r=1">seconded</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by Michael McFaul, a former Obama administration official who served as a special assistant to the president at the National Security Council and as ambassador to the Russian Federation. &#8220;As ambassador, I found it difficult to defend our commitment to sovereignty and international law when asked by Russians, &#8216;What about Iraq?&#8217;” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Defending America&#8217;s commitment to sovereignty and international law vis-à-vis Iraq isn&#8217;t difficult at all, if one chooses to examine the facts, as opposed to the American left&#8217;s historical revisionism. To begin with, President Bush asked for and </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2002-10-10-house-iraq_x.htm">received</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> authorization for the use of force in Iraq from Congress. Both chambers approved the measure with overwhelming majorities. On Oct. 10, 2002 the House voted 296-133 in favor, followed by the Democratic-led Senate&#8217;s vote of 77-23 a day later. &#8220;I believe it is important for America to speak with one voice,&#8221; said Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) at the time. &#8220;It is neither a Democratic resolution nor a Republican resolution. It is now a statement of American resolve and values.&#8221; That sentiment was echoed by then-Senator Hillary Clinton, who called her vote &#8220;the hardest decision I&#8217;ve ever had to make, but I cast it with conviction. I want this president, or any future president, to be in the strongest possible position to lead our country, at the United Nations or at war.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The resolution authorized the president to defend America against the threat posed by Iraq and enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions (UNSCRs). It also required that all diplomatic efforts be exhausted prior to the use of force and that reports to Congress be made every 60 days once action was undertaken.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The key element here is the authorization to enforce the relevant UNSCRs. Beginning in the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.iraqwatch.org/government/US/State/state-iraqres-032003.htm">began</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> serially dismissing UNSCRs, ignoring more than 17 of them and remaining in material breach of Iraq&#8217;s disarmament obligations. The last one in that regard, Resolution 1441, authorized on November 8, 2002, gave Iraq a &#8220;final opportunity to comply.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Bush also established a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100233454/barack-obama-is-proving-an-embarrassing-amateur-on-the-world-stage-compared-to-george-w-bush/">coalition</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of 40 nations to depose Hussein, including Great Britain, Australia, Spain, Italy, Poland, 16 members of the NATO alliance, Japan, South Korea, and a total 12 of 25 EU nations. France and Germany sat on the sidelines, as did Russia, but the &#8220;nobility&#8221; of their position was </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/2005/10/28/over-2000-companies-paid-oil-for-food-bribes/">belied</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by the oil-for-food scandal, in which a U.N investigation revealed that the three nations had paid a total of $1.8 billion in kickbacks and illicit surcharges to the Iraqi strongman.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Another inconvenient reality is that, left-wing mythology not withstanding, WMD possession was not sole premise of the Iraq War. While WMDs were one concern, many other activities of the Hussein regime posed extreme threats to international security, as </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.rightwingnews.com/column-2/what-about-the-weapons-of-mass-destruction-2/">articulated</a> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">by Bush in his Sept 12, 2002 speech to the U.N</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. Aside from WMDs, Bush made clear that if Hussein wanted to avoid war he must &#8220;immediately end all support for terrorism,&#8221; &#8220;cease persecution of its civilian population,&#8221; &#8220;account for all Gulf War personnel whose fate is still unknown,&#8221; and &#8220;immediately end all illicit trade outside the oil-for-food program.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet the comparison between Putin&#8217;s seizure of Crimea and Bush&#8217;s liberation of Iraq ultimately falls apart based on the simplest of realities. America invaded Iraq, disposed of a bloodthirsty dictator, did our best to establish a provisional and democratic government, and </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">withdrew</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. Nor did we seek anything in the way of reparations: China has </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.rte.ie/blogs/business/2012/12/04/how-china-won-the-iraq-war/">become</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the largest recipient of Iraqi oil, with India coming in second. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Putin, however, is not at all interested in global security or bringing an internally recognized criminal to justice. Since 2008, Putin has engaged in invasions of two countries &#8212; Georgia and Ukraine &#8212; and many of Russia&#8217;s neighbors are now fearing the same fate awaits them. That fear is driven by the reality that Putin has </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.utsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050426/news_1n26russia.html">characterized</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the breakup of the Soviet Union as &#8220;the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,&#8221; and is </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/27/us-ukraine-crisis-centralasia-idUSBREA2Q0BP20140327">eyeing</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> other conquests in his determination to build a Eurasian Union of former Soviet states. Fear of Russian expansionism is further exacerbated by Obama&#8217;s killing of the missile defense systems that were to be installed in Poland and the Czech Republic in 2009, which were aborted in exchange for a &#8220;reset&#8221; in bilateral relations between the U.S. and Russia.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Rather than Iraq, a far better comparison to Crimea is a more recent war, which the left was hypocritically silent to: Libya. From the very beginning, Putin has used appeals to humanitarianism as the pretext for his invasion of Crimea. He has </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/19/world/europe/ukraine.html">cast</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> himself as the &#8220;guardian&#8221; of the Russian-speaking people, even those residing in neighboring countries, such as Ukraine. For example, citing threats of violence toward the Russian-speaking citizens in the Ukraine, Putin said, &#8220;[I]f we see such uncontrolled crime spreading to the eastern regions of the country, and if the people ask us for help, while we already have the official request from the legitimate president, we retain the right to use all available means to protect those people. We believe this would be absolutely legitimate.”</span></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In 2011, Obama used similar justifications for the U.S.-led NATO intervention in Libya, which at the time was in the midst of a chaotic civil conflict, not unlike that of Ukraine. &#8220;I have&#8230; stated that it is U.S. policy that Qaddafi needs to go,&#8221; Obama </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-qaddafi-must-go-but-current-libya-mission-focused-on-humanitarian-efforts/">said</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of the situation. &#8220;But when it comes to our military action, we are doing so in support of U.N. Security resolution 1973. That specifically talks about humanitarian efforts, and we are going to make sure that we stick to that mandate.&#8221; </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The mission began as a no-fly zone over Libya, for the purpose of protecting civilian populations, but quickly escalated into </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/joseph-klein/nato-aims-to-kill-qaddafi/">unauthorized</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> targeted air strikes and a manhunt for Qaddafi. While </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Obama and NATO were carrying out these </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">strikes, which destroyed schools and non-governmental buildings such as the Libyan Down&#8217;s Syndrome Society, the president steadfastly maintained that intervention was </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">necessary</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to pre-empt an imminent massacre by the Libyan regime. </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Notably, the intervention in Libya proceeded without the permission of the U.S. Congress in violation of the War Powers Act. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In the background of the Libyan war was a philosophy that is currently in vogue in the left-wing foreign policy establishment &#8212; and in the Obama administration in particular. The </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.globalr2p.org/about_r2p">responsibility to protect doctrine</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, known as R2P, is a pet doctrine of UN Ambassador and Samantha Power and National Security Advisor Susan Rice. The philosophy of R2P codifies the justification of military intervention on the basis of humanitarian reasons and rejects absolute rights of sovereignty. It sanctions &#8220;appropriate collective action, in a timely and decisive manner&#8221; with regard to nations that fail to protect its populations from &#8220;genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.&#8221; Power even once envisaged </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/israeli-newspaper-focuses-on-samantha-powers-remarks-in-2002/">invading</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Israel based on this principle.</span></p>
<p><span><span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">What Power, Rice and Obama are no doubt learning from the Crimea episode is that rejection of the premise of absolute </span>sovereignty<span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> and using humanitarian reasons for </span>the bases of invasion and war is a double-edged sword. There will always be malignant state actors who will exploit the &#8220;responsibility to protect&#8221; for their own purposes. Indeed, Putin appears to have taken a page out of the Obama administration&#8217;s playbook &#8212; not George W. Bush&#8217;s. <span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><br />
</span></span></span></p>
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		<title>Condoleezza Rice Takes on Obama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/condoleezza-rice-takes-on-obama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=condoleezza-rice-takes-on-obama</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 31 Mar 2014 04:53:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Is the GOP finally ready to take the gloves off on foreign policy? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/condi.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-222271" alt="condi" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/condi-450x300.jpg" width="315" height="210" /></a>Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice – our last competent Secretary of State – has been aggressive in criticizing President Obama&#8217;s failed foreign policy. And she has the experience and expertise to do so with authority. While nobody really expects the Obama administration or most Democrats in Congress to pay Dr. Rice any heed, the Republican Party better be listening and raise its collective voice against the dangerous path that Obama is taking this country down. </span></p>
<p>Dr. Rice is particularly concerned with the “vacuum” in world leadership resulting from the Obama administration’s leading from behind policies. The vacuum is being filled by the likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin. As Dr. Rice wrote in an op-ed article appearing in the Washington Post on March 7<sup>th</sup>, “dictators and extremists across the globe will be emboldened” if the United States abandons muscular diplomacy and eschews its global responsibilities as the leader of the free world.</p>
<p>The Obama administration’s attempt to extend “hands of friendship to our adversaries, sometimes at the expense of our friends,” such as the administration’s “reset” button with Russia, has obviously not worked, Dr. Rice has pointed out.</p>
<p>For those who might say that Condoleezza Rice is hypocritically skipping over Russia’s push into Georgia in 2008 during the presidency of George W. Bush while she criticizes the Obama administration’s ineffectiveness in dealing with the Ukraine crisis, Rice set the record straight in her op-ed article:</p>
<blockquote><p>After Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, the United States sent ships into the Black Sea, airlifted Georgian military forces from Iraq back to their home bases and sent humanitarian aid. Russia was denied its ultimate goal of overthrowing the democratically elected government, an admission made to me by the Russian foreign minister.</p>
<p>But even those modest steps did not hold. Despite Russia’s continued occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the diplomatic isolation waned and then the Obama administration’s ‘reset’ led to an abrupt revision of plans to deploy missile defense components in the Czech Republic and Poland.</p></blockquote>
<p>President Obama said last week in The Hague that he was “much more concerned when it comes to our security with the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan” than he was about any threat from Russia. Fair enough, but Obama’s agreement to fruitless negotiations with Iran and easing the pressure of sanctions in the meantime, while Iran advances its nuclear arms and missile delivery programs, is making that nightmare more likely. So is his failure to deal adequately with the spread of al Qaeda and its affiliates throughout the Middle East and Africa, as well as the infiltration of Iran’s proxy Hezbollah in Latin America. And rather than worry about the real threat of nuclear and chemical weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists as the most significant threat to homeland security, why is Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry foolishly declaring that “climate change can now be considered the world’s largest weapon of mass destruction, perhaps even the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction?”</p>
<p>Dr. Rice expressed particular concern that withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan without a reasonable amount of residual military presence may repeat the disastrous aftermath of the Obama administration’s precipitous decision to withdraw all American troops from Iraq. Al Qaeda returned with a vengeance to launch widespread lethal attacks in Iraq and threaten its viability after they had been largely defeated as a result of the successful surge that President George W. Bush had ordered in the face of opposition by then Senator Obama, John Kerry and many other members of the Democratic Party of Defeat.</p>
<p>Addressing more than two thousand people attending the National Republican Congressional Committee’s annual dinner on March 26<sup>th</sup>, Dr. Rice also warned about the dangerous consequences of a shrinking military budget:</p>
<blockquote><p>Our values and our interests require defense. As Ronald Reagan famously said, peace really only comes through strength. What are we doing? What are we doing when we&#8217;re talking about a defense budget that is so small that our military starts to tell us that we may not in fact be able to carry out all of the requirements put upon it?</p></blockquote>
<p>President Obama wants to reduce the force level of the United States Army to its smallest size since 1940 and drop an entire class of Air Force attack jets.</p>
<p>While understanding the weariness of the American people after two long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and more than a decade fighting global terrorism, Dr. Rice said that “leaders can&#8217;t afford to get tired. Leaders can&#8217;t afford to be weary.”</p>
