An Extremely “Foreign” Policy

 

Last week’s missile attack on Malaysia Flight 17, near the Russian-Ukrainian border which caused the death of 298 innocent and unsuspecting people, was part and parcel of the proxy war that Russia has been conducting, in efforts to reincarnate the Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin, well-schooled in the clandestine arts when he was an agent with the KGB, plays a deadly game of wit and parry, using separatists to lay siege to a sovereign Ukrainian nation, fully arming these separatists, providing enhanced training and, allegedly, also providing Russian troops and equipment, conveniently devoid of any Russian military insignia on either.

 

Keep in mind that while not a full-fledged member of NATO, Ukraine has been a fully-fledged member of NATO’s Partnership for Peace, having signed the NATO-Ukraine Action Plan in 2002, which essentially obligates NATO to treat Ukraine as a de facto partner in the event of outside aggression.

 

When Russia essentially annexed the Crimean peninsula in February 2014, Ukraine’s most southern and strategically-important region, NATO responded, vis-à-vis the United States (nothing happens in NATO without the United States taking the lead), responded by providing MREs – Meals Ready to Eat- and nothing else. On face value this is, at best, a feckless initiative on the part of the Obama administration to tacitly show support for Ukrainian sovereignty. In fact, however, Vladimir Putin has nothing to fear from NATO with Obama as president of its strongest member, when this is the only support we are willing to provide.

 

Why is the relevant? Well first of all, it brings to mind a comment made by Barack Obama to then- outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, in March of 2012, not realizing that the microphone was still turned on, where he said, “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.”

To this, Medvedev replied, “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir,” presumably referring to then-incoming Russian president Vladimir Putin.

 

Now to any observer, this would suggest that Barack Obama was, in effect, telling his Russian counterpart that, following the 2012 Election, he would be in a better position to go along with what has turned out to be a nefarious design on the part of Putin, to take a more-aggressive stance in Eastern Europe, which is exactly what happened, beginning with Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March of this year.

 

Now, we have a situation where a civilian airliner, en route from the Netherlands to Malaysia is shot down out of the sky by an extremely sophisticated Russian SAM (surface-to-air missile) and Obama’s response screams in its tepidness and lack of moral outrage. Even his UN ambassador, Samantha Power, hardly anything but a pacifist herself, expressed an admirable level of outrage in demanding Russia to “end this war”, while on the very same afternoon, Obama played his oft-used moral equivalency card saying it was up to Russia, the separatists and the Ukrainians to come to the table and seek an agreement to end the hostilities- in other words intoning that all were equally to blame, which is a lie, plain and simple.

 

Compare, for a moment, Obama’s response and his insistence to follow through on attending yet another fundraiser in New York, to President Ronald Reagan’s response to Russia’s downing of Korea Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983, and it is easy to see the difference between political expediency and fecklessness on the part of Barack Obama, as opposed to Reagan’s moral clarity and righteous determination to call out Russian aggression for what it is.

 

In short, if this is what Obama meant, promising “more flexibility” to Medvedev and Putin, back in 2012, then it is certainly not a stretch to say that this is an extremely “foreign” policy- foreign to the American tradition of righteousness and moral clarity. By its effects, the Obama administration is thereby complicit in its tolerance of the reincarnation of the evil empire whose demise President Reagan worked so hard to achieve, and it is to our peril that Obama so dithers.

 

-Drew Nickell, 21 July 2014

 

© 2014 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved