“Rallying Around The Wrong President”: Blinded By Hatred, Republicans Just Can’t Seem To Make Up Their Minds
I’ve been fascinated of late by Republican praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin, but as Rachel noted on the show last night, Rudy Giuliani appears to have taken this affection to a new level. For those who can’t watch clips online, here’s the former mayor talking to Fox’s Neil Cavuto yesterday.
GIULIANI: Putin decides what he wants to do and he does it in half a day, right? He decided he had to go to their parliament. He went to their parliament. He got permission in 15 minutes.
CAVUTO: Well, that was kind of like perfunctory.
GIULIANI: But he makes a decision and he executes it, quickly. Then everybody reacts. That’s what you call a leader. President Obama, he’s got to think about it. He’s got to go over it again. He’s got to talk to more people about it.
It’s not unusual, during a time of crisis, for Americans to rally behind a president. In Giuliani’s case, the trouble is the New York Republican appears to be rallying behind the wrong president.
That said, it’s nevertheless important to appreciate the fact that, in Giuliani’s mind, the mark of an effective leader is seen in someone who acts unilaterally, invades a country, and doesn’t stop to think too much about it. Real leaders, the argument goes, simply act – then watch as “everybody reacts.”
But here’s the follow-up question for Giuliani and other conservatives swooning over Putin: if President Obama did act that way, wouldn’t you be calling him a lawless, out-of-control tyrant?
We’ve talked many times about the underlying contradictions embraced by Obama’s detractors. The president’s critics have presented two competing caricatures, both of which are wrong, but more importantly, both of which are incongruous.
Dana Milbank picked up on the theme today.
President Obama is such a weak strongman. What’s more, he is a feeble dictator and a timid tyrant.
That, at any rate, is Republicans’ critique of him. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Obama’s critics pivoted seamlessly from complaining about his overreach to fretting that he is being too cautious. Call it Operation Oxymoron.
Last Wednesday, I sat in a House hearing and listened to Republicans describe Obama exercising “unparalleled use of executive power” and operating an “uber-presidency.” They accused him of acting like a “king” and a “monarch,” of making the United States like a “dictatorship” or a “totalitarian government” by exercising “imperial” and “magisterial power.”
But after events in Ukraine, this very tyrant was said to be so weak that it’s “shocking.”
Once again, the right is going to have to pick a caricature and go with it. Obama can be a power-hungry dictator, ruthlessly wielding power, or he can be a weak pushover, afraid to act. He can’t be both.
For that matter, Republicans can long for an authoritarian leader, who acts without thinking or regard for consensus, or they can embrace a more deliberative style of leadership that cares about partnerships and checks and balances.
At this point, the right can’t seem to make up its mind.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 4, 2014
“The Hawks Do Love Those Hitler-Era Talking Points”: Take John McCain’s Russia Advice And You Might Get Another Cold War
I’m not sure what we should do about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I am, however, dead sure about what we shouldn’t do. Please, Washington—don’t listen to John McCain!
The leader of the capital’s bombs-away caucus spoke exclusively over the weekend to the Beast’s Josh Rogin, who nailed the scoop. It was a relief to see McCain acknowledging that there is no plausible military option. So that’s progress. But the steps McCain advises are certain to heighten tensions and probably start a new Cold War, which is surely what the thuggish Putin wants. It’s most definitely not what the United States should want, at exactly the time when, as Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has proposed, we should be reducing the size of our military and the reach of our global commitments.
McCain floated three notions: tougher sanctions against Russia and its higher-ranking officials; NATO membership for Georgia; expanded and sped-up missile defense systems in Europe. The first is unobjectionable. The world has to do something here, and sanctions are that something. If we can’t prevent Putin from engaging in this kind of aggression—and face it, we can’t—we can at least do what we can to harm his economy and limit the foreign travel of his high government officials.
But Georgia in NATO and missile defense? McCain and other hawkish types (including, very distressingly, Joe Biden back in 2008) have been banging that gong for years now. Calls for Georgian entry into NATO go back to the mid-2000s, when “Rose Revolution” president Mikheil Saakashvili made it a top priority. It was a horrible idea then—expanding a military alliance right up to the doorstep of a certain country, all but surrounding it, is bound to be seen in that country, and not unreasonably, as a provocative act. It’s even worse when that country happens to have 8,500 nuclear weapons.
And don’t forget NATO’s famous Article 5: an attack on any NATO country will be taken as an attack on all. What would the implications of that commitment have been in 2008, during the Russo-Georgian war in Ossetia? It’s true that Georgia moved first in that conflict, but pretexts for such action are absurdly easy to establish. Would the United States and the other NATO countries have been forced into war against Russia in 2008 if Georgia had been a NATO member then? It’s not at all an idle question, and it’s one well worth keeping in mind now.