<p>The Obama administration is operating on the dangerous assumption that America can lead from behind by relying on our European allies, even though they are unable to get their act together to take any effective measures against Russia over Ukraine, for example. President Obama also hides behind the apron strings of the fuzzy norms of international law, which he insists everyone in the 21<sup>st</sup> century is expected to follow as a matter of course. President Obama believes that even the Iranian regime can be dealt with rationally in good faith negotiations. This is the same regime ruled by Ayatollah Khamenei, who reportedly issued a fatwah declaring that he must be obeyed as the &#8220;representative of the Prophet Muhammad and [Shi'ism's] 12th Imam on Earth.&#8221;</p>
<p>Unfortunately, what President Obama says in his speeches regarding how he thinks all world leaders should act bears little resemblance to how the leaders of our adversaries are actually acting in the real world.</p>
<p>Republican leaders in Congress and elsewhere need to follow Dr. Rice’s example and directly challenge the basic tenets of Obama’s foreign policy. They need to clearly contrast Obama’s tenets with the principles that Republicans stand for, which if implemented will keep the United States and its allies free and secure. The United States must lead from the front, not from behind as Obama would prefer. An American president should give America’s allies such as Israel the benefit of the doubt, not those who time and again have proven that their word cannot be trusted as President Obama has tended to do. As Putin follows a more aggressive foreign policy and jihadists are expanding their bases of operations, now is not the time to radically cut America’s military defenses as President Obama wants to do. Peace is truly won through strength, not by planned weakness in cutting the U.S. military down to size in order to supposedly improve America’s image in parts of the world where we are not liked. As jihadists, who want to kill as many Americans as they can, get closer to possessing weapons of mass destruction, now is not the time for John Kerry to raise a red herring about climate change as possibly “the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.” In fact, to achieve energy independence for the United States and our European allies, the radical environmentalists should be told to return to their environmentally protected shells while such initiatives as the Keystone Pipeline and the export of liquefied natural gas are finally allowed to go forward.</p>
<p>Few Republican leaders in Congress have been as bold to date as Dr. Rice in directly challenging the foundational principles that animate the Obama administration’s foreign policy and have led to disastrous outcomes. Some are all too willing to give President Obama the benefit of the doubt, a courtesy that Democrats including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, former Senator (now Secretary of State) John Kerry and Barack Obama himself refused to do in their relentless and at times vicious attacks on President George W. Bush’s foreign policies. It would be perfectly appropriate for Republicans to point out that while Bush’s surge was widely credited with winning the war in Iraq against the insurgents, Obama’s decision to withdraw all troops from Iraq managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And it would also be perfectly appropriate for Republicans to point out that while Ronald Reagan helped win the Cold War, leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Obama is managing to midwife the rebirth of the Russian empire.</p>
<p>When some Republican congressional leaders such as Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham do level a sharp criticism, it tends to deal with specific episodes such as the Obama administration’s mishandling of the Benghazi debacle. Hopefully, as it becomes painfully obvious by mid-summer to all but the willfully ignorant that there will never be a verifiable deal with the Iranian regime to dismantle Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities and to curb its missile program, Republicans will insist on the passage of new sanctions against Iran and work with like-minded Democrats to ensure veto-proof majorities.</p>
<p>The world is a far more dangerous place than when President Obama first took office in 2009. A fundamental reason, as Condoleezza Rice said in her speech at the 2012 Republican Convention, is that under President Obama’s watch the world does not know where America stands. “You see,” she said, “when the friends or foes alike don&#8217;t know the answer to that question, unambiguously and clearly, the world is likely to be a more dangerous and chaotic place.”</p>
<p>This should be the key foreign policy message during both the 2014 midterm election campaign and in 2016. Particularly if Hillary Clinton runs for president, perhaps the Republican slogan against candidates from the Democratic Party of Defeat can be “Strong American leadership DOES make a difference.”</p>
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		<title>Obama and Putin: Two Totalitarians, One Game</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-and-putin-two-totalitarians-one-game/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-and-putin-two-totalitarians-one-game</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 27 Mar 2014 04:56:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221847</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama is a national community organizer, but Putin is a global community organizer.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/obama-and-putin.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221862" alt="obama-and-putin" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/obama-and-putin.jpg" width="385" height="217" /></a>War is what Obama does best. The War on Women. War on Poverty. Class War. Race War.</p>
<p>Walk up to a union member snoozing on a bus, a Latino man crossing the street, a gay cowboy poet earning minimum wage, and community organize him along with a few hundred thousand others into the latest battle in the social justice war that never ends.</p>
<p>&#8220;Fight for card check, for birth control, for gay marriage and illegal alien amnesty.&#8221;</p>
<p>Every time a battle is won and an election ends, a new source of social conflict is dug up and deployed for war.</p>
<p>As a domestic radical, divisiveness is his natural weapon. Obama plays on fragmented identities, assembling coalitions to wage war against some phantom white heteronormative patriarchy consisting of a middle class barely able to pay its bills.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s governing by terrorism. The bombs are ideological. The objective is a constant state of war.</p>
<p>The war that never ends has been good to Obama. Its various clashes have given him two terms and very little media scrutiny. They have given him a post-American army of identity groups with few mutual interests except radical politics and government dependency.</p>
<p>While Obama profits from stirring up conflicts at home, making it easy for him to light some fuses and walk away, he loses from conflicts abroad.</p>
<p>A Reaganesque president could have turned the Syrian Civil War or Russia&#8217;s invasion of Ukraine into an approval rating bonanza. Foreign conflicts pay off politically for presidents even when they aren&#8217;t involved. But that&#8217;s not true of Obama who is congenitally incapable of showing strength and reacts to a foreign crisis by playing for time while struggling to resolve the ideological betrayal of using American power abroad.</p>
<p>Internationally, it&#8217;s the KGB agent, not the community organizer, who profits from conflict. Putin plays Obama&#8217;s role in the world community, dividing and conquering, doing to America internationally what Obama does to it domestically.</p>
<p>Obama uses a phantom patriarchy, a phantom white privilege, a phantom 1 percent, to mobilize a coalition for his own agenda. Putin uses the United States as a phantom enemy to organize a coalition of &#8220;oppressed&#8221; tyrants from Belarus to Venezuela to North Korea.</p>
<p>Administration officials scratch their heads wondering why Putin&#8217;s won&#8217;t cooperate with them. It&#8217;s the same reason they don&#8217;t cooperate with Republicans. Their coalition of black nationalists, gay rights activists, abortion-loving professors of feminism and fist-pumping La Raza nationalists, Muslim Brotherhood front men with trimmed beards and aging Stalinists urging single payer shares little in common internally except a furious resentment and a consuming sense of unfairness.</p>
<p>It needs an enemy to give it meaning. Without a common enemy it will tear itself apart and die.</p>
<p>The same is true of the anti-American coalition that Putin has cobbled together out of Marxist dictators in Latin America, Shiite fanatics in Iran, a North Korean prep school grad who starves his people to build nukes and radical American leftists convinced that every war is a CIA conspiracy. Like allying the NAACP, AFL-CIO and GLAAD; it&#8217;s an odd conclave, but as long as everyone focuses on a common foe, they can all be herded in the right direction.</p>
<p>Obama is an adequate national community organizer, but Putin is a global community organizer.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s not just that Obama is weak and inept, but he&#8217;s using a rulebook that Moscow is entirely familiar with because its men helped write it. The KGB vets running the show understand Obama intimately because they understood his mentors. The tactics that Obama and his people imagine are clever and innovative are minor examples of the tactics that the USSR was using abroad before he was even born.</p>
<p>Obama isn&#8217;t isolating Putin. Putin is isolating Obama. He&#8217;s doing it in the same way that Obama did it to Republicans.</p>
<p>Anti-Americanism has nothing to with America. Anti-Americanism creates a phantom enemy.</p>
<p>Osama bin Laden flew planes into the World Trade Center to increase the importance of Al Qaeda. Khrushchev&#8217;s bellicose posturing was intended to ensure that the USSR would be taken seriously as a world power by framing its presence on the world stage alone with America. For Putin, conflict with America wasn&#8217;t a reason not to invade Crimea, but an incentive to do it.</p>
<p>Putin is weakened, his popularity is shaky, the energy economy that he built up may collapse and the domestic opposition shows no fear of him despite all the beatings, arrests and suspicious suicides. Crimea polarizes his domestic debate on favorable terms, between nationalists and &#8216;traitors&#8217;, while increasing his stature as a world leader.</p>
<p>This should be familiar territory for Obama who has reacted to bad economic news by finding targets to attack. The War on Women had a lot in common with the invasion of Crimea. Both were sham wars stirred up by corrupt political figures to distract everyone from their own misdeeds.</p>
<p>Obama needs a Republican enemy to keep his people in line. Putin needs an American enemy to keep his people in line. If Obama understood this, he would also understand that Putin is as likely to work with him to defuse the conflict, as Obama would with John Boehner.</p>
<p>Putin and Obama are both deeply corrupt men whose former popularity has waned and are badly in need of distractions. The soft distractions of photo ops with celebrities, impromptu musical performances and hunting expeditions, won&#8217;t work. So they turn to the hard distractions of war.</p>
<p>The threat that both men face is the same. Their people are suffering and that suffering has been caused in no small part by the culture of corruption surrounding them. Obama and Putin&#8217;s friends have robbed both countries blind and the American and Russian peoples are waking up to their crimes.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s why Putin isn’t going to play nice. Unlike Obama, his domestic political opposition isn’t in a position where it can be blamed for anything involving his regime. He can&#8217;t declare that his domestic political opposition is waging a War on Women.</p>
<p>Instead he has to seek his wars abroad.</p>
<p>Obama would like Putin to go away so that he can focus on demonizing the domestic political opposition. Putin would like his domestic political opposition to go away so that he can focus on demonizing America. It&#8217;s the same old game by two reds with law degrees on different political battlegrounds.</p>
<p>Obama thinks globally and acts locally. Putin thinks locally and acts globally.</p>
<p>Putin is determined to score points from the post-American transition. Reducing American power and influence worldwide was a move that the foreign policy left believed would defuse tensions. Instead it has turned into a gold rush for every petty tyrant and terrorist eager to count coup by humiliating the United States.</p>
<p>Obama wanted a peaceful post-American transition. Instead he&#8217;s getting worldwide chaos and war.</p>
<p>Putin seeks out a conflict with the United States for the same reason that Obama seeks one out with Republicans; he wants an easy target to beat up on to distract from the economy and political corruption. United Russia, like the Democratic Party, is a party of crooks and thieves, which survives by fighting phantom enemies for phantom causes while robbing everyone blind.</p>
<p>For Obama and Putin, it&#8217;s not really about Crimea or birth control; it&#8217;s about power.</p>
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		<title>Harry Reid: Republicans Helped Russia Annex Crimea</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/harry-reid-republicans-helped-russia-annex-crimea/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=harry-reid-republicans-helped-russia-annex-crimea</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/harry-reid-republicans-helped-russia-annex-crimea/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Mar 2014 13:22:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crimea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Harry Reid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vladimir Putin]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221819</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Senate leader "sounds completely unhinged."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Reid_Oil_Tax.jpg"><img class="alignnone  wp-image-221820" alt="Reid_Oil_Tax" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Reid_Oil_Tax.jpg" width="526" height="296" /></a></p>
<p>Harry Reid, the Senate&#8217;s favorite crazy person, is really pulling out all the stops in the hopes of hanging on to his Senate Majority Leader title.</p>
<p>And you can practically<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/03/24/harry-reid-accuses-gop-of-helping-russia-annex-crimea-as-ukraine-aid-deal-clears-procedural-hurdle/"> smell the desperation</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Since a few Republicans blocked these important sanctions last work period, Russian lawmakers voted to annex Crimea and Russian forces have taken over Ukrainian military bases,&#8221; Reid said. &#8220;It&#8217;s impossible to know whether events would have unfolded differently if the United States had responded to Russian aggression with a strong, unified voice.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>The Senate wasn&#8217;t voting to authorize Obama to use military force. It was voting on a giveaway to the IMF. Only someone completely delusional would imagine that the aid bill would have stopped Putin from completing the annexation.</p>
<p>Does Harry Reid imagine that Putin would have looked at a procedural vote in the Senate and said, &#8220;Oh no, the Yankees are writing a check. Come on Comrades, let&#8217;s run for it.&#8221;</p>
<blockquote><p>In response to Reid&#8217;s comments, Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said the Senate leader &#8220;sounds completely unhinged.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>That&#8217;s putting it mildly.</p>
<blockquote><p>GOP Senate aides noted the House has passed different legislation, meaning the Senate bill could not have become law before recess anyhow. They blamed Reid and Democrats for blocking the Senate from taking up the House legislation.</p></blockquote>
<p>Reid is trying to blame Republicans for Obama&#8217;s miserable failure.</p>
<blockquote><p>Republicans have long spurned the administration&#8217;s attempt to ratify the IMF changes, saying they&#8217;d increase the exposure of U.S. taxpayers in foreign bailouts managed by the fund. Making the shift now, opponents such as Sens. Rand Paul and Marco Rubio argue, also would marginally increase Russia&#8217;s voting power over the fund&#8217;s finances.</p></blockquote>
<p>So we&#8217;re punishing Russia by&#8230; helping Russia. Great plan.</p>
