Yeah, it seems like it was only a week ago I was praising Ross Douthat for speaking intelligently about the situation in Ukraine. Well, that was then. Now Ross is on a roll, to wit:
Note the artfulness of Douthat’s bullshit. “Is it really so ridiculous” “crisis confirmed certain impressions that Putin had already cultivated” “Putin surely took account of the steps that the United States and its allies were likely to undertake in response, and decided that they would be less effective, and less painful to his interests, than our own foreign policy team clearly expected him to think.”
The whole basis for this artful dodging and weaving is the unspoken assumption that if the U.S. make it “clear” to Putin that a seizure of the Crimea on his part would be “unacceptable” to us, then he would have backed off. But he did seize the Crimea. Ergo, Obama fucked up.
But Obama did not make it clear to Putin that seizure of the Crimea would be unacceptable to the U.S. because it isn’t unacceptable to the U.S. The Crimea is not that important to us—by a very long shot—that we would engage in military action to drive Putin out. Nor is it nearly so important to us and our European allies that we could create a “coalition of the willing” to engage in a high-level, long-term diplomatic/economic campaign against Russia of such intensity as to cause Putin to publicly back down, suffering severe public humiliation as he did so.
Ross, pretending to be the measured voice of measured reason, makes the same neocon claim that I have previously denounced in unmeasured terms: that the U.S. is so powerful that we can bring essentially irresistible force to bear on any part of the globe without suffering the least consequence. Unless we’re going to launch nuclear missiles every time someone gives the U.S. the finger (and we aren’t, particularly not at Russia), people like Putin can do unfortunate, unattractive and ill-advised things.
Afterwords
Ross doesn’t entirely take back the sane words that he said previously, but he does go out of his way to tie Putin’s actions with Obama’s “fumbling” on Syria. I wish we had more such “fumbling,” which resulted in Washington’s gabbing elites suddenly becoming aware that a majority of the American people were really, really tired of pointless foreign engagements.
It is sadly “typical” of the zero-sum thinking that prevails among today’s shrieking heads that Putin’s seizure of the Crimea is regarded as a win—a “big win”—for him. The odds are very good that this face-saving measure will cost Putin billions of rubles in the long run. There is no way that Vladimir’s puff-chestedness is ever going to compensate for the fact that Russia today is still not capable of high-tech manufacturing, unlike its neighbors, Germany, China, and Japan, each of which is more powerful than Mother Russia.