As for missile defense, the United States is already scheduled to install missile interceptors in Poland in 2018, which is mistake enough. But at least Obama has drawn back here from stronger commitments to Poland (a charter member of the coalition of the willing, remember?) made by the Bush administration. The Bush commitment was for interceptors of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Obama scaled that back to interceptors of intermediate-range missiles. There will now be pressure from McCain and others to go back to Bush’s plan, and to get them there faster than 2018, which is the Obama timetable.
I’m hardly an expert on the different types of missile interceptors, so if the question is which one to deploy, I readily confess I’m not your man. But I have a better question: What in blazes does Poland have to do with this anyway? Is Putin set to invade Poland—a member of the European Union and of NATO? Is this 1939? The hawks do love those Hitler-era talking points. Yes, certain parallels can be drawn between what Putin is doing here and what Hitler did in the Sudetenland. But do we really think he wants to drag all of Europe into a war, wipe Germany off the map, put Russia’s and Europe’s gay population in concentration camps? Putin is a hideous person, but a latter-day Hitler he is probably not, and even if he did want to do those things, trillions of dollars in trade are at stake for him in his relations with Europe in a way that wasn’t at all true in the 1930s.
In fact, yesterday Putin accepted Angela Merkel’s mediation offer for a contact group to discuss the crisis, suggesting perhaps that his aims here, however repugnant, may fall short of world domination
We have to express our disapproval, and we should impose sanctions. Beyond that, there just isn’t much we can do, and there isn’t much we should do. Timothy Snyder, a leading expert on the region, writes in The New Republic that the EU should undertake a series of moves designed in effect to banish Russia’s upper classes from European banks and cities and private schools and resort playgrounds, which might well get the attention of the only people (Putin-approved kleptocrats) who can possibly influence Putin’s behavior.
And as for McCain and his Cold War caucus: McCain wants the United States to do the things he wants it to do so that the United States remains the world’s only true hegemonic power. For almost all of John McCain’s sentient life, we had a bipolar world, and then, after 1991, a unipolar world. The McCains of America think the bipolar world was a freak accident of history and the unipolar world is the default way things ought to be.
But the unipolar era of U.S. dominance is—increasingly, was—itself a product of particular historical forces, and those forces are changing rapidly. We’re returning to a multipolar world in which there will be other powers that can operate more or less on the United States’ level. Far from resisting this we should welcome it. I’m not a liberal isolationist, and certainly no pacifist either. Although it’s not possible to quantify—it’s like trying to measure how much rain didn’t fall—I think there’s no doubt that our global military presence has prevented more problems than it has created, and we shouldn’t pull too far back. But we should start sharing that burden with other nations and multilateral organizations more than we have.
And most of all, recreating a bipolar world of U.S.-Russia conflict is at the very bottom of our global “to do” list. We don’t have to like Putin or what he’s doing here, but let’s not pretend that who controls the Crimea is a question of first-rank global importance, and let’s not play into Putin’s grubby hands. Demagogues only gain power when they can whip their people into a frenzy about an outside enemy. Obama must not help him, and must’nt let himself get cowed by a hectoring neocon right into saying things he shouldn’t say.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 3, 2014
“Vladimir Putin’s New Axis of Evil”: Liberal Russians, Ukrainian ‘Fascists’, And America
After being the “Man Responsible for Russia’s Victory at the Olympics,” President Vladimir Putin became the “Man Responsible for Protecting Russians Everywhere.”
In a country where insecurity and crushed ambitions are the foundation of national identity, the idea resonates well with a lot of people. The fine print, however, they should’ve read by now: Putin is the defender of Russians anywhere, as long as they’re not in Russia.
A growing number of right-leaning Russians, known for their resentment of Putin due to his lax stance on Central Asian immigrants and his support of the Muslim republics of Northern Caucasus, are praising the invasion. To many of them, this regime’s shortcomings can now be overlooked, overshadowed as they are by the image of a “Great Russia” finally reunited with its prodigal sibling, Ukraine. No one really cares what happens in Russia, as long as this country still has the balls to send a military force outside of its borders to protect ethnic Russians. The fact that Russia often can’t provide security for its citizens—mostly ethnic Russians—within its own borders, often losing in its never-ending war on homegrown terror, fades away at the prospect of a territorial gain and a victorious war.
With Ukraine, the Kremlin is creating its own axis of evil: America, the “fascists” who seized power in Kiev, and their liberal Russian supporters.
Russia’s vehement anti-American rhetoric is nothing new. However, combined with assaulting a far less powerful country in a moment of crisis, it’s akin to talking shit to the captain of the football team, while giving a beatdown to a member of the chess club who is having an asthma attack. (This isn’t to say that Georgia or Ukraine, or the next country Russia decides to invade, can’t put up a fight. They can. They just won’t win.)