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		<title>China and Iran Draw Conclusions on Crimea</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/china-and-iran-draw-conclusions-on-crimea/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=china-and-iran-draw-conclusions-on-crimea</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/china-and-iran-draw-conclusions-on-crimea/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Mar 2014 04:20:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ari Lieberman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crimea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nuclear Weapons]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ukraine]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221511</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Aggressive powers see an opportunity. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/china_iran_flag.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221512" alt="china_iran_flag" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/china_iran_flag.jpg" width="296" height="197" /></a></span>As Putin moves to consolidate his hold on Crimea, concern grows that Russia’s expansionist appetite will not be satiated with conquest of the peninsula. Ukraine fears that Putin’s next move will entail seizure of eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian sentiment remains high. Some news outlets intimated that the tiny nation of Estonia, once part of the Soviet Union <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/19/us-russia-estonia-idUSBREA2I1J620140319">may be next</a> on Russia’s wish list with reports about Russia’s concern over the treatment of ethnic Russians in the Baltic country.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Some, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://time.com/13310/clinton-walks-back-russia-nazi-comparison/">she later backtracked</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">) and Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird have </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/stephen-harper-john-baird-compare-russia-to-ww-ii-era-germany-1.2559643">compared</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Russia’s actions in Crimea with those of Nazi Germany and its unlawful seizure of Sudetenland in 1938, suggesting correctly that aggression unchecked will simply lead to more aggression. While there are certainly similarities between the two scenarios in that the leaders of both nations feigned concern for their kinsmen as the impetus for invading the sovereign territory of another nation, the similarities stop there.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Hitler was a madman, prone to irrational and rash decisions. He was infamous for refusing advice offered by seasoned Prussian military officers infinitely more capable than his limited mental abilities. Putin, by contrast is cold, cunning and calculated. An ex-KGB officer, Putin is by definition a cautious, analytical man who does not embark on an endeavor without thinking it through. Hence, when his troops entered Crimea, they did not bear any insignias that would betray their nationality thus gaining a measure of plausible deniability. While a confused NATO was scrambling to react to rapid developments, Putin had already thought things through to the minutest detail.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Putin realizes that any further moves into Ukraine will likely invite biting sanctions and other political repercussions and any move on the Baltic countries will provoke direct confrontation with NATO. Thus, the Ukrainian crisis will end in Crimea and go no further. Putin recognizes that he’s pushed the Crimean envelope as far as it could go and he is satisfied with this result. The aggressor has attained its objective while at the same time exposing and highlighting a feckless American foreign policy.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Events in Crimea and the Obama administration’s impotence in dealing with aggression have also had far-reaching, negative global implications. There are two nations watching events unfold with keen interest. China and Iran, two dictatorial countries with imperialistic and expansionist agendas, can draw comfort from a pusillanimous American foreign policy.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In the South and East China seas, China is aggressively seeking to expand its maritime borders. It has made significant headway in both these areas with a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/02/19/china-preps-military-for-short-sharp-war-with-japan-says-us-navy/">muscular military approach</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> designed to intimidate American regional allies like Japan and the Philippines. America’s feeble response to Putin’s aggression in Crimea will only serve to embolden a resurgent and aggressive China, making the likelihood of a regional war in that neglected theatre a real possibility.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The situation with respect to Iran is even more acute. Iran is arguably the greatest threat to world peace since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, providing financial and military support to groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Taliban, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-sees-new-weapon-in-iraq-iranian-efps/">Iraqi insurgents</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> and Hezbollah. Its terror tentacles have extended beyond the Mideast to Europe, South Asia, Africa and the Americas and its </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/04/24/iranian-sponsored-narco-terrorism-in-venezuela-how-will-maduro-respond">connection to narco-terrorism</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> is well established.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Israel’s </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://defense-update.com/20140305_israel_sizes_shipload_of_heavy_rocket.html">recent naval interception</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of the Klos-C, a terror bound cargo vessel laden with Iranian arms, including some forty, long-range M-302 rockets, only serves to underscore the scheming nature and menace posed by that pariah nation.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But it is Iran’s nuclear ambitions coupled with its aggressive ballistic missile program that are most worrisome, with implications far beyond the region.  Iran is now cognizant of the fact that the Obama administration, exercising what John McCain so aptly described as a “feckless” foreign policy, will do nothing to thwart the Islamic Republic from achieving breakout capacity. Once that occurs, the free world will be at the mercy of an apocalyptic Islamic theocracy and that should be a source of concern for us all.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><b style="line-height: 1.5em;">Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b style="line-height: 1.5em;">.</b></span></p>
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		<title>Obama’s Facebook Strategy for Ukraine</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-facebook-strategy-for-ukraine/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-facebook-strategy-for-ukraine</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Mar 2014 04:57:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crimea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Facebook]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Putin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Twitter]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ukraine]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221459</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Twitterer-in-Chief vs. the KGB.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/48f009975b7d50cae54cd3f902e618a7.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221460" alt="48f009975b7d50cae54cd3f902e618a7" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/48f009975b7d50cae54cd3f902e618a7-450x300.jpg" width="270" height="180" /></a>It&#8217;s unfair to expect Obama to do anything about Ukraine when his biggest priority is convincing twenty-somethings to buy worthless health insurance policies by appearing on online comedy shows and deploying his March Madness bracket.</span></p>
<p>The Obama Twitter feeds are filled with desperate pleas to buy ObamaCare; harnessing every memeworthy bit of internet detritus from cat pictures to twerking in the hopes of convincing  healthy young people who don&#8217;t want health insurance to buy it anyway.</p>
<p>On March 17th, Obama&#8217;s Twitter linked to a statement on Ukraine and then it was back to &#8220;There&#8217;s only 14 days to get coverage.&#8221; It&#8217;s currently down to 12 days. It&#8217;s like holiday shopping, but with a $6,000 deductible.</p>
<p>Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn) went to Ukraine, called Russia&#8217;s invasion a &#8220;weak&#8221; and &#8220;panicky&#8221; reaction to Obama&#8217;s strength, and then announced plans to speak about the &#8220;Between Two Ferns Effect.&#8221; The &#8220;effect&#8221; is the sheer awesomeness of Obama&#8217;s appearance on an internet comedy show to promote ObamaCare.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s that kind of 21st century thinking that sets Barack apart from Vladimir&#8217;s 19th century hunger for territory. While a former KGB agent wastes time conquering countries, a former community organizer focuses on selling nationalized health care to young invincibles through a website that works about as well as a Soviet Yugo.</p>
<p>Putin&#8217;s power rests on a shaky energy industry, but Obama&#8217;s power rests on ObamaCare. Kerry scoffed at Russia&#8217;s invasion as so 19th century. In the 21st century, power doesn&#8217;t come from land or armies, but from online popularity. Online popularity took a radical Illinois State Senator and turned him into a world leader. Online popularity is the WMD that the State Senator is convinced will save ObamaCare.</p>
<p>In the post-modern America, leaders claim absolute power while making self-deprecating jokes. They discard the rule of law and then hawk nationalized healthcare in infomercials for an effect more surreal than a crony capitalist KGB man with a law degree taking off his tailored suit and $500,000 Tourbograph watch to play Great White Hunter.</p>
<p>Putin poses on horseback, in a wetsuit, finding ancient urns in the sea or shooting tigers. Obama poses playing with a lightsaber, makes an unimpressed face with McKayla Maroney and unveils his March Madness picks. The Russian dictator strikes heroic poses straight out of the 19th century, while Obama struggles to hold the unstable attention span of 21st century millennials.</p>
<p>Putin is playing the part of the great leader, while Obama disguises the enormous power he wields by acting more like Ellen; a talk show host endlessly cracking jokes and posing for goofy selfies.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s easy to laugh at Putin&#8217;s posturing, but Obama&#8217;s public image is no less cynical. Both men are instinctive totalitarians with backgrounds in Marxism and little respect for the rule of law.</p>
<p>Obama is a creature of a more modern media age catering to a demographic which prides itself on skepticism, at least where Western religion or nationalism are concerned, while being as gullible as any of the old ladies clutching red portraits of Stalin in Simferopol when it comes to the progressive agenda.</p>
<p>Putin enhances the public perception of his power while Obama downplays it. Putin&#8217;s base likes their red meat raw while Obama&#8217;s base prefers a soy burger that looks and tastes exactly like meat so that they can have an ersatz imitation of the real thing that preserves their moral superiority.</p>
<p>Obama delivers Putin&#8217;s totalitarianism in soy form. It looks a lot like a burger, but it&#8217;s really just an Asian legume. It looks a lot like tyranny, but it falls apart when confronting an actual tyrant. It&#8217;s easy to raid guitar factories, lock up anti-Muslim filmmakers and send the IRS after political opponents, but that sort of pettiness is an ordinary day in Russia which just banned lacy underwear. The EPA, USDA and even the IRS are no match for Russian teenagers with assault rifles.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s Mean Girls strategy for Putin is to make him unpopular. The various White House responses talk of isolating Russia. But Obama needs Russia to isolate Iran. He needs China to isolate Russia which will become inconvenient when China starts a shooting war with Japan. Obama can&#8217;t isolate everyone or anyone. He has just now gotten around to kicking Syria out of the US after Russia and China prevented him from isolating Assad.</p>
<p>The Hills and Big Brother are poor models for international diplomacy. While Obama is figuring out how to convince Russia to stop talking to Iran and China to stop talking to Russia and everyone to stop talking to North Korea, these countries are moving their own agendas forward by doing things, instead of by tweeting them.</p>
<p>The social network strategy for Russia will work about as well as it did for Syria or for ObamaCare. Twitter mobs can destroy the lives of individuals who make racist jokes, but they&#8217;re no match for a conquering army. Progressive nerd bullies are as vicious online as they are impotent in real life.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s plan to make Putin unpopular while he gobbles up countries isn&#8217;t a brilliant show of strength; it&#8217;s a passive aggressive display from the twitterer-in-chief who excels at putdowns, not at takedowns.</p>
<p>The left has gotten its own way for so long that it has forgotten that the Colbert Report isn&#8217;t real life, that snide remarks are no substitute for strength and that there are some men who are not afraid of being mocked by Saturday Night Live.</p>
<p>The men and women in charge of our countries treat every problem like an online debate. They assemble allies, troll the opposition and then declare victory.</p>
<p>&#8220;The world has seen through Russia’s actions and has rejected the flawed logic behind those actions,” Joe Biden declared. That might be a winning line in a Facebook debate, but it doesn&#8217;t do anything to move Russian forces out of Ukrainian cities. Meanwhile the failure to stop Putin will make him more popular in the places that truly matter, where no one buys ObamaCare and no one is impressed by accusations of flawed logic.</p>
<p>Putin has demonstrated to Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Syria and China that America is weak, that it has become a nation living inside its own imagination, and he has shown Eastern Europe and the rest of the world that America is a bad friend while Russia is a dangerous enemy.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s 21st century world is an imaginary place whose virtual territories depend on real infrastructure and energy. Underneath the glittering cities in the sky where everyone is part of a virtual community are the real roads and cities of stone and steel that can be taken by anyone with enough men and determination to capture them.</p>
<p>The left has confused the overlay, its commentaries and memes, for reality. It has come to believe that The Daily Show is real news, that Obama is a real leader and that a Twitter hashtag is real power.</p>
<p>The Russian soldiers in Crimea are a reminder that, as Mao said, &#8220;Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.&#8221; The Western left has forgotten the simple truth that no Eastern leftist has ever become decadent enough to forget.</p>
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		<title>Why Obama Will Not Change Gears</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/why-obama-will-not-change-gears/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-obama-will-not-change-gears</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Mar 2014 04:56:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221425</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Putin and Obama's shared objective of American decline.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: left;"><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/140221_WARST_Obama-Putin.jpg.CROP_.original-original.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221429" alt="US President Barack Obama and Russia's President Vladimir Putin." src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/140221_WARST_Obama-Putin.jpg.CROP_.original-original-432x350.jpg" width="302" height="245" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Our-world-Why-Obama-will-not-change-gears-345647">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Just before Russian President Vladimir Putin orchestrated Russia’s takeover of Crimea, the US’s Broadcasting Board of Governors that controls Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty announced that it will be ending its broadcast to Iraq and the Balkans next year.</p>
<p>And this makes sense. As far as the Obama administration is concerned, Iraq ceased to exist in 2011, when the last US forces got out of the country.</p>
<p>As for the Baltics, well, really who cares about them? Russia, after all, wants the same things America does. Everything will be fine.</p>
