Wednesday, March 5, 2014 - Volume 5, Number 2

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Putin to Obama’s Russian Relations Reset: ‘Drop Dead’

Will President Obama Manage to Assuage Russian Aggression in Ukraine?

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SPECIAL ALERT

Reset Fantasy Dead

19^th Century Actions Trample 21^st Century Words

We Are Now in Those Waters

In the wake of the Russian occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea, the serious, concerned, and even indignant (gasp!) words continue to come from the President of Words. Yet, to his befuddlement, they seem to have no effect on their intended target. He and his Secretary of State appear utterly helpless in explaining what has happened. Still, they remained undeterred, firm, and stoic in their conviction that if only they can convince the Russian leader how inappropriate and hurtful to others his actions are, how unpopular he is going to be with the other leaders in the world school yard, if they can make him see how his thuggish behavior is so “19^th Century,” then Russian President Vladimir Putin will realize the wisdom of their pleas, and reverse course.

We advised our readers in UWFR of November 27 that President Barack Obama’s retreat on Syria in September would be a singularly pivotal point in his presidency, even as many pundits on the left and a few libertarians and isolationists on the right minimized its importance. Today, editorial pages from left to right are all now considering that point, even if to earnestly deny it (CNN yesterday spent much of the day finding experts and story angles to cover the President’s backside on this question). We said in that issue that we had now “been steered into dangerous waters under the argument that any immediate peace is better than any fight.” We are now indisputably in dangerous waters.

Ukraine Sights Before Sochi

Strange that a news report out of CNN also yesterday said the CIA did not anticipate Russia’s overt thrust into the Crimea. It is evidently clear by the swift occupation of Ukrainian territory that even before the then-president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, was very suddenly left without his private presidential zoo and scampering for a safe place in the bossom of President Putin, plans for this expertly executed military advance on Crimea were already in place; In fact, even before then; as crowds were cheering the Russian hospitality in the Sochi Winter Olympics, even then, the subjugation of Ukrainian will was underfoot, and Crimea was already in the sights of the former KGB operative while he genially waved at the world from his glittering Olympic perch. Proof of this will come.

American Fantasies

The indictment of President Obama’s feckless foreign policy is now coming from less partisan quarters, with even news media outlets usually friendly to the President becoming impatient (read The Washington Post’s devastating Monday editorial, “Obama’s Foreign Policy Is Based on Fantasy.”)

Continued column 2 >

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< From column 1 Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh suggested Monday that the way to get the President to get tough with Mr. Putin is to convince Mr. Obama that the Russian leader “is Tea Party.” Far-left loonies are now arguing that it was the U.S. that provoked this disaster by mobilizing Nazi groups inside Ukraine to topple the pro-Russian president, that the Russian president is simply trying to protect his “legitimate” interests, and that President Obama is blameless because he is not in control of all these actions. These same people almost certainly argue that George Bush was behind 9/11. It is true that George W. Bush did not fare much better in his dealings with Vladimir Putin. It was, after all, President Bush who declared, as would a naïve simpleton, that he had seen into Putin’s “soul,” and thus found someone he could trust – in contradiction to all the available, horrible, evidence. Putin rewarded that ridiculous trust with the invasion of Georgia in 2008, and an occupation of part of that country that is still in place today. In response, the Bush administration imposed sanctions and began to mobilize Eastern European allies, at political risk to themselves, to accept anti-ballistic missile defense, which they did. Georgia Freebie In 2009 President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton decided that the Bush administration was the cause of all the bad feelings with Moscow, and so, they would “reset” relations. In exchange for nothing from Mr. Putin, they gave up the anti-missile defenses that had been hard-won in Poland and the Czech Republic, and lifted the sanctions against Russia that had been put in place in response to the Georgia invasion. Georgia’s invasion was now a freebie of goodwill. We do not have the space to detail just how irresponsible American foreign policy has been in the Ukraine. There is so much to say about it, that it would take a book to merely summarize it all (no doubt, someone will write one). But among the most irresponsible acts was convincing the Ukrainians to disarm in 1994, and give up all their nuclear weapons to Russia, in exchange for assurances from the United States and Western European powers that they would safeguard Ukraine’s territorial integrity, as outlined in the Budapest Memorandum, a guarantee subsequently re-affirmed by President Obama in 2009. On its face, we should be at war right about now. Instead, we imagine the President and the Secretary of State beside themselves in the Oval Office, wondering in anguish “why is this piece of paper not working!!!?” Continued column 3 >

< From column 2 Syria Consequences – Revisited In our UWFR of November 27, we said: People will long talk about the Obamacare debacle, and how the President began to lose respect for his word after October 1. But, in our estimation of history’s reckoning, September 10 will be the last day the President’s words mattered, when at 9:12 PM EDST, the President stood still at his own red line, turned back, and made his words cease to convey any consequence to friend and foe alike. The word from the British as of this writing is that they are not prepared to follow America’s call for economic sanctions. France is non-committal, and Germany is downright squeamish. Any of this sound familiar? Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine: Putin’s logic is sooo 19^th Century. And, apparently sooo successful. The Last Red Line We want to earnestly hope the President has us all fooled, and has a trick up his sleeve he has been withholding to employ at just the right time to save the day. We pray the seemingly bumbling and inexplicable strategy we see is just a cover for the real, brilliant strategy hiding underneath, to be unleashed at any moment. Maybe those plans are sitting right next to those for the Nazi operatives in Ukraine and George Bush’s 9/11 attack on New York. As it is, we expect Putin to continue to play a hair-raising game of brinksmanship with the leaderless West, amused at how easy this has all been. Putin is not planning to go to war against the U.S. and the West. He will push as far as he can, trying to get as close as he can to the line he knows he must not cross. The real, scary problem is, with all sorts of disappearing red lines, and vague ethereal threats of retaliation muddling the scene, there is now a real risk he won’t see the actual red line when he crosses it. Think about it. Taking over Ukraine’s Crimea violated the Budapest Memorandum, which risked a military response from the West, and he did it anyway. Once the last red line is crossed, all words will be pointless. Now, we are in the position of having to rely on a Russian KGB alumnus to calculate correctly. Our forecast record cannot be beat. One can follow the herd chasing the latest hyperbolic, melodramatic, and soon-forgotten micro-trend on Facebook and Twitter, or one can be wisely and judiciously in front of it with UWFR. Comments may be directed to contactproject@ultrapolisproject.com, or if you receive the newsletter email, also via a reply to the email address from which you receive it. OR CLICK BELOW

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