Ukraine is not a vital interest of the US. Its a country historically in Russia’s backyard. This is not even Eastern Europe.
People who imagine Russia will sacrifice its interests at the behest of a Western demarche are living in a dream world. We forget its a nuclear superpower.
And if the Bear wants to sit there, how are we going to push him off? The neo faux Cold Warriors have lost all touch with reality.
Was just listening on FOX to some Council on Foreign Relations hack spewing his talking points.
If Putin can just keep the appeasing Obama and the feckless EU from taking any military action, then the Soviet Union will rise from the ashes.
Putin has already signaled that Poland and Lithuania are next in line.
But what is anyone going to do about it?
Economic sanctions? And who is ready to enforce them?
And the Chinese are preparing to take back Formosa.
The similarities to what happened in the 1930’s are obvious to anyone except people like Obama, Kerry, Clinton and Hagel.
Hitler was always playing a bigger and longer term game. By acquiring the Sudetenland he took out the very strong defenses the Czech's had along their border with Germany. That made taking the rest of the country a walkover. And having Czechoslovakia's northern border completely outflanked Poland, the next bite of the pie and the final straw for Britain and France. Stalin went along a) because there was really nothing he could do to stop Hitler, and b) being handed the eastern half of a country that was even more troublesome to Russia than it ever was to Germany made for an extremely nice (however temporary) bribe.
We'll have to wait and see if Putin carries through with the rest of the playbook and gobbles up all of the Ukraine and not just the Crimea Peninsula, which is mainly Russian speaking and was, until the 1950's, part of Russia. But with the Crimea dangling out there with no land connection to the Rodina, another WWII analogy comes to mind ... German speaking East Prussia (now part of Poland and then separated from Der Vaterland by a Baltic Sea facing section of Polish territory). Putin may go forward in steps by demanding a Sea of Azov coast corridor.
He has a great gift, our secretary of state, that of compressing the greatest amount of words into the smallest amount of thought.
I would have put it the other way round.
A great gift, that of expanding the smallist amount
of thought into the greatest amount of words...