<p>As Obama said to Governor Mitt Romney during one of the 2012 presidential debates, “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”</p>
<p>During the election, Obama was famously caught on an open microphone promising President Putin’s stand-in Dmitry Medvedev that he would have “more flexibility,” on missile defense after the presidential election.</p>
<p>He asked Medvedev to ask Putin to give him “more space” until after November 2012.</p>
<p>With a five-and-half-year record of selling US allies like Poland, the Czech Republic and even the Syrian opposition out to please Putin, it should be obvious that Obama will do nothing effective to show Putin the error of his ways in Ukraine.</p>
<p>Obama doesn’t have a problem with Putin.</p>
<p>And as long as Putin remains anti-American, he will have no reason to be worried about Obama.</p>
<p>Consider Libya. Three years ago this week, NATO forces supported by the US began their campaign to bring down Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.</p>
<p>As Patrick Coburn noted in The Independent over the weekend, the same Western forces who insisted that their “responsibility to protect” the Libyan people from a possible massacre by Gaddafi’s forces compelled them to bring down Gaddafi and his regime have had nothing to say today about the ongoing bloodbath in post-Gaddafi Libya.</p>
<p>Libya is disintegrating today. There is no central governing authority.</p>
<p>But Gaddafi, the neutered dictator who quit the terrorism and nuclear-proliferation rackets after the US-led invasion of Iraq, is gone. So no one cares.</p>
<p>Coburn mentioned the recent documentary aired on Al Jazeera – America that upended the West’s narrative that the bombing of Pan Am 103 in 1988 over Lockerbie, Scotland, was the work of the Libyan government. According to a credible Iranian defector, the attack was ordered by Iran and carried out by Palestinian terrorists from Ahmed Jibril’s PFLP-GC.</p>
<p>He wrote, “the documentary emphasizes the sheer number of important politicians and senior officials over the years who must have looked at intelligence reports revealing the truth about Lockerbie, but still happily lied about it.”</p>
<p>If the Al Jazeera documentary is correct, there is good reason for the public in the US, Europe and throughout the world to be angry about the cover-up.</p>
<p>But there is no reason to be surprised.</p>
<p>Since its inception, the Iranian regime has been at war with the US. It has carried out one act of aggression after another. These have run the gamut from the storming of the US Embassy in Tehran and holding hostage US diplomats for 444 days, to the use of Lebanese and Palestinian proxies to murder US officials, citizens and soldiers in countless attacks over the intervening 35 years, to building a military presence in Latin America, to developing nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>And from its earliest days, the same Iranian regime has been courted by one US administration after another seeking to accommodate Tehran.</p>
<p>A similar situation obtains with the Palestinians. Like the Iranians, the PLO has carried out countless acts of terrorism that have killed US officials and citizens.</p>
<p>From the 1970 Fatah execution of the US ambassador and deputy chief of mission in Khartoum to the 2003 bombing of the US embassy convoy in Gaza, the PLO has never abandoned terrorism against the US.</p>
<p>No less importantly, the PLO is the architect of modern terrorism. From airline hijackings, to the massacre of schoolchildren, from bus bombings to the destabilization of nation states, the PLO is the original author of much of the mayhem and global terrorism the US has led the fight against since the 1980s.</p>
<p>And of course, the PLO’s main stated goal is the destruction of Israel, the US’s only dependable ally, and the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.</p>
<p>Yet, as has been the case with the Iranian regime, successive US administrations have courted, protected and upheld the PLO as moderate, reformed or almost reformed militants.</p>
<p>In many ways, then the Obama administration is simply a loyal successor of previous administrations. But in one essential way, it is also different.</p>
<p>IN A 2006 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, civil rights historian Shelby Steele argued that the reason the US has lost every war it has fought since World War II despite the fact that it has had the military might to vanquish all of its enemies is “white guilt.”</p>
<p>White guilt, he argued, makes its sufferers in the West believe that they lack the moral authority to act due to the stigma of white supremacy and imperialism.</p>
<p>Writing of the then raging insurgency in Iraq, Steele explained, “When America – the greatest embodiment of Western power – goes to war in Third World Iraq, it must also labor to dissociate that action from the great Western sin of imperialism. Thus in Iraq we are in two wars, one against an insurgency and the other against the past – two fronts, two victories to win, one military, the other a victory of dissociation.”</p>
<p>This neurotic view of America’s moral underpinning is what explains the instinctive American tendency to strike out at those who do not oppose the West – like Gaddafi’s regime in Libya and Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt – while giving a pass to those who do – like the Palestinians and the Iranians.</p>
<p>But whereas white guilt has afflicted the US leadership for the past several generations, past administrations were willing to set it aside when necessary to advance US national security interests.</p>
<p>This cannot happen with Obama.</p>
<p>Obama owes his presidency to white guilt. His promise to American voters was that by voting for him, they would expiate their guilt for the sins of European imperialists and southern racists.</p>
<p>It was the American desire to move beyond the past that enabled a first-term senator with radical connections and the most liberal voting record in the Senate to get elected to the presidency.</p>
<p>But tragically for the US and the free world, Obama’s worldview is informed not by an appreciation for what Steele extolled as America’s “moral transformation,” on issue of race. Rather it is informed by his conviction that the US deserves its guilt.</p>
<p>Obama does not share Bill Clinton’s view that the US is “the indispensable nation,” although he invoked the term on the campaign trail in 2012.</p>
<p>From his behavior toward foe and friend alike, Obama gives the impression that he does not believe the US has the right to stand up for its interests.</p>
<p>Moreover, his actions from Israel to Eastern Europe to Egypt and Libya indicate that he believes there is something wrong with nations that support and believe in the US.</p>
<p>Their pro-Americanism apparently makes them guilty of white guilt by association.</p>
<p>So Iran, the Palestinians and Russia needn’t worry. Obama will not learn from his mistakes, because as far as he is concerned, he hasn&#8217;t made any.</p>
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		<title>Ukraine Crisis Strengthens the China-Iran-Russia Axis</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/majid-rafizadeh/ukraine-crisis-strengthens-the-china-iran-russia-axis/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ukraine-crisis-strengthens-the-china-iran-russia-axis</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Mar 2014 04:55:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Majid Rafizadeh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221431</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why addressing the Iranian nuclear threat has gotten that much harder. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/putin_flag.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221432" alt="putin_flag" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/putin_flag-450x343.jpg" width="315" height="240" /></a>Russia, the Islamic Republic of Iran and China have strengthened geopolitical ties to create a united front after President Vladimir V. Putin reclaimed Crimea as a part of Russia and after the Crimean local government called for a referendum to secede the peninsula from Ukraine.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Russian-American standoff over Ukraine has made these three nations more united in attempting to create a new power pole, counterbalancing and resisting the West— particularly the United States— in the region and beyond.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Last week, Iran&#8217;s state-run Press TV announced that Putin and Iranian president Hassan Rouhani agreed that Moscow would build two additional nuclear power plants for Tehran as well as construct new facilities next to Iran&#8217;s power plant in the city of Bushehr. Each plant will offer the Islamic Republic 1,000 megawatts of power and assist the Islamic Republic in eliminating its reliance on oil as well.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Since the Ukraine crisis, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), Ali Akbar Salehi, has repeatedly pointed out that the Islamic Republic of Iran is ready to continue its mutual cooperation with Russia regarding its nuclear facilities and strategic interests. China, which generally follows Russia’s foreign policies when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program, did not object to the recent moves. On the other hand, there has not been strong leadership from the West, particularly from the Obama administration, to condemn or halt such a move.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Islamic Republic is benefiting from the Ukrainian crisis, as it finds Russia moving closer towards Tehran to reinforce its strategic depth in the region to obstruct Western objectives. Putin and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are attempting to restore their wounded regional and international prestige by defying the West. In addition, Khamenei, Rouhani and his nuclear team are taking advantage of this crisis by feeling less pressure to make concessions in the current nuclear talks. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Rouhani addressed the provincial managers and officials of Bushehr province pointing out, </span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Our first nuclear power plant is active in the (Bushehr) province which will develop, God willing… Based on our estimates, the second nuclear power plant will be built in the same province and I hope that we can use the facilities of this province.</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sallehi defiantly stated, “We are not obliged to introduce to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) the nuclear facilities that we are to build in the future and only 180 days before entry of nuclear substances there, we will inform the IAEA of them.”</span></p>
<p>Iran and the P5+1 (the U.S., Russia, France, China, Britain and Germany) started their diplomatic negotiations this week to make headway on the nuclear dispute, which aims to create a lasting accord permanently resolving the decade-old nuclear standoff, preventing the Islamic Republic from obtaining an atomic bomb and possibly averting the threat of another war in the Middle East.  The interim nuclear deal expires on July 20<sup>th</sup> and the P5+1 are aiming at agreeing on comprehensive one before this date.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Several Western diplomats and policy analysts are claiming that the US-Russian confrontation is not going to undermine the quest for a final nuclear deal over Iran&#8217;s atomic activity or Tehran’s nuclear defiance; however, this idealistic view seems to be unrealistic.</span></p>
<p>Although Russia and China agreed to reconvene for the nuclear talks and hold meetings during the Ukraine crisis, this act does not necessarily mean that they are going to agree with the West’s terms for the final nuclear deal.  They are going to use these nuclear talks as geopolitical and strategic leverage to forcefully push for their own political and strategic agenda in the nuclear talks.</p>
<p>In other words, Russia and China are going to affect the final deal’s details and nuances that are being negotiated, including the amount of centrifuges that Tehran can retain, the level at which they are allowed to enrich uranium, the preservation of the plutonium reactor in Arak (Fordow), and the scope of IAEA inspectors monitoring the nuclear facilities.</p>
<p>As American-Russia tensions continue, Moscow is going to be far less strict on Iran’s nuclear program. While the Western powers attempt to significantly scale back and reduce Tehran’s centrifuges from approximately 20,000 to a few thousand, Moscow has been far more lenient, pointing out that it is willing to accept a final deal with Tehran retaining most of its nuclear infrastructure with nearly 20,000 centrifuges. Beijing has taken the same position.</p>
<p>The Ukraine crisis has provided Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran with a new platform to further establish their strategic depth and present themselves as influential political actors in the region. As the West-Russia standoff simmers, the Western powers will find it much more difficult to attain Moscow’s support for the specific terms that they desire in the final nuclear deal.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">While the Ukrainian crisis moves Russian leaders closer to their Iranian counterparts, Tehran is feeling less pressure to make concessions as well. The final deal will likely be much less strict on Iran’s nuclear activities, the number of the centrifuges it can retain, and the level of uranium enrichment it can pursue.</span></p>
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		<title>Putin Throws Down the Gauntlet and Obama Shrinks Away</title>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 19 Mar 2014 04:45:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[East meets Western weakness. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/putin-and-obama.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-221324 alignleft" alt="putin-and-obama" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/putin-and-obama-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a>Russian President Vladimir Putin minced no words when he signed on March 18</span><sup style="line-height: 1.5em;">th</sup><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> a treaty with Crimea to signify the absorption of that territory into Russia. Defending the referendum held Sunday in Crimea in which those voting approved the absorption overwhelmingly, Putin declared in a televised address in front of both houses of the Russian parliament and Crimea&#8217;s purported leaders: &#8220;In the hearts and minds of people, Crimea has always been and remains an inseparable part of Russia.&#8221; </span></p>
<p>Responding to President Obama’s stale incantations about international law and “consequences” if Russia does not adhere to its norms, Putin turned around and accused the United States of practicing the “law of the strong.” He said that the current central government of Ukraine in Kiev consisted of “fascists, anti-Semites, nationalists and radicals who seized power in a coup d’état backed by western patrons, and do not legitimately represent the people of Ukraine.”  All from the Russian dictator who sent his shock troops throughout Crimea to ratify an engineered coup d’état in the break-away peninsula. In a veiled threat, Putin said that Russia will do what it has to do to protect the interests of ethnic Russians of Ukraine “diplomatically, through laws and <i>other means</i>.” (Emphasis added) As if to underline his point, a Ukrainian soldier was reportedly killed on Tuesday when a base came under attack by Russian or pro-Russian forces.</p>
<p>Addressing crowds after his parliament speech in Moscow&#8217;s Red Square, Putin exclaimed: &#8220;Glory to Russia.&#8221; Obama and his partners in Western Europe, after much hand-wringing and talk of severe consequences if the Crimean referendum proceeded towards annexation by Russia, decided to impose the weakest of sanctions against a few individuals who couldn’t care less. Their mockery of Obama, and by implication the United States, was palpable. Putin went so far as to joke that Russia was ready to take on NATO forces in Crimea and Ukraine at any time.</p>
<p>The trouble for President Obama is that Putin actually believes his grandiose talk about Russian pride and might. Putin addresses his countrymen in fiery language meant to instill hyper patriotism and explains his rationales for his actions in terms that Russians and Russian-speaking people in Crimea can understand and relate to.</p>
<p>Obama embraces no core principles in defense of freedom. He shies away from muscular diplomacy – peace through strength- and is actually proposing to downsize the U.S. military to its lowest level since U.S. involvement in World War II. Rather than speak to the American people in a prime time address from the Oval Office and explain clearly what he thinks is at stake for international peace and security and American interests if Russia continues its aggressive ways, he plays golf and shops at The Gap.</p>
