We can only hope that both Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin could be so smart. One can wish the two had a dialogue more or less as follows:
Putin: What’s the idea of engineering the overthrow of a democratically elected government? I thought you were like pro-democracy!
Obama: I have all these idealists to satisfy. You know, they want to “change” the world.
Putin: Yeah, so why don’t they change your world instead of mine?
Obama: Because if you take one step off the middle of the road in U.S. politics, someone’s jamming you. There’s no room to maneuver, no room to do anything new. It’s boring as hell. So the kids want to go overseas and solve someone else’s problems. And it’s not just the kids. Look at John Kerry. The schmuck’s never going to be president. Never. So now he wants to solve the Middle East. You know, I appoint people to get them the hell out of the country.
Putin: Well, you know, I feel so sorry for you. It must be terrible to be so rich that you don’t have problems.
Obama: Yeah, yeah. So why did you invade Crimea? That was cool.
Putin: What was I supposed to do? Stand around with my thumb up my ass while you make me look like the bad guy? I wanted to look cool, OK? It was a dumb move, but what the fuck? I wanted to look tough, OK? And I’m not backing down either. If I back down, I’m toast.
Obama: You’re just fucking yourself, Vladimir.
Putin: I don’t give a fuck, OK? I’m gonna, I’m gonna run some tanks around and look like a total bad-ass, and you can’t stop me.
Obama: OK. Then I’m going to run some tanks around too.
Putin: Go ahead! See if I give a damn! Just, you know, no live ammo.
Obama: Of course not. Christ! I hire crazy people, but I’m not one of them.
Putin: I wish I could believe that,
Afterwords
Suzanne Nossel, executive director of PEN American Center, described by Wikipedia as “a left wing group [that] works to advance literature, to defend free expression for left wing writers, and to foster international left wing literary fellowship,” sounds neither left-wing nor very literary when she gives vent, in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, to a clarion call for mindless world intervention by the U.S. in light of the “crisis” in Crimea: “Washington needs eyes in the back of its head to ensure that the world’s leading rising powers—Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Nigeria, India, and Indonesia—don’t, deliberately or not, stab it in the back by gradually giving Putin the global legitimacy that the Obama administration wants to deny him.”
I don’t know how you accidentally stab someone in the back, but never let it be said that Suzanne is incapable of alarmism, labeling Putin’s annexation of the Crimea both a “tense global rift” and even (perhaps) a “prolonged international conflagration.” Well, it isn’t either. A lot of Crimeans were not very happy being part of Ukraine, and a lot won’t be very happy being a part of Russia, but sorting out the collapse of a centuries-old, multi-national empire will not be the work of a day, or even a decade. Russia fell further in a decade than anyone could have imagined, so it’s not too surprising if it bounces back a little, but Putin isn’t a “threat” to anyone except himself, however disappointing that is to the Suzanne Nossels of the world.
