OK, I’m not. In my last foray east of the Elbe, I hoped/opined that Vladimir Putin’s muscle-flexing re “break-away” Ukraine was just that. Little did I know that Vlad would pull a Bush (or an Obama) and decide that war is fun. Like them both, he’s discovered that the ultima ratio regnum1 is chockfull of unintended and unpleasant consequences.
I suspected that Putin’s “big win,” achieved by annexing the Crimean Peninsula, which had, after all, been a part of Russia for almost two hundred years (and never a part of Ukraine2), would turn out a net loser for Russia, but Putin’s grotesquely stupid decision to provide Ukrainian separatists with sophisticated weaponry has come back to bite him in the ass with stunning promptness and severity. All of “civilized Europe” is shaking its head at this renewed outbreak of Russian barbarism and brutality.
Putin probably would like to believe that he doesn’t “need” Europe—at least, not as much as Europe needs him. But he just made one jug-eared black kid’s job a whole lot easier.
Afterwords
Of course, there will be plenty of people who will demand that Obama “do something"—even though those spoilsports, the American people, are still pretty allergic to that boots on the ground stuff. But who can pay attention to the GOP’s *manufactured” crises—like Benghazi and the IRS “scandals"—when there’s real shit happening?
- Short for “war is the last argument of kings”. Louis XIV had these words cast on the muzzles of his cannon. “I have been too fond of war,” he said on his death bed, after having wasted millions of francs, and millions of French lives, in the fruitless pursuit of gloire. ↩︎
- Catherine the Great “obtained” it from the Ottoman Empire in the late eighteenth century. ↩︎