<p>Putin firmly believes that the West operates on a double standard and, to some extent, he has a point. We certainly do not always practice what we preach. But in using Kosovo as an example of such a double standard, Putin displays Russian doublespeak in action as he tries to defend Russian aggression with a bogus moral equivalency argument.</p>
<p>NATO intervention in Kosovo followed extensive attempts over a decade to persuade Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to reverse his decision to sharply reduce the autonomy that Kosovo had enjoyed since 1974 and cease his human rights violations. This was happening against the backdrop of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia breaking up as Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence. The Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was admitted as a member state of the United Nations on May 22, 1992 following a bloody war involving Serbian and non-Serbian factions. After Kosovo sought to go its own way and Milosevic cracked down to keep Kosovo part of Serbia, including by the commission of gross human rights violations against civilians, NATO finally intervened in March 1999 with air power.</p>
<p>Although Russia opposed NATO’s military intervention, it actually helped in the final resolution of the conflict. President Boris Yeltsin’s chief Balkans envoy, Viktor Chernomyrdin, along with Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari presented NATO&#8217;s demands to Milosevic in Belgrade on June 3, 1999.</p>
<p>When the war was over, Kosovo was not absorbed into any NATO country. It was not made a protectorate of the United States nor occupied by U.S. soldiers by virtue of a unilateral decision of the U.S. government. Although its status as an independent country or as an autonomous part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia remains disputed, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1244, placing Kosovo under transitional UN administration and authorizing a NATO-led peacekeeping force. Russia supported this resolution.</p>
<p>In other words, contrary to Putin’s attempt to rewrite history with his double-speak, while Russia did object to the NATO bombing campaign, it supported working through the United Nations Security Council to help resolve the Kosovo conflict. Putin is now thumbing his nose at the United Nations Security Council when it comes to Crimea, insisting on what amounts to his claim of a unilateral right for Russia to occupy and then absorb Crimea as a fait accompli. There is no moral equivalence between Kosovo and Crimea.</p>
<p>That said, President Obama needs to make a choice. He can put some teeth into his oft-repeated threat of consequences for Russia’s violation of international law by providing arms to Ukraine and installing sophisticated military equipment such as missile defense systems in Poland, the Czech Republic, and perhaps the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia as well as Western Ukraine. Alternatively, he can decide that, for the sake of more important strategic interests that would benefit from Russian cooperation in dealing with Iran, Syria, the aftermath of the war in Afghanistan and the fight against global jihad, he will work behind the scenes with Russia to contain the damage from the Ukraine crisis and move on. If Obama were to follow the latter course, he would need to nail down significant commitments from Putin with demonstrable actions to back them up – something he failed to obtain when he unilaterally decided to cancel the ballistic missile defense systems the United States was to place in NATO members Poland and the Czech Republic.</p>
<p>As of now, President Obama does not have an effective strategy in either direction. He is acting like a shrinking violet while Putin struts his stuff on the world stage.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Taunting Obama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/taunting-obama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=taunting-obama</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 19 Mar 2014 04:20:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crimea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Ukraine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[weak]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221311</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Putin's message to "comrade" Obama. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/watch-putin.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-221313 alignleft" alt="watch-putin" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/watch-putin-450x335.jpg" width="315" height="234" /></a>The current Ukraine situation has led to tense foreign relations between America and Russia, the worst dispute since the end of the Cold War. Even for the conservatives amongst us, it presents a difficult situation, for few of us wish for America to send troops to the region, and there is little that the Obama administration can do against another strong world power that doesn’t involve foreign intervention.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That said, foreign relations and politics is often about trust and posturing – and this President has done a great job of </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/ronn-torossian-russia-ukraine/2014/03/01/id/555497/">letting everyone know that America is weak</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Simply, America is </span>in this situation today because the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, knew he could get away with it.  Putin is a smart man – no raving lunatic like previous adversaries Qaddafi or others – and a strongman.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As legendary journalist Bob Woodward noted last year, Obama has no personal relationships with political leaders.  Obama is ineffectual and not likable, and so Putin knew he could take action and get away with it. Obama, who embarked on an apology tour upon taking office, has taken America to an all-time low in foreign relations. The left ignores the fact that America is in a worse place than during the days of their arch-villain, George W. Bush (even amongst traditional close allies – as we learned from UK media, “The special relationship is over”).</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Obama has spent a lot of time lecturing nations on how to act – and succeeded at improving relations with none. In addition to awful political skills, the man has been insulting and disrespectful to numerous foreign leaders, and possesses awful interpersonal skills. </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/us/politics/arab-spring-proves-a-harsh-test-for-obamas-diplomatic-skill.html?pagewanted=1&amp;_r=5&amp;">As an article last year detailed, Obama fails miserably at personal relationships. </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> The article said: </span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“The tensions between Mr. Obama and the Gulf states, both American and Arab diplomats say, derive from an Obama character trait: he has not built many personal relationships with foreign leaders. ‘He’s not good with personal relationships; that’s not what interests him,’ said one United States diplomat.&#8221;</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">He is ineffectual and not likeable – and so Putin knew he could get away with his aggressive behavior. No foreign allies would put their own necks out on the line for someone they don’t respect and don’t like. This President talks too much and does nothing, and </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ronn-torossian/obamas-legacy-of-disaster/">Obama shall leave behind a legacy of disaster</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Last month, Obama claimed that Putin’s “tough-guy schtick” is usually only done in play to impress the Russians. Oh, really Mr. President? At least Obama was right on the plan to “reset” relations with Russia – they have indeed been reset.  Russia has the upper hand now on foreign relations. Amazingly, only a few weeks ago, Obama, the fool-in-chief, said the Russian president’s “bored, tough guy ‘schtick’ [is] aimed at [an] internal audience.” </span>(He didn’t mention that “internal” stretched beyond Russia’s borders at that time.)</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Embarrassingly, Russia’s deputy prime minister laughed off President Obama’s sanction list, and tweeted insults, asking “Comrade @BarackObama” if “some prankster” had come up with the embargo list. He then tweeted again to &#8220;Comrade @BarackObama&#8221; and asked “what should do those who have neither accounts nor property abroad? Or U didn’t think about it?” Russian senior politicians openly mocking America. Awful.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The 11 Russian and Ukrainian officials who were hit with American sanctions as punishment for Russia’s support of Crimea’s referendum knew this was coming for weeks. And they couldn&#8217;t care less, as it’s ineffectual and means nothing. As another Russian, Vladislav Surkov, told a Russian newspaper, “It’s a big honor for me. I don’t have accounts abroad. The only things that interest me in the U.S. are Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg, and Jackson Pollock. I don’t need a visa to access their work. I lose nothing.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Obama’s sheltered experience has been evident during his administration. He doesn’t mind his own business, doesn’t understand the importance of keeping one’s word, and thinks he is still in his Ivy League world.  In Realpolitik, strength breeds peace. American power and strength could allow Putin to step back with victory in Crimea, and call it a day.  Let us hope that’s a possibility and Obama will not bungle the situation any further.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">President Obama is a simple laughingstock. He promised change – the change will be that the world will be a much different place after two Obama terms. Much less stable, and powerful for Western interests.</span></p>
<p>Obama will go down as the worst American President in history.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Comrade Obama is the world’s laughingstock.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
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		<title>Putin Power vs. Obama Weakness &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/putins-contempt-for-obama-on-the-glazov-gang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=putins-contempt-for-obama-on-the-glazov-gang</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Mar 2014 04:00:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[The Glazov Gang]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crimea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Igor Melcuk]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220590</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Radical-in-Chief gets humiliated all over again.    ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/jg34.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220961" alt="jg34" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/jg34-450x253.jpg" width="315" height="177" /></a><b><strong>[<a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Subscribe</b></a></strong></b> to <em>The Glazov Gang</em> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>Facebook.]</b></a></p>
<p>This week’s<em> Glazov Gang </em>was joined by <strong>Daniel Greenfield</strong>, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center who runs the blog <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/the-point/"><em>The Point</em></a> at <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/"><em>Frontpagemag.com</em>.</a></p>
<p>Daniel joined the Gang to discuss<strong> Putin Power vs. Obama Weakness</strong>. The dialogue focused on the Radical-in-Chief getting humiliated all over again &#8212; this time at the hands of a Russian thugocrat over Ukraine.</p>
<p>Daniel also shed light on <em>Why Lois Lerner Pleaded the Fifth</em>, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/israels-homicidal-peace-partner/">Obama and Israel’s Homicidal Peace Partner,</a> and much, much more:</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/6Se7vaS-INo" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss this week&#8217;s second BLOCKBUSTER episode with<strong> Igor Melcuk,</strong> a<strong> </strong>Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Montreal and Member of the Royal Society of Canada. A scientist and “reluctant” Soviet dissident, he left the Soviet Union in 1977 after being expelled from the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences because he defended <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/frontpagemag-com/2011/08/26/symposium-russia-after-elena-bonner/">Andrei Sakharov</a>​ in a letter published in The <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/frontpagemag-com/2011/08/26/symposium-russia-after-elena-bonner/">New York Times</a>​.<strong></strong></p>
<p>Prof. Melcuk joined the Gang to discuss <em>Putin&#8217;s Ukraine Gamble. </em><em></em>The discussion occurred in the context of <em>Putin&#8217;s Contempt for Obama. </em>Prof. Melcuk explained why the Russian president laughs in the Radical-in-Chief&#8217;s face, what he is really after, what he really fears, and what dangers he poses:</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/5H8u9x3je6Y" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><b>To watch previous <i>Glazov Gang</i> episodes, </b><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><b>Click Here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p><b><a href="https://www.facebook.com/jamie.glazov">LIKE</a> Jamie Glazov’s <a href="https://www.facebook.com/jamie.glazov">Fan Page</a> on Facebook.</b></p>
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		<title>Russia Steamrolls Over the United Nations</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/russia-steamrolls-over-the-united-nations/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=russia-steamrolls-over-the-united-nations</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 17 Mar 2014 04:45:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[crimea]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[security council]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[veto]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221162</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The reemergence of an old era. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/03ED2C87-A736-4FAF-95EA-FA842A4B8D43_w640_r1_s.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221178" alt="03ED2C87-A736-4FAF-95EA-FA842A4B8D43_w640_r1_s" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/03ED2C87-A736-4FAF-95EA-FA842A4B8D43_w640_r1_s.jpg" width="256" height="188" /></a>In the phony Crimean referendum held on Sunday March 16th, 95.5% of voters in Crimea have supported joining Russia, Russian officials say. The vote was boycotted by many Crimeans loyal to the Ukraine central government in Kiev, including Tartars who make up about 12% of the Crimean population. Sergei Aksyonov, Crimea&#8217;s leader installed last month after the Russians effectively occupied Crimea, announced that his government will formally apply on Monday to join the Russian Federation. Shortly after the polls closed, the Obama administration issued a statement rejecting the referendum.</span></p>
<p>The United Nations Security Council voted Saturday March 15th on a draft resolution addressing the Ukrainian crisis, which was supposed to send a signal to Russia to back off from moving ahead to absorb Crimea into Russia. It doesn’t seem to have had any effect. Russia has said that it will respect the results of the referendum.</p>
<p>Thirteen members voted in favor of the draft Security Council resolution. China abstained. Only Russia, not surprisingly, voted no, which killed the resolution because of Russia’s veto power. In the best line of all the statements made by members of the Security Council following the vote, France’s UN Ambassador, Gerard Araud, exclaimed that “Russia vetoed the UN Charter.”</p>
<p>The vetoed draft resolution began with a reference to Article II of the UN Charter, which calls for member states to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. It cited bilateral and multilateral agreements that Russia had signed guaranteeing the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine. It stressed the importance of maintaining an inclusive political dialogue in Ukraine that “includes representation from all parts of Ukraine,” and reaffirmed the Security Council’s “commitment to the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.” Finally, in keeping with these principles, the draft resolution criticized the Crimean referendum to endorse the secession of Crimea and absorption into the Russian Federation. It declared that “this referendum can have no validity, and cannot form the basis for any alteration of the status of Crimea,” and called upon all member states and international organizations “not to recognize any alteration of the status of Crimea on the basis of this referendum.”</p>
