Obama Skipped a Few World Events in His Big Foreign Policy Speech at West Point

I missed this editorial Richard Engle mentioned in his comments I posted earlier.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Obama at West Point":

The speech President Obama delivered Wednesday at West Point was intended to be a robust defense of his foreign policy, about which even our liberal friends are starting to entertain doubts. But as we listened to the President chart his course between the false-choice alternatives of "American isolationism" and "invading every country that harbors terrorist networks," we got to thinking of everything that wasn't in his speech.

No mention of the Reset. "The reset button has worked," Mr. Obama avowed in a 2009 meeting with Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's figurehead president. That was the same year Mr. Obama announced in Moscow that, "The days when empires could treat sovereign states as pieces on a chessboard are over."

No mention of the Pivot or "rebalance" to Asia. This was billed by Hillary Clinton in 2011 as "among the most important diplomatic efforts of our time" and meant as proof that America's withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan wasn't simply a retreat from the world. But as assistant secretary of defense Katrina McFarland admitted in March, following the latest round of Pentagon cuts, "Right now, the pivot is being looked at again, because candidly it can't happen."

No mention of Mr. Obama's Red Line in Syria against the use of chemical weapons. No mention, either, of the ostensible success of using diplomacy to disarm Bashar Assad. The President was fond of boasting of this achievement until recently, when it emerged that Assad continues to use chlorine bombs to kill his enemies. Somehow that also didn't make it into the speech....

We know that no foreign policy speech can cover the entire world. But listening to Mr. Obama trying to assemble a coherent foreign policy agenda from the record of the past five years was like watching Tom Hanks trying to survive in "Cast Away": Whatever's left from the wreckage will have to do.

Just One-Quarter of West Point Cadets Give Obama Standing Ovation During #Commencement Address

Not well respected as Commander in Chief.

At London's Daily Mail, "I'm NOT WEAK: Obama answers critics in West Point speech and insists the US must lead the world by example – 'If we don't, no one else will'":

Obama receives standing ovation from less than 25% of #WestPoint cadets: report http://t.co/ds0Nbepvxz #military pic.twitter.com/b5bnaeHSOd
— The Washington Times (@WashTimes) May 28, 2014

President Barack Obama said Wednesday that he would 'work with Congress to ramp up support for those in the Syrian opposition who offer the best alternative to terrorists and a brutal dictator.'

But the central theme of his foreign policy-heavy address was that American strength would continue to come by working through international coalitions. Obama called for diplomacy and 'multilateral action' in the face of global threats.

His prepared remarks, distributed by the White House, replaced that phrase with the words 'collective action.'

Receiving tepid applause and a short standing ovation from less than one-quarter of the audience upon his introduction, Obama argued for a contradictory foreign policy that relies on NATO and the United Nations while insisting that 'America must always lead on the world stage.'

'If we don’t, no one else will,' he insisted. But 'we require partners,' he said, using the words 'partner' or 'partnership' 16 times in his speech.

PREVIOUSLY: "Barack Obama West Point Speech 2014."

Professor William C. Bradford Resigns His Position at U.S. Military Academy at West Point

Bradford, at controversial law professor, published "Trahison des Professeurs: The Critical Law of Armed Conflict as an Islamist Fifth Column," at the National Security Law Journal, out of Georgetown University. The article is available in here in PDF.

The journal's editors repudiated the article, lamenting that they couldn't unpublish that which was already published, and apologed profusely for their errors, pledging never to let it happen again. The website was overloaded the other day when I tried to access the site, but I was able to read the apology at the cached version.

The law article is something like 100 pages long, and frankly I have no desire to wade through it.

That said, Jeremy Rabkin wrote a critical response (very critical), "A BETRAYAL OF RATIONAL ARGUMENT."

And Ilya Somin wrote about the controversy yesterday, at the Washington Post, "Student-edited “National Security Law Journal” repudiates article that advocates targeting legal scholars as “enemy combatants” in the War on Terror."

Plus, at the Chronicle of Higher Education, "Academics Who Criticize War on Terror Are ‘Lawful Targets,’ West Point Professor Says."

And now he's resigned, at the Guardian, via Memeoradum, "West Point law professor who called for attacks on ‘Islamic holy sites’ resigns."

So, wade in and you be the judge.

Personally, I agree these leftist law professors are traitors who deserve a nice healthy predator drone strike. But alas, freedom of speech protects us all, even treasonous progs, and Professor Bradford apparently crossed a line for too many on the PC left.

Barack Obama West Point Speech 2014

I'll have some responses to the president's address later.

For example, on O'Reilly's a few minutes ago Ralph Peters said Obama was "having a little trouble with the teleprompter." I think Peters was going easy on him. Seriously, if the goal was to demoralize and demobilize the cadets, the president hit it out of the park.

At NYT, "'America Must Always Lead,' Obama Tells West Point Graduates."

Also, "Transcript of President Obama’s Commencement Address at West Point."

David Horowitz and Ron Radosh Attack Diana West and American Betrayal

Folks will remember I attended the Diana West book signing last month. It was a lively event and I was excited to meet Diana.