Still, Russia is best at fighting enemies within. Already there are numerous calls to identify those Russians who oppose the invasion—“the fifth column,” as pro-Kremlin bloggers label anti-war protestors. Their photos are passed around on Twitter, information on these people is exchanged—names, phones, sometimes addresses; threats are made. These are cyber threats for now, but there’s no telling when they could become actions, and those who make their sentiments public get the trademark Kremlin treatment of beatings and mock trials for crimes they didn’t commit. A country as great as Russia can’t afford to have people who oppose its “reclaiming” of another state’s territory. Numerous Kremlin mouthpieces ask those who oppose the invasion to leave the country or face consequences of being a traitor. In their minds, only a crazy proxy of American Imperialism can say that it doesn’t benefit Russia to invade Ukraine.
In reality, there is little benefit for Russia in invading a sovereign state. Moral and legal issues aside—and they’ve never really been “issues” here, anyway—even if there isn’t going to be a war, the invasion is going to put a huge strain on Russia’s weak economy. But beyond warp-speed capital flight, the plunging rate of local currency, and probable economic sanctions that are going to follow, there are more costs to invading Ukraine.
Putin has to show his new subjects that he’s a benevolent king. So Crimea and whatever part of cash-stripped Ukraine he’s going to chop off are going to get a huge influx of Russian taxpayer money to help secure popular support, and get local elites hooked on Kremlin cash.
After Putin all but annexed Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008, Moscow desperately needed for these two breakaway republics to be recognized as sovereign states. It offered generous aid packages to the island nation of Nauru and Nicaragua in exchange for their recognition of the newly “liberated” republics, and was ready to pay anyone who would buy into the story a solid chunk of cash. There’s no telling who is going to side with Russia on its Ukraine gambit, but it sure as hell isn’t going to be free.
When the dust settles, the lack of any long-term strategy on Kremlin’s part will become unmistakable. The newly acquired republics become nothing but a financial liability for Moscow, and possible hotbeds for future conflicts. Just like it happened with Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Putin is left with corrupt local governments, refugees, and brain-dead economies on permanent life support from Moscow. But as long as Russia got to parade its tanks, threaten everyone around them, and search enemies within their ranks, to them, it was absolutely worth it.
By: Andrew Ryvkin, The New Republic, March 2, 2014
“Country First, Fellas, Country First”: Republicans Blow The Response To Putin’s Aggression
With nothing to offer beyond what the Obama administration is already pursuing in terms of tough economic recriminations in response to Russia’s offensive moves on the Crimean Peninsula, leading GOP elected officials took to the airwaves on Sunday to do what they always do when they have little in the way of constructive ideas—blame Obama.
The favored GOP meme pursued on the Sunday morning talk circuit revolved around suggestions that Obama’s tendency to draw “red lines”, only to back away from confrontation when possible, has led foreign leaders—including Russian strongman Vladimir Putin—to disrespect the American leader and presume they can do as they please without interference or response from the USA.
Appearing on CNN’s State of The Union, Senator Lindsey Graham had this to say when giving a bit of unsolicited advice to President Obama:
“Well, number one, stop going on television and trying to threaten thugs and dictators. It is not your strong suit. Every time the president goes on national television and threatens Putin or anyone like Putin, everybody’s eyes roll, including mine. We have a weak and indecisive president that invites aggression. President Obama needs to do something. How about this, suspend Russian membership in the G-8 and the G-20 at least for a year starting right now. And for every day they stay in Crimea, add to the suspension. Do something.”
Of course, had Senator Graham reserved comment in a manner more befitting of one who is alleged to be a seasoned statesman and foreign policy ‘expert’, he would have discovered—in but a few short hours—that the White House was way ahead of him. Indeed, the administration had already been hard at work lining up support from the G-8 to suspend preparations for the upcoming talks in Sochi, Russia and was doing so well before Graham threw in his two cents.
But then, I suppose that there is no such thing as statesmanship and commitment to the Commander–In-Chief during a foreign crisis when it is an election year, right Senator Graham?
In a joint statement from the G-8 countries issued on Sunday afternoon, the organization condemned Russia’s “clear violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine” and informed Putin that the remaining G-8 nations were suspending their participation in preparing for the upcoming summit “until the environment comes back where the G-I is able to have meaningful discussion.”
We are now left to await the Republican effort to take credit for the American policy—despite the fact that achieving such an agreement had to take the White House considerably longer than the couple of elapsed hours between the GOP criticism-fest and the jointly made G-8 announcement.
Even more interesting is the fact that Graham’s idea of playing hardball with Russia, as expressed on CNN, involved suspending the nation from the G-8 group for at least a year plus however many days Russia remains in Crimea.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State John Kerry was on television suggesting that Russia’s actions could actually lead to a far, far tougher punishment for the Russians—the potential that the country could be permanently tossed out of the G-8. This would mean that, after years of effort on the part of Russia to become a member of the economic elite, they would permanently be booted from the fraternity of top players in the world’s democratic nations and left to take a seat at the loser table after once being a part of the “in crowd”.
