All eyes will be on Obama as his 'costs' threat to Russia remains to be seen while troops wind farther into Ukraine

03/04/2014

Hollow Threats??? 

Secretary of State John Kerry is scheduled to arrive in Kiev on Tuesday amid a fog, not of war, but of words. Vladimir Putin can hardly be impressed and President Obama’s standing hangs in the balance.

Secretary of State John Kerry is scheduled to arrive in Kiev on Tuesday amid a fog, not of war, but of words. Vladimir Putin can hardly be impressed and President Obama’s standing hangs in the balance.

While the Russian strongman’s intentions have been clear since before he invaded Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula, Obama and Western leaders have mouthed promises of unspecified actions that would exact a price for his lawlessness.

The President and Kerry speak of placing Russia in “isolation” at great cost to the country’s economy. What they mean is unclear but, having spoken so strongly, the measures they impose must be as punishing as their rhetoric implies.

Anything less would further solidify Obama’s growing reputation as a leader who can be defied without fear of meaningful repercussions. That’s the sorry pass the President has reached thanks to his record of talking tough and backing down.

Most notoriously, he drew a chemical weapons red line in Syria, verged on military action after Bashar Assad killed thousands with the munitions, scrapped a strike at the last moment and fell into league with Putin on destroying the weapons, leaving Russia’s ally Assad unscathed.

In the confrontation of the moment, Obama warned Putin that “there will be costs” if Russia invaded, and then Putin went right on and invaded. The President spoke with Putin for 90 minutes by telephone and Putin got rubber-stamp approval from the Russian parliament and solidified his hold on Crimea.

At this point, there’s little chance that Putin will let go of a region that has close cultural and historic ties to Russia. The more pertinent question is whether he intends to grab for more of Ukraine, dropping the fig leaf that he entered Crimea only to protect Russians and Russian speakers living there from the turmoil sparked by the fall of his vest-pocket president.

The U.S. representative at the UN, Samantha Power, put the lie to that claim addressing the Security Council:

“What is happening today is not a human rights protection mission and it is not a consensual intervention,” Power declared “What is happening today is a dangerous military intervention in Ukraine. It is an act of aggression. It must stop.”

Obama has posited only that “we are examining a whole series of steps . . . that will isolate Russia and will have a negative impact on Russia’s economy and status in the world.”

In the absence of greater clarity, speculation has pointed to everything from the weak-tea of cancelling attendance at a G8 summit in Sochi in June to the strong medicine of exiling Russia from the global banking system.

For the sake of his presidency and, equally important, the international order, Obama must spell out a coherent plan of action that matches his rhetoric. The anti-Putin symbolism of dispatching Kerry to stand with Ukrainians in Kiev will be destructively hollow without potent anti-Putin measures.

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