At the time I'd read a couple of chapters of the book. I'm frankly not well read in the historiography of Communist Party infiltration of the U.S. government, although from my own training I thought that some of Diana's conclusions were quite broad, especially on WWII strategic issues and the origins of the Cold War in Europe. Indeed, I mentioned to Diana that I thought her book was very "bold" and that I'd be interested to see the reactions among academic historians.

Unfortunately, this isn't what I had in mind.

It turns out that former Communists-turned conservatives David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh have launched a vicious, personal and ad hominem attack on Diana and American Betrayal. And right off the bat I have to say that any writer/scholar is going to face criticism and pushback against their work. But in an ideal world such criticism comes with an abundance of collegiality, reflecting normative expectations of elevating the community of scholars and scholarship. But with Horowitz and Radosh the attack is actually the exact opposite. It's an attempt to destroy any scholarship that isn't the acceptable form of anti-communism. This is conservative political correctness of the most extremely ugly kind.

Lots of interested parties are weighing in on this, and the heated exchange has seen a flurry of salvos issued at FrontPage Magazine, PJ Media, with Diana responding at her blog. But to be clear, at this point it's not wether Diana's book is right or wrong on facts and interpretations. It's that she's being treated as shabbily as can be, and sadly this is by people I've long held in very high esteem.

Let's start with Diana's initial, shocking email exchange with the folks at FrontPage. See, "If Frontpage Will Lie about This, What Won't They Lie About?" Diana was responding to Radosh's attack on her book at Horowitz's website, which included a nasty disclaimer falsely alleging that Diana refused to publish a response to Radosh at FrontPage. Check that link for the full post. (And note that Horowitz pulled his website's initial glowing review of the book, written by Mark Tapson, "MARK TAPSON ON DIANA WEST’S “AMERICAN BETRAYAL”.") But here's the exchange:

The email sequence starts at the bottom. I note that Horowitz cc'd his email (immediately below) to three other people -- presumably to display his cleverness.

On Aug 7, 2013, at 1:08 AM, david horowitz wrote:

Dear Diana,
Our decision to remove the review of American Betrayal was not because it offered an incorrect opinion that we wanted to suppress. The review was removed because the reviewer was as incompetent to provide an informed assessment of your book as you were to write it.
David [Horowitz]

From: jamie glazov
Subject: Fwd: review of your book
Date: August 6, 2013 7:41:00 PM PDT
To: David Horowitz

I guess we're not friends anymore.

From: Diana West ...
Date: Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 9:38 PM
Subject: Re: review of your book
To: jamie glazov

Dear Jamie,
What gall. You and your crew behave like little totalitarians, suppress an "incorrect" opinion of my book, and, now that you have your "correct" reveiw at the ready, ask me to dignify your nasty tactics by engaging in civil debate. If I deem it worth my while to respond to the Radosh review, I will find another outlet.
Diana

On Aug 6, 2013, at 9:41 PM, jamie glazov wrote:

Dear Diana, I just want to give you a heads up that our review of your book, written by Ron Radosh, will be going up on our site at 9:30pm Pacific time this evening (12:30am Eastern).

David would like me to pass on to you that you are most welcome to write a response to this review, and to feel free to write at length to defend your position (but not longer than the review itself).

Sincerely, Jamie.

I've placed Horowitz's email in bold as the condescension and contempt for Diana is really astonishing.

And the exact same contempt bleeds across the page at Radosh's angry review at FrontPage, "McCarthy on Steroids." He's so fired up that he posted another piece at PJ Media even before Diana was able to respond, "Why I Wrote a Take-Down of Diana West’s Awful Book."

And then on it goes. Here's David Horowitz, "Editorial: Our Controversy With Diana West."

There's also a review by historian Jeffrey Herf, "Diana West vs. History." And then Ron Radosh lashes out again, "Diana West’s Attempt to Respond."

And then back over at Diana's blog, "If Frontpage Lies about This, They'll Lie about Anything, Pt. 2," and "'Professor' Radosh Gets an 'F'."

Again, I'm still reading and evaluating Diana's book, and I expect to be reading more books in the genre of Soviet espionage against the U.S. My argument here is that the attacks on Diana are unscholarly and unprofessional. Nothing here works to elevate the community of scholars above the routine bilge we navigate on a daily basis in the blogosphere. There's a prodigious amount of research that went into American Betrayal, and I'd expect that the work would be seen as advancing an important debate and offering much needed provocation in our current era of official state-sponsored ignorance and the media's capitulation to daily Orwellian lies.

In any case, Robert Stacy McCain, who's very well versed in the works on Communist infiltration in the U.S., has weighed in at his blog, "Diana West Dissed by David Horowitz?" And Edward Cline has this, "FrontPage's Spitballs Strike Diana West":

Why would the editors remove Tapson's review? Because it contradicts Radosh's in substance and in style, in truth, and in honesty. The removal of Tapson's review speaks volumes about the motives of FrontPage's editors. Instead of issuing a statement to the effect that while they respect Tapson's views on West's book, there is another perspective and here is Mr. Radosh's, and even providing readers to a link to Tapson's review. But to remove a contradictory and controversial article is a confession of intellectual weakness and moral turpitude. The editors do not wish readers to compare the Tapson review with Radosh's. They wish to play Big Brotherish Ministry of Truth games with readers' minds.

