WILL OBAMA EVER STOP LIVING IN FOREIGN POLICY FANTASYLAND?

"The United States will stand with the international community in affirming that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine," President Barack Hussein Obama said in a brief statement from the White House after Russia invaded the Crimea Feb. 28.

Then he left for the Washington Hilton to declare the bar open at a function for the Democrat National Committee.  When intelligence officials came to the White House the next day to brief, the president didn’t attend.

If Mr. Obama had been serious about stopping Russian aggression, he wouldn’t have put "consequences" off to some time in the future, said columnist Charles Krauthammer.

"What he’s saying is we’re not really going to do anything," Mr. Krauthammer said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin must have read the president’s remarks the same way.

"Rarely has a threat from a U.S. president been dismissed as quickly – and comprehensively – as Obama’s warning Friday night," noted Washington Post reporter Scott Wilson.

Russia is on the wrong side of history, Mr. Obama told reporters Monday (3/03). 

"Actions on the ground in Crimea are deeply troubling but what is also true is that over time, this will be a costly proposition for Russia," the president said. "Now is the time to consider whether they can further their interests with diplomacy as opposed to force."

The seizure of the Crimea "is really 19th Century behavior in the 21st Century," said Secretary of State John Kerry.

Mr. Putin, alas, "has not received the memo on 21st-century behavior," said the Washington Post.

When the president and his aides lecture Mr. Putin, they come across as "patronizing or out of touch," said Johns Hopkins University Prof. James Mann. 

"We are speaking very loudly.  We are carrying a small stick," Russian expert Dmitri Simes told the New Republic. "We are issuing pathetic declarations which nobody is taking seriously."

 "If you are effectively taking the stick option off the table, then what are you left with?" Andrew C. Kuchins, who heads the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Washington Post. "I don’t think that Obama and his people really understand how others in the world are viewing his policies."

What the world sees is a pattern of bluster and retreat by a president reluctant to exercise leadership or protect American interests.

Because Mr. Obama "blinked" after drawing a "red line" in Syria last fall, Putin doesn’t believe anything he says, Russian chess master and human rights advocate Garry Kasparov told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

The old KGB hand’s ambition to put the Soviet Union back together is so poorly kept a secret that the plot of Tom Clancy’s last novel — he died in October — is a Russian invasion of Crimea.  But the administration ignored all the warning signs.

"Washington’s flat-footed, deer-in-the-headlights incomprehension about Russia’s Crimean adventure undermines President Obama’s broader credibility in a deeply damaging way," said Walter Russell Mead, editor of the American Interest.

"President Obama’s foreign policy depends on three big ideas: that a working relationship with Russia can help the United States stabilize the Middle East, that a number of American adversaries are willing to settle their differences with us on the basis of compromises that we can accept, and that President Obama has the smarts to know who we can trust," Prof. Mead said.

"If he could be this blind and misguided about Vladimir Putin," he asked, how can foreign leaders trust his judgment about anything else?

More important to all (save perhaps Mr. Obama) than Mr. Obama’s reputation is preventing war. He seized the Crimea to protect ethnic Russians there, Mr. Putin said.  He was acting to protect ethnic German minorities, Adolf Hitler had said to justify his aggression against Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Since ethnic Russians were in no danger, I suspect the fact Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is based at Sevastopol had more to do with Putin’s conquest of the Crimea.

Russia’s "Twice Red Banner" Baltic Fleet is based at its enclave of Kaliningrad, sandwiched between NATO members Lithuania and Poland, and further separated from Russia proper by its vassal state of Belarus.  Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has threatened to place tactical nuclear arms in Kaliningrad should Poland acquire an anti-missile defense system.

We don’t know where, or when, Russia will strike next.  But we can be certain Vladimir Putin will take what he wants until he suffers consequences more formidable than being scolded as a Cold War relic.

The Ukraine debacle has led some to compare Mr. Obama to the hapless Jimmy Carter.  This is unfair — to Mr. Carter.  After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, he woke up and smelled the coffee.

"For five years, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality," said the editors of the Washington Post.

Even now, whenever reality has collided so violently with his worldview, Mr. Obama clings to his fantasies. 

"The way that some of this has been reported, suggestions somehow that the Russian actions have been clever strategically," Mr. Obama said at a news conference Tuesday. "I actually think that this has not been a sign of strength."

"Let’s review," said Mr. Krauthammer.  ""Putin has taken over the Crimean peninsula…He’s destabilized a regime in Ukraine that is intensely anti-Russian. The Europeans are resisting any real sanctions.

"When Obama says, and Kerry also did in Kiev, that this is a sign of weakness and not strength, you’ve got to wonder what cosmos our president and secretary of state are living in."

More dangerous than Mr. Putin’s aggression is the inability or unwillingness of Mr. Obama and his aides to recognize the world as it is.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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