McCain: Force US Businesses To Leave Russia

by JASmius

Leave it to that rarest of creatures, a Regressive Hawk, to go about taking muscular action against a geopolitical foe of the United States by beating up American business:

The U.S. should consider forcing major American companies such as General Electric and Exxon Mobil to suspend business in or pull out of Russia if President Vladimir Putin attempts to take more territory from Ukraine or other neighboring nations, said Senator John McCain of Arizona.

"I know that that's a tough call and I know that we don't want to hurt our own economy, but what are the consequences of Vladimir Putin just being able to act?" McCain, a Republican who advocates military assistance for the Ukraine, said in an interview for Bloomberg Television's "Political Capital with Al Hunt" this weekend.

Such a move likely would come through formal sanctions rather than political pressure on individual corporations, McCain said, and "would only be considered" if Putin "went much further."

See, that's how you can tell that Sailor is a Republican Regressive; a Democrat Regressive (pardon the redundancy) would be blaming General Electric and Exxon-Mobil for "provoking" Vladimir Putin into attacking Ukraine in the first place and demanding that they be sent the way of GM and Chrysler.  A RINO goes about it indirectly, via toothless "sanctions" that accomplish nothing other than punishing an American private sector economy that is already being amply punished by Obamanomics.  No thought of expanding U.S. natural gas exports to Europe to break Russia's energy stranglehold on Europe and boost our economy at the same time, oh heavens, no.

And, BTW....:

In addition to GE and Exxon-Mobil Corp., the companies with the largest business interest in Russia include Ford Motor Co., General Motors Co., Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., and PepsiCo Inc.

Oh, well.  I guess "Ukraine's dead and Russia's alive!", right?

Putin, who annexed Crimea from Ukraine earlier this month, has amassed tens of thousands of troops along the border, which McCain says indicates Russia may strike soon.

"If you'd asked me three or four days ago, I'd have said I believe not -- now I'm not sure," he said. "You don't keep troops massed on the border of a country for no reason."

Anybody else get the feeling that this process is accelerating like the Arlington, WA landslide?  The Ukrainians, who are, you know, actually there on their own border, say that the Russians are massing a hundred thousand heavily-armed troops, complete with tanks, APCs, combat aircraft, etc., while the Obama Regime stubbornly persists in lowballing it by a factor of five and in its unkillable belief in the efficacy of pumping the air full of useless words:

President Barack Obama and Putin had an hour-long telephone conversation yesterday on the crisis, and the leaders dispatched their top diplomats to conduct further discussions.

Obama told Putin that a diplomatic solution "remains possible only if Russia pulls back its troops and does not take any steps to further violate Ukraine's territorial integrity and sovereignty," the White House said. [emphasis added]

I don't watch the Animal Planet channel all that much, so I may not be an expert on this analogy, but I just don't recall seeing that many lions being intimidated away from chowing down on a felled zebra by the specter of a spindly gazelle wagging its hoof in disapproval.

C'mon, admit it, you thought I was going to say "chimpanzee," didncha?

The only thing that surprises me is that Putin took O's call.  I honestly can't imagine what they had to talk about.  Seems to me like Putin's hundred thousand troops moving into their invasion readiness positions speaks volumes about the Kremlin's intentions.  And the best Red Barry can do is dangle the "carrot" of Vlad having to snore through more of his bloviating against the "stick" of having his audio access to the Traveling "Historic" Speech Channel cut off if he doesn't content himself with just ripping the Crimea from Ukraine's grasp?  I mean, I know that the Obama Doctrine is the termination of the United States as the global economic and military superpower, but he's doing it in such a way as to raze his own reputation as a planet-bestriding demigod in the process.  "Don't do it even more or I'll stop talking!" sounds like a sweet deal to me, even if the price of the inevitable reneging on it is well worth the admittedly steep cost.

Moldova - Ukraine's last conduit to the Black Sea - is evidently next on Vlad's geopolitical shopping list after the crown jewel is conquered.  But the Baltic States are different, Darth Queeg argues:

The NATO-member Baltic states are a different matter, said the lawmaker who was his party's nominee for president in 2008. If Putin moved on to Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania, he said, "I just can't believe we wouldn't have some kind of military response."

McCain reiterated his call for the U.S. to provide the Ukrainians with weapons to defend themselves. "Symbolically it means so much," he said, and a lack of military assistance may encourage Putin "to exercise further adventurism."

So now we're to believe that the neoCzar will be deterred from slurping up Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania by virtue of their NATO membership?  The same NATO alliance that, with the sole exception of Poland, has been shedding military capability like S'Mores the Wonder Kitty is shedding fur (much to Mrs. Hard Starboard's lament)?  And bear in mind that Europe, having been freeloading off the U.S. for the past half-century, never had an overabundance of martial hardware to begin with.  Now they're following Barack Obama's bad example and divesting themselves of much of what little they had.

Which raises the deadly serious question of whether NATO would be able to muster any credible force with which to defend the Baltic States against a nakedly open Russian invasion.  And that question is rhetorical: of course it wouldn't.  So we wouldn't even bother trying.  Just fire off more diplomatic missives and empty threats, beg Putin not to go even further, make a few timidly annoying noises before ducking back into the clubhouse lest the Czar decide to step on us next.  The fraud of NATO would be in tatters, and who knows, maybe Vlad would stop taking Barry's calls altogether.  Which would probably be The One's idea of a nightmare.

That, BTW, is what makes Maverick's proposal of arming the Ukrainians so not-hot of an idea, unless he's in favor of the Russians getting their hands on what remains of our latest military hardware.  Precisely the reason, in turn, why I don't understand why O isn't doing exactly that: don't arm Kiev sufficiently to actually be able to repel a Russian invasion, or even be able to inflict heavy damage on Putin's forces, but give them just enough for them to capture and reverse-engineer.  It'd save the Kremlin a great deal of espionage time and cost.

Might even get Vlad to start taking his calls again.


UPDATE: Senator McConnell made a bit more sense.