In his rambling, Alinskyite article, Radosh expects West to have read or consulted every book ever published whose subject was FDR's conscious, insouciant, or unwitting complicity in the preservation of the Soviet Union. He claims she didn't read this or that authority or author. Her knowledge and command of the field of Soviet-American studies ought to have been encyclopedic, and if it wasn’t, then, as far as Radosh and his editors are concerned, she should be shot down, discredited, and her work consigned to a dustbin.

Reading his purported review, I was constantly reminded of that old legal saw, "When did you stop beating your wife?" "But I never beat my wife." "Prove it." "I can't prove a negative." "Too bad. Let the implied charge be entered into the minds of the jury." "Objection!" "Objection overruled."

Reading Radosh's "review," one is first knocked silly by the highly personal animus he nurtures for West. It colors his purported review and does him no favors, and certainly, as West herself points out, does nothing to lend his reputation as a neocon any credibility. I could not shake loose the impression that Radosh was attempting to defend Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, and even Stalin from West's charges. The invective present in his long screed is demonstrable and there for all to see who choose to see.

But rather than attempt to counter Radosh's allegations of West's incompetency and illiteracy – which in itself would require a book-length treatment, something I am not willing to undertake because the soundness and value West's book speak for themselves – I will simply stress that FrontPage's editors have shown their dishonest and manipulative hands by removing Mark Tapson's review. That is an unconscionable and unforgivable journalistic and moral crime.

There's more at the link.

And see the Lonely Conservative, "Front Page Mag vs. Diana West."

And also Kathy Shaidle, "Ron Radosh takes issue with Diana West’s ‘American Betrayal’." And note Kathy's update:

UPDATE: Andrew Bostom sent me two articles critical of Radosh’s reviews of new books about McCarthy, as a sort of “consider the source” thing. So I will check those out.

And yet more from Ruth King, "RON RADOSH: REVIEW OF DIANA WEST’S BOOK “AMERICAN BETRAYAL”….SEE NOTE PLEASE."

Obama's Commencement Address at West Point (May 22, 2010)

I have both read and listened to this speech. It's a serious moment for the President of the United States to deliver any commencement address, and especially that of the graduates at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. It's especially interesting to listen to President Obama here, because as I noted many times throughout campaign '08, Obama was the most antiwar candidate of either party. The president's foreign policy has only moderately improved since then. A heavily reluctant warrior, Obama spent much of his first year in office touring the globe apologizing for grievances held among anti-Americans the world over. (Obama even apologized for the "imperfect" Western democracies that liberated Europe in WWII.)

But there is a pull to both the American political system and the world balance of power, and the force of both of these structures are infinitely too much for one president to resist. The world demands leadership. Aside from the United States, no other country possesses the commensurate historical attributes of liberty or the requisite material bases of power. And no other country sees its historical mission as doing right by the world, to improve the quality of life, liberty, and happiness across the globe. And these realities make it that much more difficult to comprehend this administration's abandonment of democracy and human rights in U.S. foreign policy.

CBS News has the full text of the speech. The president's stressing what theorists call a "neoliberal international order." The emphasis is on American leadership in creating and sustaining multilateral institutions of cooperation in security and economic organization. Watch starting about 17:30 minutes at the video, especially these passages:

The burdens of this century cannot fall on our soldiers alone. It also cannot fall on American shoulders alone. Our adversaries would like to see America sap its strength by overextending our power. And in the past, we've always had the foresight to avoid acting alone. We were part of the most powerful wartime coalition in human history through World War II. We stitched together a community of free nations and institutions to endure and ultimately prevail during a Cold War.

Yes, we are clear-eyed about the shortfalls of our international system. But America has not succeeded by stepping out of the currents of cooperation - we have succeeded by steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice, so nations thrive by meeting their responsibilities and face consequences when they don't.

So we have to shape an international order that can meet the challenges of our generation. We will be steadfast in strengthening those old alliances that have served us so well, including those who will serve by your side in Afghanistan and around the globe. As influence extends to more countries and capitals, we also have to build new partnerships, and shape stronger international standards and institutions.

This engagement is not an end in itself. The international order we seek is one that can resolve the challenges of our times -- countering violent extremism and insurgency; stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and securing nuclear materials; combating a changing climate and sustaining global growth; helping countries feed themselves and care for their sick; preventing conflict and healing wounds. If we are successful in these tasks, that will lessen conflicts around the world. It will be supportive of our efforts by our military to secure our country.

More than anything else, though, our success will be claimed by who we are as a country. This is more important than ever, given the nature of the challenges that we face. Our campaign to disrupt, dismantle, and to defeat al Qaeda is part of an international effort that is necessary and just.

Notice here the emphasis on American interests in security and cooperation. But in the next few passages, the president minimizes the threat from al Qaeda, for example:

Al Qaeda and its affiliates are small men on the wrong side of history. They lead no nation. They lead no religion. We need not give in to fear every time a terrorist tries to scare us. We should not discard our freedoms because extremists try to exploit them. We cannot succumb to division because others try to drive us apart. We are the United States of America. (Applause.) We are the United States of America, and we have repaired our union, and faced down fascism, and outlasted communism. We've gone through turmoil, we've gone through Civil War, and we have come out stronger - and we will do so once more.

