President Obama's shocking admission that the Administration "does not yet have a strategy for combatting ISIS" has provoked justifiable bewilderment and outrage. The danger has intensified for months with the Administration in deep denial. Worse, Obama indicated at the same Press Conference that no decisive airs strikes would come any time soon , if at all. Obama's prevaricating language undercuts the strong words of his Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, and chairman of his Joint Chiefs of Staff deeming ISIS a grave threat that the United States must defeat.
The President's latest foreign policy blunder has ominous ramifications beyond the Middle East, where the Administration's weakness has emboldened a fanatical ISIS and a revolutionary, virulently anti-American Iran bent on becoming a nuclear power in the Middle East. The absence of any coherent , effective, strategy for dealing with dangerous aggressors eviscerates America's dwindling credibility to deter Vladimir Putin's Russia from devouring Ukraine. In recent days, the Ukrainian Crisis has taken an dire turn with the Russian invasion of Eastern Ukraine, demolishing the sanguine assumptions of Obama's reset with Putin.
The outcome of the unfolding Ukrainian Crisis has profound significance for American security even exceeding ISIS and Iran at their most menacing. Putin considers Russian domination of Ukraine pivotal for achieving his grand design of reviving his corrupt, economically stagnant demographically declining regime, reversing the outcome of the Cold War, and reconstituting an authoritarian Russian empire across East Central Europe. Apologists for Putin such as University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer -- co-author of a scurrilous diatribe against the so-called Israel lobby -- wrongly blame NATO expansion for the Ukrainian Crisis rather than an inherently expansionist authoritarian Russian regime.
A peaceful, democratic NATO with low and shrinking defense budgets threatens no legitimate interest of Russia. What NATO and an independent Ukraine righty prevent is Putin's realizing his illegitimate ambition to transform Russia into a powerful empire, spanning Europe and Asia. Without the resources and pivotal strategic location of Ukraine, even an authoritarian Russia ceases credibly to menace the freedom of Europe still vital to American ideals and self-interest, well understood.
Morally, the brave Ukrainian people deserve America's full support. No people have suffered from Soviet tyranny or Russian oppression longer or more grievously than Ukrainians. Putin persists odiously in lamenting the demise of the Soviet Union and denying Joseph Stalin's perpetration of the Holdomor, a criminal campaign of starving millions of Ukrainian peasants to death during Soviet collectivization of Ukrainian agriculture during the 1930s.
Putin, not the West, initiated the Ukrainian crisis in August 2013 when he pressured the Ukrainian President to renege on an economic agreement with the EU that would have established a strong gravitational pull toward a more open, democratic, Ukraine. Putin has escalated the crisis ever since: defying sanctions; illegally annexing Crimea; aiding the pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine; likely supplying them the surface to air missiles that downed the Malaysian Airliner, killing all 269 aboard; impeding the investigation of the atrocity; periodically massing troops on Ukraine's borders to intimidate the duly elected government; and now sending Russian troops into Eastern Ukraine while mendaciously denying it.
Though Putin falls far short of Hitler's malevolent intentions and the capacity to realize them, both played a weak hand in a similar fashion. Putin has emulated the strategy that Hitler so successfully employed against the stronger but vacillating democracies during the 1930s: using his ethnic diaspora to foment strife in neighboring states; proceeding incrementally; dissembling about his intentions; exploiting the gullibility and guilt of the west; periodically launching peace offensives to tranquilize public opinion. Like Hitler's invasion of the Rhineland in 1936 -- the last time the West could have stopped Nazi Germany without a major war -- Putin's subjugation of Ukraine will exponentially raise the cost and risks of stopping him.
The United States and the EU still possess the preponderance of resources easily to avert this perilous shift in the European balance of power, while reassuring the increasingly doubtful Eastern European allies that NATO can and will still effectively defend them against Russian aggression. The U.S. GDP is more than $16 trillion, a figure slightly smaller than the EU's, versus Russia's $2.5 trillion. What the Obama Administration needs to prevail against Putin as well as ISIS is a compelling strategy, fortitude and foresight.
Putin has defied with impunity the President's belated, incremental, exclusively non-military responses to mounting Russian predations. The President has resisted the sterner measures that critics of the Administration have wisely championed: providing generous military aid to the Ukrainian government; substantially increasing America's military presence in Eastern Europe; reversing his decision to cancel the deployment of missile defense in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary; substantially raising rather than dramatically reducing U.S. defense spending; treating Putin as an adversary rather that a partner. Instead, the President still pledges delusionally to engage Putin in seeking a diplomatic resolution to the Ukrainian crisis.
The Russian invasion of Eastern Ukraine comes at a pivotal moment with a major NATO summit convening in Wales this week. A failure to response effectively would imperil the historically successful but increasingly troubled alliance dangerously on the verge of impotence and irrelevance if Putin succeeds with his Ukrainian gambit. Nothing but vigilance will foil Vladimir Putin ISIS, or other virulently anti-American rogue regimes. Alas, President Obama remains solid for fluidity, adamant for drift, and obstinate in his feckless faith that the "international community" can substitute for American power and the will to use it.
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1.John Mearsheimer, "How the West Provoked Putin," Foreign Affairs (September/October 2014), 72.