<p>In the midst of the discussions following the Security Council vote, Ukrainian UN Ambassador Yuriy Sergeyev made the dramatic announcement that he had just been informed of the movement of Russian troops from Crimea into the Ukraine mainland, signifying a dangerous expansion of Russia’s aggressive moves into Ukrainian sovereign territory. “Stop the aggressor,” he pleaded to the Security Council. His plea came two days after Ukrainian interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk turned toward the Russian Ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, and bluntly asked whether &#8220;Russians want war.&#8221; Ambassador Churkin responded that neither the Russian government nor the Russian people wanted war.</p>
<p>Perhaps the Russian people themselves don’t want war, but Russian President Vladimir Putin takes no stock of what the Russian people may think or want if he has a different opinion. He has turned the Soviet Union Communist dictatorship into a pre-Soviet style Russian imperial oligarchy under one-man political rule. Now, as the New York Times described the situation in Crimea,</p>
<blockquote><p>“[W]ith a mix of targeted intimidation, an expansive military occupation by unmistakably elite Russian units and many of the trappings of the election-season carnivals that have long accompanied rigged ballots across the old Soviet world, Crimea has been swept almost instantaneously into the Kremlin’s fold.”</p></blockquote>
<p>The provocative actions of Russian forces inside Crimea, and now possibly within the Ukrainian mainland, speak louder than Ambassador Churkin’s assurances of Russia’s peaceful intentions.</p>
<p>Russia’s persistent attempt to justify the Crimean referendum as an exercise in self-determination is, as Ambassador Power said last Thursday in response to my question regarding this Russian assertion, nothing more than an attempt to define self-determination as “Russia-determination.”</p>
<p>In deference to the principle of territorial integrity, international law is loath to recognize a unilateral right of secession for all peoples. Russia acknowledges in principle that secession is justified in only exceptional circumstances, but claims that what it calls a coup d’état in Ukraine by “radicals” justifies the right of the Crimean people to secede from Ukraine if they wish. The problem with this argument is that it is not up to Russia to determine the legality of the change of government in Kiev and, on that basis, inject its own military presence in Crimea in support of the referendum.</p>
<p>Russia is free to accept as citizens in its own country Russian-speaking residents of Ukraine who no longer feel safe living in Ukraine under present circumstances. But the Tartar minority now living freely in Crimea, who have suffered deportation and killings at the hands of the Soviets when they controlled Ukraine, have nowhere else to go and remain safe. Crimea is their homeland. Russia of all countries, given its past brutal treatment of the indigenous Tartar population in Crimea, has no business forcing its will to favor one ethnic group over another in an independent country on the other side of internationally recognized borders with Russia.</p>
<p>In any case, Russia’s oft-stated rationale for providing military support to the Russian-speaking citizens in Ukraine &#8212; that these citizens’ rights are being violated by ultra-nationalist “radicals” entering Crimea from other parts of Ukraine &#8211; is bogus. According to international monitors who have tried to gather evidence of human rights violations in Crimea and elsewhere in Ukraine, no evidence to date has been found to back up the Russian claim. And Russia and its allies in Crimea are not providing any support for such international monitors to enter Crimea safely, suggesting that it is they who have something to hide.</p>
<p>As for Russia’s superficial comparison of the Crimea referendum to Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008, United Kingdom’s UN Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant summed up the response best in his remarks to reporters after Saturday’s UN Security Council meeting:</p>
<blockquote><p>There is no comparison between the two cases. The Kosovo vote for independence, declaration of independence, came after a brutal war in which, as you say, there were massive human rights abuses; hundreds of thousands of people were killed, and the Security Council Resolution 1244 itself accepted that the status of Kosovo was disputed. None of those conditions apply in Crimea.</p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In his remarks on Saturday explaining Russia’s veto, Ambassador Churkin lashed out at both the proposed resolution and its supporters. He accused Ukraine of having blood on its hands as a result of the violent protests last month that led to the ousting of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko. And he challenged Washington “to tell the truth” about its own role in the events leading up to the crisis.</span></p>
<p>Speaking about truth, U.S Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power said during her condemnation of Russia’s veto that, while Russia has the power to veto a Security Council resolution, “it does not have the power to veto the truth.&#8221; She placed the blamed for the crisis squarely on Russia’s shoulders:</p>
<blockquote><p>The crisis came with a label &#8211; made in Moscow.  It was Moscow that ordered its armed forces to seize control of key facilities in Crimea, to bully local officials, and to threaten the country&#8217;s eastern border.  It was Moscow that tried to fool the world with a false narrative about extremism and the protection of human rights &#8211; about refugees fleeing, and about attacks on synagogues. The reality is that the part of Ukraine where minorities are threatened is Crimea, where Russian forces have confronted Ukrainians, and spread fear within the Tatar community - which has endured Russian purges and ethnic cleansing in the past and fears now that this bitter past will serve as prologue.</p></blockquote>
<p>Ambassador Power accused Russia of double standards when it came to the issue of territorial integrity, a principle which Russia has supported in the past. As for the Crimean referendum, the “whole world knows,” Ambassador Power said, that it “was hatched in the Kremlin and midwifed by the Russian military. It is inconsistent with Ukraine&#8217;s constitution and international law. It is illegitimate and it will have no legal effect.”</p>
<p>Russia had not a single supporter on the Security Council. No other member spoke out in favor of the Russian position. Most of the members forcefully condemned Russia’s actions and rationales. Some noted the cardinal UN Charter principles at stake, as well as Russia’s violation of its own bilateral and multilateral agreements with Ukraine in which it promised to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine.</p>
<p>China, while abstaining and raising concerns about the timing of the resolution, emphasized its consistent support of the principle of territorial integrity and the need for political dialogue. Its Ambassador Liu Jieyi was the voice of moderation and reconciliation, suggesting the establishment of an international coordinating mechanism to discuss the crisis, restraint by all parties to the conflict and increased financial assistance to Ukraine through international institutions.</p>
<p>The price Russia will pay for its naked aggression against Ukraine will, at minimum, be international isolation and sanctions. Secretary of State John Kerry has warned of serious consequences for Russia as early as Monday if Russia does not back off.  The European Foreign Ministers will be meeting on Monday. The United Kingdom’s UN Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant told reporters after the Security Council session adjourned that “[I]f the referendum goes ahead on Sunday, then I think we can see a reaction from the European leaders on Monday.”</p>
<p>Sanctions and asset freezes may be too little too late. Moreover, Putin can retaliate, causing severe disruptions to American and European businesses operating in Russia and cutting off fuel supplies to Europe. Moreover, Asian countries are far from likely to participate in any sanctions.</p>
<p>There is only one language that Putin understands – military pressure. That means, at minimum, an announcement by the Obama administration that it will install missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic after all. And, for good measure, the Obama administration should make clear that it will plan for installation of such systems and other highly sophisticated military equipment in the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and in western Ukraine if Russia does not immediately withdraw its troops back to where they belong.</p>
<p>Today Russia stands exposed as an outlaw state operating in the same manner that led to two World Wars. As French UN Ambassador Araud noted, “We are going back to 1914, and we are in 2014.”</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Daniel Greenfield </strong>on <strong>The</strong> <strong>Glazov Gang </strong>discussing <em>Obama&#8217;s Helplessness Over the Ukraine</em>:</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/6Se7vaS-INo" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><b>Make sure to </b><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
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		<title>The Incoherence of Western Foreign Policy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-foundational-incoherence-of-western-foreign-policy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-foundational-incoherence-of-western-foreign-policy</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-foundational-incoherence-of-western-foreign-policy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Mar 2014 04:58:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crimea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Putin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ukraine]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220687</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When a delusional set of ideals collides with a dangerous world of aggressive regimes.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/lkj.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-220691" alt="lkj" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/lkj.jpg" width="259" height="194" /></a>The crisis in Ukraine is just the latest in a long series of foreign policy failures brought about by the incoherence in our thinking about foreign relations. On the one hand, we have championed ethnic-national self-determination as the highest international good, while on the other we have assumed that all these various nations and peoples share the same ideals, principles, and goods, and so can comprise a transnational order that will eliminate war and conflict and create peace and prosperity. Over a hundred years of history reveal these ideals not just to be incompatible, but also to foment and worsen inter-state violence.</p>
<p>To mean anything, ethnic-nationalist particularism must embody profound differences among nations, including languages, customs, mores, religions, ideals, and values. The identity of a people is defined by these differences, and that identity in turn creates interests and aims that necessarily clash with those of other peoples. To take one particularly important example, different countries have different attitudes about the legitimacy of using violence to achieve their goals. Russia under Vladimir Putin obviously sees no problem with using force or the threat of force to protect its interests in Moldova, Georgia, and now Crimea and Ukraine. The Muslim Middle East is rich with examples of the acceptability of violence, whether against external or internal enemies, in protecting a nation’s or a regime’s power and privilege. The brutal civil war in Syria is the obvious current example. Complaints about this brutality, moreover, on the part of victims usually are based on who is using violence, not the universal principle that violence is wrong. The same clerical revolutionaries in Iran who decried the brutality of the Shah’s secret police have had no problem using even worse brutality once they were in power, killing more Iranians in one year than the Savak did in 20. Violence, brutality, and torture are all fine depending on who the perpetrators are, and who the victims.</p>
<p>Idealistic internationalism, on the other hand, must pretend that these practices which conflict with Western norms are aberrations, remnants of a less enlightened mentality that has not yet changed and progressed to embracing the superior values of the West. No reasonable human, we assume, could approve of violence, revenge, religious triumphalism, or the lust for greater power and influence at the expense of other countries, when in our calculation pursuing such aims comes with great risks and costs. After all, there is a global “harmony of interests,” as they said in the 19<sup>th</sup> century, that include freedom, respect for human rights, peace, and prosperity, and these preferences have been enshrined in international law, institutions, and treaties that will achieve those boons for everybody. Many Westerners who believe in this sort of idealistic internationalism point to the participation of so many countries in organizations like the United Nations, or in treaties that proscribe land mines, forbid nuclear proliferation, or promote human rights, as proof of this “harmony of interests” and a universal human nature more important than nationalist or ethnic identity. But that participation in the main is a consequence of the West’s domination of the globe, not of adherence to universal principles. Just as most global leaders wear Western suits and ties, most countries go along with these Western ideals, even as they use such institutions and aims to promote their own national interests.</p>
<p>Hence the hypocrisy that lies at the heart of the international order. Sovereign nations pursue their particular interests, which necessarily conflict with those of others, using the international order when they find it useful to do so, and ignoring it when they don’t. That’s what it means to be “sovereign.” Thus Russia has responded to the U.S. and E.U.’s warnings of sanctions by threatening to suspend compliance with the international inspections called for under the START treaty with the U.S., and the Vienna Document binding on the member states of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. But even before the current crisis, Russia has been serially cheating on arms-reduction treaties. North Korea, Iran, and the Palestinian Arabs have all played the same game. To paraphrase Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan’s comments about democracy, internationalism is like a train. You take it where you have to go and then you get off.</p>
<p>The long history of the failure of international diplomacy and institutions to prevent devastating wars and other brutal conflicts should have long discredited this faith in internationalism and its utopian ideals’ ability to trump the zero-sum interests and conflicting identities of nations. If sovereign nations have the right to determine their own destinies because they are essentially different from other nations, then we must accept that they will have their own interests, no matter how irrational we may think them, that conflict with those other countries. An international order that takes one civilization’s ideals and principles as the standard for the whole world will clash with those different ideals and principles, and in the end will have to use force to impose that standard that they believe to be superior. And if they do not have the will or morale to back their idealistic words with mind-concentrating deeds, then they will be viewed with contempt by those other nations, who will see in weakness an opportunity.</p>
<p>Just peruse the comments coming from President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry about the Ukraine crisis, and you can hear all the unexamined assumptions and received opinions that result from the incoherent combination of idealistic internationalism and national self-determination. Kerry scolded Putin by evoking the dubious idea that the world has progressed beyond violence and has endorsed diplomacy as the globally preferred method of adjudicating disputes, even as he sounded the ideal of national self-determination. Putin’s actions, Kerry said, are “really 19th-century behavior in the 21st century,” not “G-8, major-nation behavior.” A sovereign nation using power to pursue its interests as determined by that nation is somehow uncivilized, according of course to Western ideals. No, Kerry instructs the wily Putin, “It is diplomacy and respect for sovereignty, not unilateral force, that can best solve disputes like this in the 21st century.” But what if a sovereign nation determines that another nation’s interests endanger its own, using force is in its interests, and diplomacy is merely a tactic in successfully doing so? Do we still “respect” that nation’s sovereignty?</p>
