On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, March 2, Sen John McCain made statements
regarding the President’s policy toward Russia and Ukraine. He dismissed actions the administration had
already taken as if nothing had been done but proclaimed loudly we should do
more but not go to war. That is not unlike the attitude many of the President’s
critics claiming administration foreign policy failures who distort, criticize,
glibly dismiss both invasion and occupation, but only propose to do more of
what we are doing already. To quote
Woody Allen as a restaurant critic: “The food here is terrible, and the
portions are too small”
Other critics of the Administration’s foreign policy are
either empty bags full of hot air devoid of alternatives, or they propose alternatives
that put us in worse shape than we are now.
The Woody Allen type critics advocate just to send a few
more ground troops to Iraq or beef up NATO support of countries near Russia.
More troops of some sort (combat boots or advisors or special ops) are either
not off the table per Secretary of State John Kerry before a December Senate
committee or are already being done as part of our war against ISIS. NATO
countries are being beefed up militarily and NATO operations centers are being
set up from the Baltics to Romania. A Western propaganda campaign has been
launched to counter Russian propaganda beamed at residents’ of future territory they
may want to control.
The issue is by how much to increase the portions:
Mission creep in our war against ISIS is indeed a danger, but the GOP Congress wants the decision of how
much creep to be the monkey on this and
the next Administration’s back by giving
them no limits. Heaven forbid Congress should take any blame for failures in the future if
we ooze into another Iraq war.
Giving Ukrainians heavier weapons can be easily matched in an arms race with the ante upped by Russia. Where that ends is a
risk. Do we want to go to war with Russia
in the future over their direct control
of or Anschluss with parts or all
of the Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia?
There are some non-military alternatives already undertaken by the
Administration of increasing the portions of economic sanctions against Russia
or propping up the Ukraine economy so it does not collapse while weaning Europe
from Russian petro energy. These are not short term strategies. It will take
time until the Russian people have enough of economic hardships to offset their
national pride in a restoration of their country’s past glory and territorial
buffers against the West.
Then there are the proponents of an empty bag approach
that would leave us worse off than we are now. This includes rejecting a
nuclear treaty with Iran. As Fareed Zakaria writing in the Washington Post
March 5 noted the threats to Israel are not fiction. Reality though, is the failure
to agree on a treaty either in the past or now has and will give the Iranians
free rein to develop as many centrifuges as they want with no inspectors or
time limits. He could have added that this risk is also of concern of our Arab
allies.
http://ukraine.setimes.com/en_GB/articles/uwi/features/2015/02/24/feature-02
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31142276
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