Commentary from a hysteric, and some others

Want the most rabidly, over the top, Obama-is-the-Great-Satan-trying-to-destroy-the-United-States-which-he-hates commentary from an Australian academic?  Look no further than Steve Kates at Catallaxy, of course.

His calm and reasoned (hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha) post prompted by Putin's actions starts:

It’s not as if Obama’s intentions from the start were difficult to read. He’s a hard left ideologue whose greatest hatreds are for the civilisation of the West and in particular the country of which he is president. That there are revelations upon revelations as one by one, but ever so slowly, the truth begins to dawn on those fools who elected him, or the international mobs who supported him, is something like a revelation to me. Just how self-deluded can these people really have been.

And now, despite my confession yesterday that I have no understanding of this geopolitical slab of the world, I will still say that I am somewhat persuaded by the "well, what do you expect the West to do, anyway?" line.   I would guess, however, that Malcolm Fraser goes further down the "it's actually the West's fault" path than is really necessary.

Elsewhere in The Guardian, however, I am finding myself persuaded by this take:

As in practically every international crisis, the pundit class seems able to view events solely through the prism of US actions, which best explains Edward Luce in the Financial Times writing that Obama needs to convince Putin “he will not be outfoxed”, or Scott Wilson at the Washington Post intimating that this is all a result of America pulling back from military adventurism. Shocking as it may seem, sometimes countries take actions based on how they view their interests, irrespective of who the US did or did not bomb.

Missing from this “analysis” about how Obama should respond is why Obama should respond. After all, the US has few strategic interests in the former Soviet Union and little ability to affect Russian decision-making.

Our interests lie in a stable Europe, and that’s why the US and its European allies created a containment structure that will ensure Russia’s territorial ambitions will remain quite limited. (It’s called Nato.) Even if the Russian military wasn’t a hollow shell of the once formidable Red Army, it’s not about to mess with a Nato country.

The writer, Michael Cohen, goes on to argue that it is actually Putin who will lose out, long term, by this strategy:

But this crisis is Putin’s Waterloo, not ours.

Which brings us to perhaps the most bizarre element of watching the Crimean situation unfold through a US-centric lens: the iron-clad certainty of the pundit class that Putin is winning and Obama is losing. The exact opposite is true.

Putin has initiated a conflict that will, quite obviously, result in greater diplomatic and political isolation as well as the potential for economic sanction. He’s compounded his loss of a key ally in Kiev by further enflaming Ukrainian nationalism, and his provocations could have a cascading effect in Europe by pushing countries that rely on Russia’s natural gas exports to look elsewhere for their energy needs. Putin is the leader of a country with a weak military, an under-performing economy and a host of social, environmental and health-related challenges. Seizing the Crimea will only make the problems facing Russia that much greater.

For Obama and the US, sure, there might be less Russian help on Syria going forward – not that there was much to begin with – and it could perhaps affect negotiations on Iran. But those issues are manageable. Meanwhile, Twitter and the opinion pages and the Sunday shows and too many blog posts that could be informative have been filled with an over-the-top notion: that failure to respond to Russia’s action will weaken America’s credibility with its key allies. To which I would ask: where are they gonna go? If anything, America’s key European allies are likely to fold the quickest, because, you know, gas. And why would any US ally in the Far East want Obama wasting his time on the Crimea anyway?

You don’t have to listen to the “do something” crowd. These are the same people who brought you the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other greatest hits.