<p>So too the President, who said, “Our goal is to make sure that the people of Ukraine are able to make decisions for themselves about their future, that the people of Syria are able to make the decisions without having bombs going off.” But what if it takes “bombs going off,” because of the aggressors who use violence to protect and advance their interests, to make sure Ukrainians and Syrians will in fact be able to “make decisions for themselves”? Next Obama smugly asserts that Putin seemingly doesn’t understand his own peoples’ interests, which lie in embracing the international order. “There are times, I hope, where Russia will recognize that over the long term they should be on board with those values and interests as well,” for “In 2014, we are well beyond the days when borders can be redrawn over the heads of democratic leaders.” What possible empirical evidence can Obama produce that suggests this assertion is remotely true?</p>
<p>Then he assures the Russians “that they can be part of an international community’s effort to support the stability and success of a united Ukraine going forward, which is not only in the interest of the people of Ukraine and the international community, but also in Russia&#8217;s interest.” The assumption that the world has progressed beyond violence, and that a nation’s interests can be advanced only by harmonizing with the interests of a fanciful “international community,” bespeaks a delusional arrogance dangerous in a world of nations that still see their particular interests, not those of a mythical “international community,” as paramount, and achieving them by any means they can get away with perfectly justified.</p>
<p>The conflict of national sovereignty and international idealism cannot be resolved without sacrificing the former to the latter. If nations have a right to rule themselves and determine their interests, on what basis do we judge those interests unacceptable? And if there is a set of ideals and principles that transcend national sovereignty, where do they come from, who has decided that they are universal and superior, and who is going to enforce them? Certainly not today’s West, whose intellectuals and elites, like Barack Obama, have embraced cultural relativism and self-loathing national guilt, even as they preach the gospel of human rights and idealistic internationalism that originated in the West and spread on the heels of Western power and economic success. Our hectoring sermons merely tell the world that we are weak, we don’t believe even in the ideals we loudly profess, and aggressors are not going to be punished for their depredations.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Daniel Greenfield </strong>on this week&#8217;s <strong>Glazov Gang </strong>discussing &#8220;Obama&#8217;s Foreign Policy Disasters.&#8221; The dialogue focuses on the president&#8217;s support of Abbas over Israel, his helplessness in the face of Putin&#8217;s Ukraine aggression, how the world&#8217;s tyrants now laugh at America, and much, much more:</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/6Se7vaS-INo" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><b>Make sure to </b><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
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		<title>It Takes a Rogue Nation to Stop a Rogue State</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/it-takes-a-rogue-nation-to-stop-a-rogue-state/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=it-takes-a-rogue-nation-to-stop-a-rogue-state</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 04 Mar 2014 05:50:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cowboy diplomacy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crimea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Multilateralism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S.]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ukraine]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220197</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Cowboy diplomacy is the only defense against commissar diplomacy and caliphate diplomacy.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/18185205.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220204" alt="18185205" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/18185205-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a>The international community looked into Putin&#8217;s eyes and blinked. Multilateralism has failed as badly as it did in the days of the League of Nations, but then again it never actually worked.</span></p>
<p>The international order that everyone pretends is a real force in world affairs is really the United States and a few partners doing all the work and letting the diplomats and bureaucrats of the world pretend that they matter. Without America, the United Nations would be just as useless as the League of Nations. With America, the United Nations is only a deterrent when the United States puts its foot down and the rest of the world doesn&#8217;t get in the way.</p>
<p>It has become fashionable to denounce the United States as a rogue state. A military intervention, even with the backing of its Western allies, but outside the framework of the organizations of the international order, was deemed unilateralism and cowboy diplomacy.</p>
<p>And then Obama rode in on a three-speed bike and won a Nobel Peace Prize for his commitment to doing nothing.</p>
<p>The multilateral system is helpless in the face of aggression. That is as true today as it was eighty years ago. International agreements are worthless without steel and lead behind them. The United Nations is incapable of acting when one of its more powerful members is the aggressor, the foreign policy experts of the left crank out editorials explaining why we can&#8217;t do anything and the Secretary of State explains that our weakness is really a strength.</p>
<p>International law couldn&#8217;t stop Hitler. It couldn&#8217;t stop Japan. It took the United States to do that. The foreign policy experts will deny it, the editorials will decry it and the Common Core textbooks will refuse to print it; but it takes a rogue nation to stop a rogue state.</p>
<p>England and France&#8217;s diplomatic outreach to Nazi Germany led to the seizure of the Rhineland, the annexations of Austria and a portion of Czechoslovakia, followed by the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland. American diplomacy and sanctions on Japan led to Pearl Harbor.</p>
<p>The issue isn&#8217;t whether the United States should intervene in Ukraine, but whether it should have the option to do something more meaningful than draw faint red lines and threaten worthless sanctions. Every mob throwing things at soldiers and police isn&#8217;t necessarily composed of the good guys just because they have photogenic protesters and colorful flags.</p>
<p>Our instinct to automatically support the underdog is just another dangerous figment of the multilateral mindset.</p>
<p>The United States has unselectively adopted the human rights agenda of the internationalists and allowed our foreign affairs priorities to be curated by the diplomats of the left who know exactly whom to denounce and what not to do about it. UN Ambassador Samantha Power, wearing a bitter frown, agonizing over the woes of the world, is the face of our senseless and useless diplomacy that forces us to play the moral scold without being able to back it up.</p>
<p>American foreign policy has become indistinguishable from the United Nations agenda and just as impotent, fixated on the recommendations of human rights committees instead of national interests, incapable of addressing historical alliances, and unable to build its responses around anything except the same Powerian empty shriek of self-righteous human rights outrage.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s America has turned a cold impartial face to its allies, aspiring instead to become the vessel of international organizations while assigning its morality to an international committee. American foreign policy is under international management and that transfers its decision process from D.C. to an international network of committees incapable of doing anything except generating worthless reports and denouncing Israel.</p>
<p>The United States was the ghost in the machine of the United Nations, but now that the United States is the United Nations, the United States has become the puppet of a puppet.</p>
<p>The weakness of multilateral diplomacy is that it strives to negotiate accommodations to the clashes of the moment without reference to past history or the trajectory of future conquests. This was a weakness that Hitler understood and exploited, reducing the issue to the current status of the Sudetenland or the Rhineland, rather than to past and future war aims. It was only when the Allies broke out of the diplomatic mindset of considering every Hitlerian conquest individually and debating the merits of defending Czechoslovakia, rather than anticipating the conquest of Poland, that real resistance to the Nazi war machine finally began.</p>
<p>Unfortunately the Allies failed to learn from history and accepted Stalin&#8217;s piecemeal takeovers at face value only waking up after much of the world had fallen under the Red Flag. It was President Eisenhower’s &#8220;Domino Theory&#8221; that assigned a value to each conquest not based on its own status, but its place in a chain of conquests in a struggle for regional dominance.</p>
<p>Sarah Palin understood in 2008 what the school of foreign policy &#8220;realists&#8221; did not; that Georgia was not significant in isolation but as a prerequisite to the invasion of Ukraine and likewise Ukraine should be understood in the context of an imperial territorial ambition that stretches far beyond its borders.</p>
<p>Whether or not we choose to oppose that ambition we should understand it on its own terms.</p>
<p>The United States should have a strong military, not so that it can use it, but so that it won’t need to use it. Military budget cuts send the message that we won&#8217;t intervene in international conflicts which makes it more likely that our enemies will start conflicts and that some of those conflicts will drag us in anyway no matter how much of the fleet we mothball and how many transsexual dance troupes we host on what used to be the army bases of a world power.</p>
<p>Military weakness invites war, whether it was the British trying to face down Hitler with no bullets or Obama announcing another round of drastic defense cuts just before Putin rolled into Ukraine.</p>
<p>Diplomacy is only the art of saying &#8220;nice doggie&#8221; until you find the stick if you were stupid enough to throw away the big stick in the first place. And then you had better hope that you are dealing with a very stupid dog that won&#8217;t gnaw your arm off before you can get at that stick.</p>
<p>The United States should have clear commitments and agreements that it keeps, rather than randomly butting into every single conflict and human rights violation on the planet. Its leaders should decide whether they really are serious about Syria or Ukraine or any other place on earth that they issue press releases about and keep quiet about them if they are not.</p>
<p>And if they are serious, they should be ready to act with the same decisiveness that Vladimir Putin showed.</p>
<p>History isn&#8217;t made by nations defending international law, but acting on their own imperatives. Only a rogue nation that isn&#8217;t bound by the chains of multilateralism can take the unilateral action necessary to stop a rogue state.</p>
<p>American cowboy diplomacy is the only defense the world has against commissar diplomacy, cossack diplomacy and caliphate diplomacy.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>New Liberal Media Meme: Obama&#8217;s Inaction Makes Him Strong, Putin&#8217;s Invasions Make Him Weak</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/new-liberal-media-meme-obamas-inaction-makes-him-strong-putins-invasions-make-him-weak/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=new-liberal-media-meme-obamas-inaction-makes-him-strong-putins-invasions-make-him-weak</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 03 Mar 2014 18:51:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crimea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ukraine]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220172</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Kerry said Putin is acting out of “weakness” and “desperation.”]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Orwell-Nineteen-Eighty-Four-large-cover.jpg"><img class="alignnone  wp-image-195174" alt="Orwell-Nineteen-Eighty-Four-large-cover" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Orwell-Nineteen-Eighty-Four-large-cover.jpg" width="490" height="341" /></a></p>
<p>Courtesy of a cursory reading of 1984 and several sharp blows to the head, the media has gathered up the tattered remnants of its dignity and has a new meme out to explain everything.</p>
<p>&#8220;Strength is weakness, Weakness is strength.&#8221;</p>
<p>Think Progress, CAP&#8217;s little spin factory, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-enters-putins-world/">deployed the meme</a>, &#8220;an act of weakness, not strength — an act, as Kerry aptly characterized it, anachronistic in both moral and strategic terms… fundamentally mismatched to 21st century realities.&#8221;</p>
<p>That&#8217;s right. Invading countries is an act of weakness. Being unable to do anything about it is an inaction of strength.</p>
<p>Kerry, the epitome of political weakness, picked up on the meme,</p>
<blockquote><p>“You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country,” Kerry said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” &#8220;That’s not the act of somebody who’s strong, “ Kerry added, saying Putin is acting out of “weakness” and “desperation.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>And the <a href="http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/patrick-goodenough/administration-dismisses-obamas-credibility-problem-says-putins">White House went on pushing it.</a>..</p>
<blockquote><p>A senior administration official took issue with a reporter’s suggestion Sunday that the Ukraine crisis has left President Obama with “a credibility problem around the world with other foreign leaders, and particularly very strong ones like [Russian President] Vladimir Putin.”</p>
<p>The official, one of three speaking during a background teleconference briefing, said on the contrary, Putin was the one looking weak after Obama rallied support to condemn his takeover of Ukraine’s Crimea region.</p>
<p>“The premise of your question is that [Putin] is strong and the president of the United States is weak, when, in fact, he is not acting from a position of strength right now,” the official told the reporter, Fox News’ James Rosen.</p>
<p>“He is acting from a position of having lost the government that they backed in Kiev and made a play to move in to Crimea, a piece of Ukraine, and being met with international condemnation.”</p></blockquote>
<p>The <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/david-ignatius-putins-error-in-ukraine-is-the-kind-that-leads-to-catastrophe/2014/03/02/d376603e-a249-11e3-a5fa-55f0c77bf39c_story.html">Washington Post&#8217;s David Ignatius</a> develops CAP&#8217;s &#8220;Strength is weakness&#8221; meme further.</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Kerry called on Putin to “undo this act of invasion.” The Russian leader would save himself immense grief by following Kerry’s advice, but that seems unlikely. His mistake in Sevastopol may lead to others elsewhere, though hopefully Putin will avoid reckless actions. But the more Putin seeks to assert Russia’s strength, he will actually underline its weakness.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Just think, if Putin invades the headquarters of the Washington Post and renames it the Moscow Post, he&#8217;ll show how truly weak and helpless he is.</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Perhaps inevitably, given Washington’s political monomania, the big subject over the weekend wasn’t Putin’s criminal attack on Crimea but whether Obama had encouraged it by being insufficiently muscular. There are many valid criticisms to be made of Obama’s foreign policy, especially in Syria, but the notion that Putin’s attack is somehow the United States’ fault is perverse.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Almost as perverse as insisting that helplessness is strength.</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Putin’s Russia may well make more mistakes: We may see a cascading chain of error that brings Russian troops deeper into Ukraine and sets the stage for civil war. Those are the kind of miscalculations that lead to catastrophic consequences, and Obama would be wise to seek to deter Russian aggression without specifying too clearly what the U.S. ladder of escalation might be.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Yes, it&#8217;s wise not to specify the details of threats that you have no intention of carrying out anyway. That way there can at least be some confusion as to whether you&#8217;ve carried them out.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/president-obamas-foreign-policy-is-based-on-fantasy/2014/03/02/c7854436-a238-11e3-a5fa-55f0c77bf39c_story.html">Saner heads at the Washington Post editorial desk</a> gently reminded Obama that he can&#8217;t just run an imaginary world that only exists inside the heads of liberal foreign policy experts.</p>
