Obama: "Russia Is Isolating Itself From the World"

by JASmius

Barack Obama speaks about new U.S. sanctions against Russia.

Closing the screen door, not the barn door, after the horse is the glue on a geezer's first grade macaroni sculpture project.  But, assuming these are real sanctions on Russia's real military, energy, and financial sectors, than I suppose the phrase "better late than never" would apply.

But to what end?  This is the minimum that we could have done four months ago that might have had an actual deterrent effect on Vladimir Putin's decision-making process.  Instead we gave him free victory after free victory, which rallied the Russian people behind him into a patriotic frenzy (80+% approval ratings, which not even The One himself has ever enjoyed here) and emboldened him past the point where any action short of direct military confrontation is going to even get the Czar's attention, and even then he would be convinced that we would break and run at the first armed clash.  More Obamunist babbling of "sanctions" and "international isolation" are going to do nothing to forcibly adjust that mindset.  Indeed, even if O underwent a personality transmutation, or Zombie Reagan possessed his body, and he did do a genuine 180, his actions to date would have completely destroyed any conceivable hawkish credibility.  That would have to wait for a new POTUS, and there is highly unlikely ever to be one.

There is a historical parallel to this pattern of risible sanctions encouraging escalating enemy aggression followed by serious sanctions that triggered a direct enemy attack on the United States.  That would be FDR's bungling of Imperial Japan's rising ambitions in East Asia and the Western Pacific in the late 1930s, the end result being the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941.  I'd rather not contemplate what a Russian sneak attack in the early twenty-first century would look like, because it's actual all too abundantly clear.



You know the other way of saying "Russia is isolating itself from the world"?  "Russia is conquering the world".  A long process, but one for which "President" Putin is irretrievably convinced he has all the time he needs, and then some.