What should Obama do, in your opinion? It is true that in Putin's eyes, Obama has seemingly made himself look weak, and Putin is seeing how far he can push the West. Is the appropriate response an armed response?
I don't think the US should be involved here. Everytime something happens around the world, Lindsey Graham can't wait to say Obama is weak and wants us to bomb everyone. Why does this Nancy boy always want the US to be involved in everyone's business? Let's punish Russia by suspending them from attending meetings. That'll show them. Bet they're shaking now. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/03/02/lawmakers-call-for-suspension-of-russia-from-g8-swift-action-against-putin/?hpt=po_c1
Obama dug his grave over the past several years. Arab Spring and especially Syria have made him out to be a complete laughingstock. Russia can now do as it pleases, even if it means occupying a sovereign nation.
Not that I am disagreeing with you, but what should the president do? I am pretty sure you would criticized him if he had done something too.
not much he can do now, given his pathetic leadership in Syria and the Arab Spring. Obama's failure has been built over the past several years and this is the result.
The opposition's job is to oppose not propose. They won't make a case for anything so they don't have to deal in realities or stand for criticism. Just ignore them, don't engage. Years here have proven it's pointless. It's Putin that is in trouble here and the scary part is that he is being backed into a corner. The ruble and the Russian stock market are crashing. He is incurring Islamic wrath in Chechnya and Syria. Shale fracking in other European nations threatens his energy monopoly. His conscript army is a rusting hulk. Sevastopol is his only warm water port so he needs Crimea but can't maintain it without Ukrainian support for food, water and electricity. His Olympics sucked. He is in a world of hurt.
The question is not what can he do NOW. It's what could he have done to have prevented this. We all know damn well Obama has painted himself into a corner with his leadership void. This is simply the result.
It tells us all we need to know about those that would rather blame Mr. Obama rather than the person who is responsible for where we are today.
Yeah, I don't know how Mr. Obama could have handled Syria better. It's not a nation we have any influence in and he handled the WMD question without killing any brown people. That's a win. Frankly it's probably better for the US that Assad remains in power in Syria so that it doesn't become an outpost of radical fundamentalism. Like Egypt, we'd like a benign democratic regime but we definitely do not want Sharia states.
This is so much different than Syria. We vowed to protect Ukraine from Russia when they agreed to give up their nuclear weapons. Texx is right in a way. Obama should have seen this coming. He tried to be buddies with Putin and work with him when he doesn't understand the mentality of an ex-KGB soviet dictator. Putin has zero interest in working with Obama. As much as I don't like John Mccain, he was right about Putin all along. He warned of this which is where Palin got it from so no credit to her, but credit to Mccain.
The Invasion Of Crimea Is Crushing Russia's Stock And Currency Markets I wrote yesterday how Russia’s invasion of Crimea was a catastrophic blunder and was likely to be remembered as the worst foreign policy decision since the invasion of Afghanistan. I argued that this was the case because Russia’s relationships with not only the United States but with a range of Western European countries were likely to deteriorate dangerously and because Russia was likely to suffer some pretty serious economic harm. Well the first weekday since the invasion gave us a better idea of the invasion’s impact on the Russian economy and, if anything, it’s even worse than I expected. The stock market has been absolutely pummeled: as of the time that this piece was written (around 7:30 am on Monday the 3rd) the MICEX was down by 11.2% and the RTS was down by 12.8%. As the Financial Times noted, the sell-off did not spare the companies that function as bastions of the Russian state: Gazprom was down 10.7% and Sberbank was down by 9.8%. The activity in the currency market might have been even worse. The ruble reached all-time lows against both the dollar and the euro, falling by 2.5% and 1.5% respectively. The rout in the currency market was so great that the Russian central bank was forced to aggressively intervene. In order to support this intervention it “temporarily” raised interest rates from 5.5% to 7%. I thought it was possible that the central bank would eventually have to raise interest rates in order to combat a weakening ruble, but I didn’t think this would happen for several months (until now, the consensus expectation was that the central bank would leave interest rates alone until the summer or fall). Russia’s economy is already limping along at around 1.5% growth, and sudden monetary tightening could very well drive it into recession. It is, of course, early and it is possible (if highly unlikely) that Russia will quickly bounce back from the damage that it suffered today. It is also, of course, true that the stock and currency markets are highly imperfect barometers for the overall health of an economy. But what happened on Monday gave us some insight into what the market thinks about the decision to invade Crimea. Its answer was unambiguous: it thinks it is a disaster. To the extent that the Russians continue to follow a policy (occupying Crimea) that the market thinks is a disaster, they will suffer accordingly. The invasion of Crimea is vaguely reminiscent of the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia (though thankfully a lot less violent), and the Kremlin seems to have weighed the costs and benefits in a similar way. The problem