Posted on 03/09/2014 8:30:08 AM PDT by Kaslin
If Obama did nothing more than approve Keystone and negotiate a long term gas deal with Europe, he would send a strong message.
Instead, Vlad won’t be able to bring his family to NYC to see Rockefeller Center this coming Winter Solstace.
Interesting that the author, in using Afghanistan as an example did not point out how well the US has done there in comparison to the Soviet failure.
You should be in charge...that makes sense.
When the history of WW III is written, researchers will point to Obama’s decision to send a delegation of Homosexuals to the Sochi Olympics if a childish effort to insult the president of Russia.
Any and all US policy reversals to make the US a strong and self reliant petro/natural gas energy producer and exporter would make Russia address energy in a more free market way, but the biggest losers on the planet would be the Saudi group petro cartel and the all Islamic terrorist groups they fund so generously.
It looks to me like our only real trump card.
We can’t outspend them so we should out earn them.
Sanctions on Russia are about domestic western politics. All the kenyan cares about is appearing to do something while the Russians rape another neighbor.
Most likely Russia is never going to leave Crimea. The only option left for the west is a version of MAD. Tell Putin he might win in Crimea but he will lose everywhere else. Unfortunately, that would require concrete actions. Neither the kenyan or EU want any part of that. So instead we get these phony sanction threats. Given the projection of weakness so far, I doubt there will be any teeth to the sanctions.
Strengthening our ties in central and south America causing Russia some pain but again, we’re still stuck with a marxist president who will only screw that up.
Ya can't get more American than that.
Aside: You will notice that the technique Reagan used to oppose the Soviet Union was, we out produced them.
He already has.
Recall that our Leader was best buds with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Then, he supported Manuel Zelaya's attempted coup in Honduras.
Obama likes dictators...
“but the biggest losers on the planet would be the Saudi group petro cartel and the all Islamic terrorist groups they fund so generously.”
Ahh....win/win.
Difference between liberal and conservative unintended consequences is conservative unintended consequences usually help America.
Any bargaining power that Obama might have had in this situation was lost when he had his hissy fit over gay rights in Russia prior to the Sochi Games.
America should pay attention to her real enemy.
Any bargaining power that Obama might have had in this situation was lost when he had his hissy fit over gay rights in Russia prior to the Sochi Games.
The kenyan has plenty of chips but won’t use them. The cancelled missile program, NATO presence in the FSU (Baltics, etc.), expropriation of Russian assests in the west, etc., etc. Putin could be humiliated quite easily. The Russian kleptocracy is a paper tiger and only western greed is keeping the response to the invasion minimal.
Oddly enough, this shows the brilliance of Ronald Reagan, and was how he defeated the Soviet Union.
Early on, when he opened up unrestricted grain sales to the Soviet Union, he got a lot of heat from the right, who said that he was “propping up” the Soviet Union; and from the left, who said he was “buying the farm vote.”
What nobody figured on was that Reagan understood the communists, and meant to destroy them with grain.
The background for this was the rigid communist ideology, and their belief that communal farms *must* be more efficient than capitalist farms. And like modern Democrats, they didn’t care what reality proved, because of their religious faith in communist doctrines.
So the vast majority of Soviet farmland was communal, yet produced only a small fraction of the grain they needed, year after year, while the grudgingly few farms that paid wages, and even fewer black market private farms, provided the bulk of the food they consumed. But it was not enough.
Thus they had to import grain. Too paranoid to eat it themselves, they used it to feed their farm animals, and diverted the animal food grain to feed themselves.
And Reagan opened the floodgates for US farmers to sell them all the grain they wanted. All the *expensive* grain they wanted.
At first, the Soviets paid for our grain with their oil, every last drop of it, except for what they used themselves. But it was not enough. So they paid for the grain with their gold, every last bit of it, and even began dredging their river deltas for more. But it was not enough.
So they paid us all the foreign currency they had. And their economy was bled dry, scraping the bottom of the barrel.
And when they didn’t have a spare dime left, Reagan casually announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) program, with many billions of dollars thrown at it, to build missile defenses against Soviet missiles.
It broke them. They knew there was no possible way to match US spending, so soon they would be helpless before the US.
Right then, Gorbachev was offered the job of General Party Secretary. And he shocked everyone by naming a single condition to his taking the job. That the books of the Soviet Union be audited. To do this, he got a brilliant and studious man that nobody was angry with, who assembled a team from the communist party, the KGB and the army, who went around the Soviet Union to get the truth.
Anyone who lied to him would have been shot, and knew it.
He reported back directly to the assembled Politburo at intervals. And he told them disaster after disaster, how the Soviet Union was in ruins.
And that was pretty much that. They gave up.
So this was how Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union with grain.
Hmm... What an Idiot!
/sarc
Of Course Sarah was hardly the first to realize or push for developing our own Natural Resources to get some Petro-Dollars ourselves.
Any thinking American would come to the same conclusion.
I suspect that if pressed on it, she would also suggest that our approach can’t be all stick.
Russia has the potential to be a great ally but they don’t respect weakness. Weakness is what got us here.
Then in the late 2000's they switched to being the big bad again.
Just something I noticed growing up.
This kind of Conflict should have been prevented with Good Diplomacy before hand.
And that means not have a Pill Pedaling Homo as a President screwing up everything he touches.
Ubama is a thug.
But Putin is an even bigger thug who isn't going to play his silly game.
THIS is what happens when Grow-Ups aren't in charge and you meet a Non-Arbitrary force of nature like Putin.
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