According to columnist Charles Krauthammer, Russian President Vladimir Putin is a “lucky man” to have President Obama in the White House for another three years.
Putin got Crimea back “without firing a shot” and now can conquer other parts of Ukraine “anytime he wants,” Krauthammer
wrote in The Washington Post Thursday.
In his first U.N. speech, Obama declared that no nation “can or should try to dominate another nation” and dismissed alignments of nations rooted in the Cold War,” saying they “make no sense in an interconnected world.”
Such “adolescent universalism,” according to Krauthammer, was accompanied by “even more amazing actions” that demonstrated U.S. weakness.
These moves, he said, ranged from the canceling of missile-defense agreements with the Czech Republic and Poland to slashing U.S. defense spending and the “debacle” in dealing with Syrian President Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons.
Appearing on Fox News Channel’s “Special Report” on Tuesday,
Krauthammer said the administration was making a mistake by saying it did not plan to intervene in Ukraine.
In the event that Russia launched a full-scale invasion that included dispatching troops to Kiev, “are you going to do nothing?” he asked.
Krauthammer suggested giving Moscow a message that Baltic NATO nations would be protected by offering Poland military exercises and sending Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey to visit other Baltic NATO states.
Krauthammer sounded incredulous when asked about Secretary of State
John Kerry's claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s provocations in Ukraine were “19th century” tactics that are no longer acceptable today.
He said Kerry behaves “as if Russian aggression were simply “a breach of international decorum.”
Krauthammer joked that the Secretary of State’s dismissal of Russian aggression as an outdated 19th-century phenomenon might be indicative of some kind of underlying psychological issue.
“There is something about the number of our century that obsesses him and it’s as if everything that happened before, meaning nations taking over other nations, expanding, seeking dominance as Russia obviously is, is old history and it changed on the first of January in the year 2000, “ Krauthammer said. “I don’t understand what it is exactly about the world that has changed. But they imagine that there are norms that are self reinforcing, that the Russians are not obeying.”
Regarding Ukraine, Krauthammer wrote in the Post that Putin will be remembered by history as the leader who won Crimea back.
“Not bad for a 19th century man,” he opined.
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