The simple reality is that were you to apply any sort of logic to the scenario, it becomes more than clear that a ‘tougher’ US policy towards Russia before the Ukraine crisis might have given John McCain some emotional satisfaction, but would have had zero impact on Putin’s decision to move against Crimea. This is the reality due to a very simple reason—the Russians, Americans and Europeans all know that there is not a viable military option to be pursued in this situation.
While Vladimir Putin is many undesirable things, he is likely not an idiot. He knows his importance to Europe is waning now that Europe has developed other ways of obtaining natural gas. Where Europe might have been far more timid when it comes to administering some pain on Russia in the past, they are in a far better position to do so today given their growing ability to stick their noses up at Russian energy. And while Putin may not have known the degree to which the West might turn the economic screws on his country, he had to know that his actions in Ukraine would bring an economic response in some measure.
This being the case, just what do these Republicans believe would have been different had President Obama taken a harder line against Russia during his years in office?
Making the GOP reasoning all the more ridiculous is their willingness to pretend that any weakness Putin may have sensed was the fault of Barack Obama.
If, somehow, Putin was led to believe that there would be no significant economic price to pay in response to his actions—as noted, nobody, including those in the GOP who never met a war they didn’t like, believes there is a military option on the table—why would he be looking at Obama?
It wasn’t President Obama who failed to do much of anything at all when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. That would be President George W. Bush. And while I know that the reaction to this statement on the part of some will be to carp that I am just one more Obama apologist who wants to blame Bush for everything, I’m afraid one cannot escape history—and history tells us in great clarity that, just six years ago, Putin experienced the opportunity to invade a neighboring nation without any real US or European response whatsoever.
It may be great political fodder for Republicans to blame a president that super-hawk John McCain has now called “the most naïve president in US history” but it certainly appears that it is actually the John McCain line of reasoning that has been hobbled by naivety. Your first clue that this is the case would be the unwillingness of any of the President’s critics to offer up anything in the way of a sophisticated explanation as to how things might have been different had Obama played it rough and tough with Putin.
Given that the White House is showing signs of taking a much harder line and showing a readiness to enforce economic and political sanctions against Russia that go beyond what most Republicans spent the weekend proposing, would it not have been the wise political move for Republicans to simply chill on the useless criticism as the “go to” response and get behind the President? It might, in fact, have very much helped Republicans running for office this year—like Lindsey Graham—to show their constituencies that they can be reasonable and supportive of the President during a crisis, thus adding credibility to their positions where they have opposed the President.
Of course, to do that requires an actual commitment to the advancement of the national interest rather than advancement of personal, political interests—and that is something that has long been in short supply in Republican circles.
Country first, fellas….country first.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, March 3, 2014
“He’s So Vain”: McCain Has It All Figured Out
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), you’re so vain, you probably think this invasion’s about you.
Sen. John McCain sharply condemned President Obama on Monday, blasting the administration’s foreign policy as “feckless” and partially responsible for the mounting crisis over the advance of Russian forces into Ukraine. […]
“Why do we care? Because this is the ultimate result of a feckless foreign policy in which nobody believes in America’s strength anymore,” McCain said to the annual gathering of Jewish leaders in Washington.
McCain was apparently quite animated on the subject, going on (and on) about how President Obama is personally responsible for shaping world events in a way McCain disapproves of.
Reality, meanwhile, points in a very different direction. As David Ignatius explained this morning, “There are many valid criticisms to be made of Obama’s foreign policy … but the notion that Putin’s attack is somehow the United States’ fault is perverse.”
First, I’m struck by the curious application of McCain’s outrage. When Russia went to war with Georgia in 2008, ignoring the concerns of the Bush/Cheney administration and the international community, the senior senator from Arizona had precious little to say about blaming the United States for Putin’s ambitions. Now that there’s a president McCain doesn’t like in office, apparently he has fewer qualms about blasting the man in the Oval Office – even as the crisis is still unfolding, even when it appears Putin’s flailing desperately in search of a coherent strategy.
And second, whether McCain appreciates this or not, Russia’s interest in Ukraine predates Barack Obama’s presidency. Come to think of it, given the fact that the president was born in 1961, Russia’s interest in Ukraine predates Barack Obama, too.
It’s unsatisfying for many, especially the most aggressive foreign policy hawks in the U.S., to think world events unfold for reasons that have nothing to do with us. But foreign countries really don’t much care whether it’s unsatisfying or not – their geopolitical agendas exist without any real regard for what Americans are going to think about their decisions.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 3, 2014
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