is that the Russian Federation is not the Soviet Union: it’s not an autarkic island that has been deliberately isolated from world markets, it’s a more-or-less integrated part of the global economy. And such an interconnected system makes the economic costs of political decisions far more apparent than did the creaking and byzantine system of state socialism. If the problems with the stock market or the ruble weren’t enough, yields on Russian government bonds are already spiking and are withing spitting distance of their record high. It may not seem that Russia will pay a “price” for invading Crimea: there might not be any sanctions, for example, and it is possible that Russia will continue to control the territory it has already occupied. But as the rout in its stock, bond, and currency markets clearly demonstrate the Kremlin is already paying dearly for its decision to pursue a military solution to a political conflict. The longer the intervention in Crimea drags on the more damage it will cause to Russia’s economy. Putin and the Kremlin can think that there won’t be serious economic consequences for their actions, but reality will show them otherwise. http://www.forbes.com/sites/markado...-crushing-russias-stock-and-currency-markets/
I don't believe I said The Ukraine was Syria. No one , even Putin, could see this coming. It started as a result of negotiations over loans and when Yanukovich chose the Russian route, the anti-Russian factions of Western Ukraine threw out the government, a de facto revolution. If Putin had seen it coming, it wouldn't have happened. But you can't deal with Super Powers with direct confrontation. You can empower proxies and we do. You use diplomatic and economic pressures. If anything, devaluing the portfolios of Russia's oligarchs may be the real power of opposition. When they start calling Comrade Vlad with complaints you might have some change in his tact. But again remember, it's Putin that is cornered. It's his prestige under attack...Syria, Olympics, losing the Ukraine. If there isn't some rational fall back position for him, then he will resort to the irrational.
Putin like Hitler in 1930s: former Czech foreign minister Russian President Vladimir Putin is repeating history by acting in Crimea much like Adolf Hitler did in central and eastern Europe in the late 1930s, a former Czech foreign minister said in an interview Monday. "What's happening in Ukraine is history repeating itself," Karel Schwarzenberg said in an interview with Austrian daily Osterreich. "Putin is acting along the same principle as Adolf Hitler" did during his invasions of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1938 and 1939, he said. Putin asked Russia's parliament on Saturday to allow him to send troops to Ukraine to protect ethnic Russians in Crimea and elsewhere in southeastern regions of the ex-Soviet country, which has ancient historical and cultural ties to Moscow. "Since he wanted to invade Crimea, he needed a pretext and said that his compatriots were oppressed," the 76-year-old Schwarzenberg said, adding that Russians in Crimea, where they are a majority, were not facing any discrimination. "When Hitler wanted to annex Austria, he said that Germans there were oppressed," he said. Europe should "clearly tell him that this is a violation of law that will not pass," said Schwarzenberg, who served as Czech foreign minister from 2007-2009 and 2010-2013. Hitler annexed then Czechoslovakia's northern and western regions in 1938 under the pretext of protecting the ethnic German population there. The following year his forces occupied the rest of the country. Austria was annexed into the Third Reich in March 1938. http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/140303/putin-hitler-1930s-former-czech-foreign-minister
Putin saw this coming... <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>Chilling account of long-run Russian invasion planning. Suggests Putin's aims go well beyond Crimea. <a href="http://t.co/sK6EMUxa2Q">http://t.co/sK6EMUxa2Q</a> via <a href="https://twitter.com/FT">@FT</a></p>— Ivo Daalder (@IvoHDaalder) <a href="https://twitter.com/IvoHDaalder/statuses/440491999825649664">March 3, 2014</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Instead of coming in here just to take a shot at Texx (which he deserves) why not give your actual opinion on the topic? What do you think Obama should do?
Here we go.... Russia reportedly gives Ukraine's forces deadline to surrender in disputed Crimea region Russia's fleet has ordered Ukraine's forces in the disputed Crimea Peninsula to surrender by 5 a.m. local time or face “a real assault,” according to a statement from a Navy commander. “If they do not surrender before 5am tomorrow, a real assault will be started against units and divisions of the armed forces across Crimea," Russia’s Black Sea Fleet Commander Alexander Vitko told the Interfax news agency Monday, Sky News reports. Ukraine’s defense ministry did not immediately confirm the statement, Reuters reports. The U.N. Security Council is scheduled to hold a meeting this afternoon to address the crisis. The reported threat came hours after Ukraine’s new leaders called for Western nations to rally against Russia’s invasion of the country’s Crimean Peninsula, making a plea for economic and political support as Moscow continued to be defiant. Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk insisted that Crimea remains Ukrainian territory despite the presence of thousands of Russian troops who have secured control over the region without suffering any casualties or firing a shot. "Any attempt of Russia to grab Crimea will have no success at all. Give us some time," he said at a news conference with British Foreign Secretary William Hague, who is visiting Kiev. http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/03/03/russia-tightens-grip-on-crimea-as-west-scrambles-to-respond/