There's a massive contradiction here, and Obama can't have it both ways while remaining intellectually coherent. On the one hand, he minimizes global jihad, which is an ideological thrust perfectly in line with the radical leftists who smear conservatives as scaredy-cats whenever we have an attack (or attempt) from a Nidal Malik Hasan or an Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab or a Faisal Shahzad. Frankly, for the left, there's really no terror threat. These are always "deranged" individuals exploited by the right's "neocon warmongers." And of course, the system always "works," so that the administration's always claims (wrongly) it's got it under control. Further, these same people see no exceptionalism in American power and values. There's no unique historical role for the United States, and hence international norms and institutions should supersede American power and leadership. So note that in his speech the president wants to have his cake and eat it too. Notice how he insists that America has no worries, because "We are the United States of America, and we have repaired our union, and faced down fascism, and outlasted communism," etc. But we have not prevailed in those crises by tucking tail, apologizing for every perceived national flaw, and capitulating to those nations and ideological factions that would destroy us. And this is where this president and this administration fails.

But the president's clever. He hits enough of the right notes to convince even some conservatives that it was a good speech. Perhaps it was good, yet not great. Compare President Barack Obama's West Point commencement address to President George W. Bush's in 2002. President Bush embodied exceptionalism, even messianism, in stressing the forward role of America in guaranteeing "a peace that favors human liberty":

In defending the peace, we face a threat with no precedent. Enemies in the past needed great armies and great industrial capabilities to endanger the American people and our nation. The attacks of September the 11th required a few hundred thousand dollars in the hands of a few dozen evil and deluded men. All of the chaos and suffering they caused came at much less than the cost of a single tank. The dangers have not passed. This government and the American people are on watch, we are ready, because we know the terrorists have more money and more men and more plans.

The gravest danger to freedom lies at the perilous crossroads of radicalism and technology. When the spread of chemical and biological and nuclear weapons, along with ballistic missile technology --- when that occurs, even weak states and small groups could attain a catastrophic power to strike great nations. Our enemies have declared this very intention, and have been caught seeking these terrible weapons. They want the capability to blackmail us, or to harm us, or to harm our friends --- and we will oppose them with all our power.

For much of the last century, America's defense relied on the Cold War doctrines of deterrence and containment. In some cases, those strategies still apply. But new threats also require new thinking. Deterrence --- the promise of massive retaliation against nations --- means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend. Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.

We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties, and then systemically break them. If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.

Homeland defense and missile defense are part of stronger security, and they're essential priorities for America. Yet the war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act ....

Because the war on terror will require resolve and patience, it will also require firm moral purpose. In this way our struggle is similar to the Cold War. Now, as then, our enemies are totalitarians, holding a creed of power with no place for human dignity. Now, as then, they seek to impose a joyless conformity, to control every life and all of life ....

A truly strong nation will permit legal avenues of dissent for all groups that pursue their aspirations without violence. An advancing nation will pursue economic reform, to unleash the great entrepreneurial energy of its people. A thriving nation will respect the rights of women, because no society can prosper while denying opportunity to half its citizens. Mothers and fathers and children across the Islamic world, and all the world, share the same fears and aspirations. In poverty, they struggle. In tyranny, they suffer. And as we saw in Afghanistan, in liberation they celebrate.

America has a greater objective than controlling threats and containing resentment. We will work for a just and peaceful world beyond the war on terror.

More commentary and analysis at Memeorandum. And at NYT, "Obama Offers Strategy Based in Diplomacy," and WaPo, "At West Point, Obama offers new security strategy."

And compare especially my analysis to that of inveterate America-basher Steve Hynd at Newshoggers.

Continued Gender Integration Will Only Exacerbate the Problem of Sexual Assault in the Military

From the letters to the editor, at the Wall Street Journal, "West Point: Duty, Honor, Country and Fairness, Too":

The politically incorrect but unassailable truth is that the increased occurrences of sexual assault are the predictable results of a military that increasingly puts teenage and 20-something men and women together in close quarters for long hours under stressful conditions. Throw in intimate familiarity, few financial expenses and the catalyst of alcohol, and there exists a situation similar to any college dormitory.

Unfortunately, the continued gender integration of the military will only exacerbate the problem of sexual assault, not to mention unit morale and overall combat effectiveness. Efforts to combat military sexual assault through periodic power-point "training" and stern lectures by military lawyers will prove impotent against hormones and alcohol.

Daniel Barbeau
Irvine, Calif.

More letters at the link.

The backstory is from James Taranto, "A Strange Sort of Justice at West Point: Trent Cromartie was cleared of sexual-assault charges. But the cadet was kicked out of school anyway."

And again here it is, the consequences of cultural Marxism working its path of destruction "through the institutions."

Putin’s Plot Against America

It's Julia Ioffe, at Puck, "There is a growing fear in Washington that Russia will resort to hybrid tactics to inflict pain on Western powers in ways that it can no longer achieve through conventional warfare alone":

From Moscow’s vantage point, it isn’t simply the gross incompetence of its military and intelligence services that prevented Russia from seizing Ukraine in a flashy blitzkrieg last February. It was the fact that Ukraine was armed with NATO weaponry, its troops trained by NATO advisors, its intelligence services constantly fed information by Western intel agencies. Moscow has made no secret of this frustration or its assertion that the battle for Ukraine was a proxy war against the West, itself. This is why, from the very beginning, Moscow has framed this war as one not between Russia and Ukraine, but rather one between Russia and what Vladimir Putin and his coterie love to call “the collective West.” And, according to this consensual ideology, it is this collective West—not the incompetence of any generals or advisors—that has thwarted Putin’s aims of swallowing Ukraine and fulfilling his dream of a pan-Slavic super state with Moscow at its capital.

The Ukrainian military, which has come to be known as the MacGuyver army in defense circles, has fought bravely and with great flexibility, able to deftly outmaneuver what was once considered the second most potent army in the world, doing so with a patchwork of various weapons systems from all the various countries of Europe and the U.S. That’s not as easy as it seems. But Putin is not totally wrong. And, indeed, while Russia has punished the Ukrainian people a bushel and a peck and a noose around the neck, what about the West?

Yes, there have been inflationary pressures but that’s not enough: on the whole, the West is wealthy enough to withstand them. Last summer and fall, the West worried about a hard, cold winter exacerbated by the potential twin punch of high energy prices and Moscow’s ability to weaponize Europe’s dependence on Russian energy. As I explained in my dispatch last week, Russia originally thought it could punish the collective West, but that gun didn’t fire. Europe quickly diversified away from Russian oil and gas, depriving Russia of its main energy market.

The nuclear threat? Well, that worry seems to have abated a bit for now, too, mostly because, as I noted before, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi have made very clear to Putin that they will wash their hands of him if he goes nuclear. Right now, isolated from the West, Putin needs them too much economically to risk his own isolation.

So what is left? People in the Biden administration are worried that this leaves Putin with one remaining option: unleashing a wave of asymmetric chaos across the West. Think political interference, cyberattacks, assassinations. “The Russians wrote the book on this but they haven’t turned it on,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, who once ran the C.I.A.’s operations in Europe, countering the Russian threat. “Why is that?”

Keep reading.

 

Israel's 'Illegal Settlements' Aren't Actually Illegal

That's the thing about the radical left and foaming far-left anti-Semites: they spew lies which then become treated as fact.

See David M. Phillips, at Commentary, "The Illegal-Settlements Myth":

The conviction that Jewish settlements in the West Bank are illegal is now so commonly accepted, it hardly seems as though the matter is even open for discussion. But it is. Decades of argument about the issue have obscured the complex nature of the specific legal question about which a supposedly overwhelming verdict of guilty has been rendered against settlement policy. There can be no doubt that this avalanche of negative opinion has been deeply influenced by the settlements’ unpopularity around the world and even within Israel itself. Yet, while one may debate the wisdom of Israeli settlements, the idea that they are imprudent is quite different from branding them as illegal. Indeed, the analysis underlying the conclusion that the settlements violate international law depends entirely on an acceptance of the Palestinian narrative that the West Bank is “Arab” land. Followed to its logical conclusion—as some have done—this narrative precludes the legitimacy of Israel itself.

These arguments date back to the aftermath of the Six-Day War. When Israel went into battle in June 1967, its objective was clear: to remove the Arab military threat to its existence. Following its victory, the Jewish state faced a new challenge: what to do with the territorial fruits of that triumph. While many Israelis assumed that the overwhelming nature of their victory would shock the Arab world into coming to terms with their legitimacy and making peace, they would soon be disabused of this belief. At the end of August 1967, the heads of eight countries, including Egypt, Syria, and Jordan (all of which lost land as the result of their failed policy of confrontation with Israel), met at a summit in Khartoum, Sudan, and agreed to the three principles that were to guide the Arab world’s postwar stands: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, and no negotiations with Israel. Though many Israelis hoped to trade most if not all the conquered lands for peace, they would have no takers. This set the stage for decades of their nation’s control of these territories....

The question of the legal status of the West Bank, as well as Jerusalem, is not so easily resolved. To understand why this is the case, we must first revisit the history of the region in the 20th century.

Though routinely referred to nowadays as “Palestinian” land, at no point in history has Jerusalem or the West Bank been under Palestinian Arab sovereignty in any sense of the term. For several hundred years leading up to World War I, all of Israel, the Kingdom of Jordan, and the putative state of Palestine were merely provinces of the Ottoman Empire. After British-led Allied troops routed the Turks from the country in 1917-18, the League of Nations blessed Britain’s occupation with a document that gave the British conditional control granted under a mandate. It empowered Britain to facilitate the creation of a “Jewish National Home” while respecting the rights of the native Arab population. British Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill later partitioned the mandate in 1922 and gave the East Bank of the Jordan to his country’s Hashemite Arab allies, who created the Kingdom of Jordan there under British tutelage.

Following World War II, the League of Nations’ successor, the United Nations, voted in November 1947 to partition the remaining portion of the land into Arab and Jewish states. While the Jews accepted partition, the Arabs did not, and after the British decamped in May 1948, Jordan joined with four other Arab countries to invade the fledgling Jewish state on the first day of its existence. Though Israel survived the onslaught, the fighting left the Jordanians in control of what would come to be known as the West Bank as well as approximately half of Jerusalem, including the Old City. Those Jewish communities in the West Bank that had existed prior to the Arab invasion were demolished, as was the Jewish quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem.

After the cease-fire that ended Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, Jordan annexed both the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But, as was the case when Israel annexed those same parts of the ancient city that it would win back 19 years later, the world largely ignored this attempt to legitimize Jordan’s presence. Only Jordan’s allies Britain and Pakistan recognized its claims of sovereignty. After King Hussein’s disastrous decision to ally himself with Egypt’s Nasser during the prelude to June 1967, Jordan was evicted from the lands it had won in 1948.

This left open the question of the sovereign authority over the West Bank...

Keep reading.

And be sure to watch that Danny Ayalon video above. It's so crystal clear it's ridiculous.

PREVIOUSLY: "Obama's 'Dangerous Parting Shot' on Israel."

How the West Brought About the Crisis in #Ukraine

Via Julia Ioffe on Twitter, this is fascinating.

At the New York Times, "In Crimea, Russia Moved to Throw Off the Cloak of Defeat":

Very important piece by David @herszenhorn on how, in part, the crisis in #Ukraine is the West's fault. http://t.co/zrFJ0otTmt

— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) March 25, 2014

SEVASTOPOL, Crimea — With a single diesel-electric submarine and a hodgepodge of other aging vessels, Russia’s rickety Black Sea Fleet would be no match for the United States’ Sixth Fleet, based in Italy, which boasts the latest in seaborne military technology and has been running drills nearby.

Still, the legendary Russian fleet, whose headquarters have been here since 1783, is within a day’s sailing of the Mediterranean and remains crucial to the Kremlin’s ability to exert strategic influence in the Middle East and beyond.

Safeguarding this maritime muscle may well have been one reason President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia sent armed forces to seize Crimea. But is it possible that the Sevastopol base is just the most concrete manifestation of Russia’s deep interests in Ukraine that the United States and its NATO allies either ignored or forgot as they tried to bind it more tightly with the West?

For years, Mr. Putin has complained about the West moving unilaterally to reorder the Continental balance of power — promoting Western capitalism and democracy — with little indication anyone was heeding his concerns. Its courting of Ukraine, apparently, was a step too far, prompting Mr. Putin to risk sanctions and the worst conflict since the Cold War to make clear that Washington and its friends do not call all of the shots anymore.

The annexation here, and the Russian troops still massed on the border of eastern Ukraine, seem a clear and sharp message from Mr. Putin that the future of Ukraine and the broader region, especially Moldova and Georgia, which are also being courted by Europe, will not be decided by the West alone.

“For 23 years after 1991, Russia has been treated consciously or subconsciously as defeated in the Cold War,” said Dmitry Kosyrev, a writer and political commentator with the RIA Novosti news agency in Moscow. “Russia has not accepted this mentality. We have something to say. We have not only interest, but experience. We are not a defeated country in the Cold War; we are something separate like India, like China.”

Mr. Kosyrev added, “Not talking to us, not accepting our point of view, that’s exactly what brought Europe and the United States to the crisis in Ukraine.”

The Obama administration and European leaders, of course, insist that it is Russia and Mr. Putin who acted aggressively and unilaterally, refusing to hear the view of Ukrainian citizens who took to the streets of Kiev in November after the president at the time, Viktor F. Yanukovych, broke his promise to sign political and trade accords with the European Union.

The contest for influence in Ukraine, long torn between Russia and the West, stretches back much further than last autumn. It is part of a wider tug-of-war that the West had dominated since the fall of the Soviet Union, drawing into Europe’s fold not just former Eastern bloc nations like Poland and Bulgaria, but the ex-Soviet republics — Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — in the Baltics.

Mr. Putin and many Russians believe that the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev had received assurances that the NATO alliance would not extend beyond a reunited Germany. They consider it a betrayal that NATO now includes the Baltics, reaching Russia’s borders — a point that Mr. Putin stressed in his speech announcing the annexation of Crimea.

“They have lied to us many times, made decisions behind our backs, placed us before an accomplished fact,” Mr. Putin said. “This happened with NATO’s expansion to the East, as well as the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders. They kept telling us the same thing: ‘Well, this does not concern you.’ That’s easy to say.”

More.

Western Complacency and Denial to Remain Unscathed After #CharlieHebdo Attacks

From Melanie Phillips, at the Jerusalem Post, "As I See It: The Paris massacre and Western funk":

Is this a tipping point? Has the West finally been shaken out of its complacency? The horrific massacre in Paris, in which al-Qaida terrorists systematically targeted and gunned down journalists, cartoonists, and policemen at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in revenge for its mockery of Islam, has shocked Europe by its barbarism and its symbolism.

A core western value, freedom of expression, was snuffed out with contemptuous ease along with 12 innocent lives, among them some of France’s most iconic and beloved cartoonists.