<blockquote><p>Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. It was a world in which “the tide of war is receding” and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces. Other leaders, in this vision, would behave rationally and in the interest of their people and the world. Invasions, brute force, great-power games and shifting alliances — these were things of the past. Secretary of State John F. Kerry displayed this mindset on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday when he said, of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, “It’s a 19th century act in the 21st century.”&#8230;</p>
<p>&#8230;as long as some leaders play by what Mr. Kerry dismisses as 19th-century rules, the United States can’t pretend that the only game is in another arena altogether.</p></blockquote>
<p>The trouble though is that we have an extensive consensus inside the establishment that the new arena is the only one that exists.</p>
<p>Marc Thiessen <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-obamas-weakness-emboldens-putin/2014/03/03/28def926-a2e2-11e3-84d4-e59b1709222c_story.html">spoke much more bluntly</a> in an op-ed that isn&#8217;t getting the kind of play that Ignatius&#8217; drivel is because it&#8217;s much less comforting to liberals.</p>
<blockquote><p>When President Obama declared Friday that “there will be costs” for any Russian intervention in Ukraine, you could hear the laughter emanating from the Kremlin — followed by the sound of Russian military vehicles roaring into Crimea and seizing control of the peninsula.</p>
<p>“Costs?” Vladi­mir Putin must have thought. Just like the “costs” Obama imposed on the Assad regime in Syria?</p>
<p>Kerry fumed on CBS’s “Face the Nation” this weekend: “Russia is in violation of its obligations under the U.N. charter, under the Helsinki Final Act. It’s in violation of its obligations under the 1994 Budapest agreement.” But KGB thugs like Putin are not deterred by pieces of parchment. They are deterred when the United States projects strength and resolve.</p></blockquote>
<p>Weakness is still weakness and strength is strength.</p>
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		<title>Obama’s Cold War Denial</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/obamas-cold-war-denial/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-cold-war-denial</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/obamas-cold-war-denial/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 03 Mar 2014 05:35:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crimea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Military]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mitt romney]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Putin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[threat]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ukraine]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220109</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The president's dismissal of Russia's threat comes back to haunt him.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/russian-troops-ground-crimea.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220110" alt="russian-troops-ground-crimea" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/russian-troops-ground-crimea-441x350.jpg" width="309" height="245" /></a></span>President Obama was AWOL on Saturday when his national security team met to discuss the rapidly unfolding events in Ukraine, including Russia’s expanded military presence in the Crimea portion of Ukraine. Only a day before, President Obama had warned Russia that there would be “costs” if it violated Ukraine’s sovereignty. Saturday morning, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave his answer. He thumbed his nose at Obama. Once again, the Obama administration’s vaunted button to “re-set” relations with Russia in a more positive direction has blown up in its face, as Putin continues to play by the rules of realpolitik while Obama flounders. This detached president did not even attend a key national security meeting called to figure out how to best deal with Putin’s latest maneuvers.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Ironically, during the 2012 presidential campaign, President Obama mocked the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for warning about Russia’s “geopolitical” threat. During one of the presidential debates Obama remarked condescendingly about Romney’s warning, “You said Russia. Not Al Qaida. You said Russia. The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because…the cold war’s been over for 20 years.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In words that Obama should repeat to himself every night before he goes to sleep, Romney responded: “Russia, I indicated, is a geopolitical foe…and I said in the same paragraph I said and Iran is the greatest national security threat we face. Russia does continue to battle us in the U.N. time and time again. I have clear eyes on this. I’m not going to wear rose-colored glasses when it comes to Russia or Mr. Putin…”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Romney was right on both counts. Iran, as it pursues its nuclear arms ambitions, is the greatest national security threat that we face. And, as Russia’s willingness to run interference for the Syrian regime at the UN and its present provocative actions in Ukraine prove, Russia under Putin represents a significant geopolitical threat. Obama unfortunately continues to wear rose-colored glasses when it comes to Iran, as he pursues fruitless negotiations that the Iranian regime is exploiting. And he is now just maybe beginning to take off his rose-colored glasses with respect to Putin’s Russia, as it increasingly flexes its muscles.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Former President George Bush also mistakenly had given Putin the benefit of the doubt back in 2001 when he said, after meeting with Putin, that he thought he could trust the Russian leader. But that was nearly thirteen years ago. Obama has had all the intervening years to observe Putin in action. It became obvious to anyone with his or her eyes wide open that the Russian president operated solely on the basis of realpolitik and was very expert in doing so, as Putin has shown in taking advantage of Obama’s perceived weakness and indecision time and time again.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">With respect to the Ukraine crisis, at Putin’s request, the upper house of the Russian Parliament formally granted him the authority to use military force, not just in Crimea but throughout Ukraine. The Russian parliamentary approval for Putin’s use of military force merely ratified the facts on the ground that had already been occurring, as thousands of armed Russian soldiers, often wearing masks and uniforms without any national insignia, reportedly surrounded the regional parliament building and other government facilities in the Crimean capital city of Simferopol. They also effectively closed the region’s two main airports and took control over key communications hubs.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">President Obama’s response to Putin’s maneuvers was to call the Russian leader on Saturday and urge him to pull back his military forces or risk isolation in the international community if he refused. Obama also laid out the initial “cost” of Russia’s provocative actions &#8211; the U.S. is suspending its participation in preparations for the upcoming Group of 8 economic summit in Sochi, Russia.</span></p>
<p>“President Obama expressed his deep concern over Russia’s clear violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity, which is a breach of international law,” the White House said in its readout of the call. “The United States condemns Russia’s military intervention into Ukrainian territory. The United States calls on Russia to de-escalate tensions by withdrawing its forces back to bases in Crimea and to refrain from any interference elsewhere in Ukraine.”</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Kremlin provided its own readout of the call. It said that Putin pointed out to Obama the “real threat to the lives and health of Russian citizens” currently in Ukraine, and referred to “the provocative and criminal actions on the part of ultranationalists who are in fact being supported by the current authorities in Kiev.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Meanwhile, at United Nations headquarters in New York, an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council was held on Saturday afternoon to discuss the Ukrainian crisis – the second such meeting in two days. For the first two hours, the Security Council members wrangled behind closed doors on whether they should hold their discussions in public or in private consultations. They reached a compromise of sorts – a brief public meeting followed by much lengthier closed door consultations.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">During the open meeting, UN Deputy Secretary General Jan Eliasson called for restoration of calm and dialogue among all concerned parties. “Now is the time for cool heads to prevail,” he advised. His advice was promptly ignored. The verbal sparks were flying, reminiscent of Cold War sparring in the Security Council that had often paralyzed the UN body from taking any effective action.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Ukrainian ambassador to the UN, Yuriy Sergeyev, who was invited to attend the open meeting on Saturday, accused Russia of “an act of aggression” in “severe violation of international law.”  He added that the “Russian Federation brutally violated the basic principles of Charter of the United Nations obliging all member states to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” He called for the members of the Security Council to take a stand against Russian aggression that interfered with Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. He repeated these themes in remarks to the press after his Security Council statement. He also defended the legality of the Ukrainian parliament’s removal of the ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who has sought refuge in Russia.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin told the Security Council that Russia had acted at the request of the regional authorities in Crimea, making a dubious distinction in claiming that Russian troops could be deployed &#8220;on the territory of Ukraine,&#8221; but not &#8220;against Ukraine.&#8221; In response to calls for Russia to refrain from intervention to protect its interests, he said that &#8220;[W]e can&#8217;t agree with this at all.&#8221; Churkin lashed out at the “radicals” in the &#8220;illegal&#8221; government in Kiev who were allegedly threatening peace and security in Crimea. He questioned the legality of the manner in which Yanukovych was removed from office, noting that Yanukovych had been democratically elected.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Churkin did not speak to reporters on Saturday, but the previous day he had told reporters that the new government in Kiev was not representative of all political factions of Ukraine and was trying to impose its political will on the rest of the country. He accused the European Union of treating Ukraine as its “province” and charged that it was the West’s interference that had helped cause the Ukrainian crisis in the first place.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power expressed the strong support of the U.S. for the new government of Ukraine in her remarks to the Security Council on Saturday. Russia’s “intervention is without legal basis &#8211; indeed it violates Russia&#8217;s commitment to protect the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independence of Ukraine,” she said. “It is time for the Russian intervention in Ukraine to end.” Ambassador Power also accused the Russians of double standards with regard to its position on national sovereignty. “It is ironic that the Russian Federation regularly goes out of its way in this Chamber to emphasize the sanctity of national borders and of sovereignty,” she said, “but Russian actions in Ukraine are violating the sovereignty of Ukraine and pose a threat to peace and security.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Ambassador Power proposed that international monitors and observers &#8211; including from the UN and OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, in which Russia and Ukraine are members] be sent to Ukraine. “That&#8217;s the best way to get the facts, monitor conduct, and prevent any abuses,” she said.  Russia so far has shown little inclination to accept this proposal.</span></p>
<p>In remarks to the press after the completion of the Security Council’s closed door consultations, Ambassador Power said that Russia’s “military presence in Crimea is a violation of international law.”</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">While the situation on the ground in Ukraine continues to deteriorate, including the Ukrainian naval chief’s pledge of allegiance to the Crimean pro-Russia authorities who are defying the authority of the new central government in Kiev, the war of words from the Obama administration continued to escalate on Sunday. Secretary of State John Kerry warned on “Meet the Press” that Russia was facing isolation and opprobrium from the international community, which could result in trade and investment penalties, asset freezes, denial of visas, and even possible expulsion from the G-8. He accused Putin of “possibly trying to annex Crimea” and said that Russia was displaying 19</span><sup style="line-height: 1.5em;">th</sup><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> century behavior in the 21</span><sup style="line-height: 1.5em;">st</sup><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> century by committing “aggression” on a “phony pretext.” That said, any military option by the U.S. in response to Russia’s actions appears to be off the table at least for now.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">What is evident from this serious crisis is that President Obama’s attempt to reset relations with Russia at the outset of his first term has been a dismal failure. He demonstrated weakness when he dropped plans to locate missile interceptors and a radar station in Poland and the Czech Republic without getting anything in return. In March 2012, Obama was overheard on an open mike telling outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that, since he would not be running again for president after the 2012 election, he would have “more flexibility” in dealing with Russia on such matters as missile defense. Medvedev replied: &#8220;I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir,&#8221; a reference to the real power in Russia, Vladimir Putin, who would soon re-assume the presidency. Putin has taken Obama’s measure and is out-maneuvering him at every turn.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/cold-war-rematch-in-kiev/">prior article</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> I theorized that perhaps Obama had decided to support the protests against the Russian-allied ousted president Yanukovych in order to put Russia on defense and “divert Putin’s attention away from the Middle East by causing him to redirect money and resources closer to home.”  If so, the strategy appears to be backfiring since Putin is proving that he is perfectly capable of deploying a few thousand troops in Crimea while still continuing to provide active support to the Assad regime. He is simply allowing the presence of Russian troops, without any full-scale Russian occupation, to catalyze a popular movement in Crimea by its Russian speaking majority to push for breaking away completely from Ukraine.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">More likely, there was no real Obama offensive strategy playing out in Ukraine and no clear-eyed thinking on what real national security and geopolitical threats we face, much less on how to handle them. Instead, President Obama is reverting to his lead-from-behind, reactive approach to most major foreign policy crises he has faced. Obama owes Mitt Romney an immediate apology.</span></p>
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