The emotion behind the “Je Suis Charlie” demonstrations, as an expression of solidarity with the murdered Charlie Hebdo staff, was very understandable. But did anyone actually mean it? For what Charlie Hebdo did was what very few people have ever done. In continuing to publish its scurrilous images of Islam and Islamists, Charlie Hebdo had refused to be cowed by Islamist terrorism.

Plainly, therefore, very few people indeed mean “Je Suis Charlie,” since the media response to the massacre has been carefully to obliterate the images Charlie Hebdo published that so offended al-Qaida.

The French have also been declaring defiantly that free speech will never be surrendered. But there has been no free media expression about Islam ever since the 1989 Iranian fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie over his book, The Satanic Verses.

That was when the West sold the pass. In Britain, people supporting Rushdie’s murder were never prosecuted.

As his book was burned on British streets, establishment figures turned on the author for having offended Islam.

In 2006, riots following the publication of the Prophet Muhammad cartoons left scores dead around the world. But virtually every media outlet – except for Charlie Hebdo – refused to republish them.

In 2004, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered on a Netherlands street for making a film criticizing Islam. In 2012, Lars Hedegaard, who founded the Danish Free Press Society after the Muhammad cartoons affair,was shot point blank on his doorstep, although he miraculously survived.

To all these outrages, the West responded by blaming the victims for provoking their attackers. After this week’s Paris massacre, commentators on CNN observed that Charlie Hebdo had been “provoking Muslims” for some time. On The Financial Times website, Tony Barber wrote that “some common sense would be useful at publications such as Charlie Hebdo... which purport to strike a blow for freedom when they provoke Muslims, but are actually just being stupid.”

(That last clause was subsequently removed).

The fact is that Islamic terrorism and intimidation against the West have been going on for decades, matched by displays of Western weakness which merely encourage an enemy it refuses properly to identify.

Over and over again, the West denies that these attacks have anything to do with Islam. First it blamed poverty and exclusion among Muslims. Then it blamed grievances around the world – Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir, Palestine.

Then it blamed isolated madmen whose Muslim identity was irrelevant.

In France before Christmas, attacks in which cars were used as battering rams against crowds amid shouts of “Allahu akbar” were said by French authorities to be unconnected with each other.

Yet Muslim violence in France has clearly been out of control for years. Just look at the repeated Islamic pogroms against French Jews, which have driven thousands of them to emigrate. Yet none of those attacks provoked the kind of outrage that followed this week’s atrocity. Is free speech more important than the lives of French Jews? But the West refuses to join up the dots. The Charlie Hebdo attackers shouted “Allahu akbar” and “We are avenging the Prophet Muhammad.”

Yet Obama, Cameron, and Hollande condemned the attack as merely “terrorism,” carefully omitting to say what kind of terrorism this was.

This follows their absurd statements that the Islamic State terrorist group has “nothing to do with Islam” and that “no religion” condones that kind of barbarism.

Really? What links Islamic State, al-Qaida, Hamas, and Boko Haram? It’s a religion beginning with the letter I and ending with M.

A very senior British civil servant once told me that Islamist terrorism couldn’t be about Islam, because that would “demonize” all Muslims. This absurd non-sequitur was like saying the Inquisition had nothing to do with Catholicism, in order not to demonize Catholics.

For sure, many Muslims are not only opposed to Islamist terrorism but are its principal victims. But to pretend that it is not rooted in a legitimate interpretation of the religion, backed up by the historical evidence of centuries of aggressive and violent Islamic conquest, is ridiculous.

If the West cannot even bring itself to acknowledge what it is up against, then it will surely be defeated by it...

Still more.

Suspect Angelo West Identified in 'Point Blank' Assassination Attempt on Decorated Boston Cop (VIDEO)

At Twitchy, "‘Nearly assassination-style’: Boston police shooting suspect identified as ‘career criminal’ Angelo West, age 41."

The black mofo suspect wasn't about to go back behind bars.

See Kevin Cullen, at the Boston Globe, "Three strikes and he was out on streets again":

Angelo West wasn’t going back to prison.

That’s what this was about. Pure and simple.

When members of the Boston police gang unit stopped the car he was driving on Humboldt Avenue on Friday evening, he knew that the .357 Magnum he was carrying was a ticket back to Cedar Junction in Walpole, and he wasn’t going out like that.

So he came out of the car, without a word, put his gun to the face of John Moynihan, and pulled the trigger. Then he ran off, turning back to fire at Moynihan’s colleagues.

Did he really think he would get away?

Who knows. Luckily, police officers are much better shots than habitual felons like West and he died as he would have had them die.

There was an extraordinary scene as police officers combed the area for spent shell casings and other evidence as Moynihan underwent surgery at Boston Medical Center. Some people got in their faces, calling them pigs, screaming about another black man shot to death by police.

Given the facts in this case, and that, according to Police Commissioner Bill Evans, the entire fatal encounter, showing West put the gun to Moynihan’s face without provocation, is caught on camera, you’d think the people screaming at the cops might have waited, oh, I don’t know, maybe a few hours, before concluding that Angelo West is the next Michael Brown, the next Eric Garner, the next Tamir Rice.

But he isn’t. Angelo West is somebody who routinely armed himself with guns and previously had fired a shot that nearly killed a cop. His death on Humboldt Ave. was more the inevitable conclusion to a violent, lawless life than it is the latest example of police being too quick to fire on young black men...

More.

And here's video of depraved leftists taunting police, "VIDEO - Protesters Caught on Video Taunting Police After Boston Cop Remains in Coma from Shooting."

Behold today's cop-killing left. #BlackLivesMatter only if they're used to kill police.

Obama's Foreign Policy: A Somber Parade of Straw Men and Emptiness

From Charles Krauthammer, at WaPo, "Emptiness at West Point":

As with the West Point speech itself, as with the president’s entire foreign policy of retreat, one can only marvel at the smallness of it all.

Who Is Behind the Islamic School Being Planned For West Edmonton?

Blazing Cat Fur's been looking into the Muslim Brotherhood's initiative to open an Islamic school in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. It turns out that the leadership of Muslim Association of Canada's Edmonton chapter is preparing lawsuits against "a handful of 'people exhibiting Islamophobia'." And there's more at Point de Bascule, "Who Is Behind the Islamic School Being Planned For West Edmonton?":

Many citizens living in the Lessard district of West Edmonton have expressed their concerns regarding the opening of an Islamic school in their community by the Muslim Association of Canada (MAC), the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood was founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna. Itsmotto is: "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur'an is our constitution. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope".

Shortly after some citizens expressed concerns in the West End News about the background of the promoters of this K-9 school, CTV and the Edmonton Sun reported that the Edmonton chapter of the MAC threatened the local paper with a civil suit. Instead of trying to defuse the concerns of the citizens by explaining how their goals and objectives were compatible with individual freedom, the MAC's leaders in Edmonton are trying to silence their critics.

Point de Bascule (Tipping Point) has been set up to expose the subtle ways used by Islamists to promote their agenda. The text that follows focuses on identifying the objectives pursued by the Muslim Brotherhood and it provides many links towards various statements made by its leaders in the past. Another text will follow in the coming days that will deal more specifically with the tactic of legal warfare frequently used by the Islamists to prevent any discussion about their agenda.

The concerns expressed by the citizens of Lessard are not only justified, they should be taken into consideration by the authorities. Up to now, the government has been silent on the issue. The citizens have no other choice but to challenge the Islamists willing to abuse the legal system in order to shut down responsible inquiry.

That sounds familiar.

Read all about it here.

Watch How Vastly Different West Point Cadets React Between Hearing Presidents Obama and Bush

Oh my goodness this is brutal, at the Independent Journal Review.

Previous "icy" Obama at West Point blogging is here.

Responding to the Russian Challenge

It's by now clear that for all the chest-thumping over Russian aggression in Georgia, the immediate risk of great power escalation is remote: Russia is a nuclear-state, the U.S. has major military operations currently underway in Afghansitan and Iraq, and Moscow may engage in self-restraint to consolidate its power short of larger international condemnation.

That being the case, I'm intrigued by the diplomatic advice offered by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security advisor under former President Jimmy Carter:

The West needs to respond to Russia's aggression in a clear and determined manner. That doesn't mean with force. Nor should it fall into a new cold war with Russia. But the West, particularly the U.S., should continue to mobilize the international community to condemn Russia's behavior....

It is premature to specify what precise measures the West should adopt. But Russia must be made to understand that it is in danger of becoming ostracized internationally. This should be a matter of considerable concern to Russia's new business élite, who are increasingly vulnerable to global financial pressure. Russia's powerful oligarchs have hundreds of billions of dollars in Western bank accounts. They would stand to lose a great deal in the event of a Cold War–style standoff that could conceivably result, at some stage, in the West's freezing of such holdings.

At some point, the West should consider the Olympic option. If the issue of Georgia's territorial integrity is not adequately resolved (by, for example, the deployment in South Ossetia and Abkhazia of a truly independent international security force replacing Russian troops), the U.S. should contemplate withdrawing from the 2014 Winter Games, to be held in the Russian city of Sochi, next to the violated Georgia's frontier. There is a precedent for this. I was part of the Carter Administration when we brandished the Olympic torch as a symbolic weapon in 1980, pulling out of the Summer Games in Moscow after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. The Soviet Union had planned a propaganda show reminiscent of Hitler's 1936 Olympics in Berlin. America's boycott delivered a body blow to President Leonid Brezhnev and his communist system and prevented Moscow from enjoying a world-class triumph.

Reading this, it's frankly no surprise that Soviet tanks rolled into Kabul during President Carter's watch in 1979.

2014 is still some time away, but if the U.S. wanted to bring about a new Cold War, what better way than to revive the Olympic tradition of boycotting Russia's games? Maybe a President Obama will don a cardigan and ask Americans to turn down the thermostat to 68 degrees as well. Meanwhile, Americans could watch Russian tanks roll from Tsbilisi to Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan, not to mention Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Moscow could place a strategic stranglehold on the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which sends crude oil supplies to Southeastern Europe, and it could begin to incorporate the former Muslim republics at the southern Russia periphery back into Moscow's sovereign control.

All of this, while remote, is a reminder that U.S. diplomacy and soft-power may be limited in meeting the rising challenges of great power politics. Ideas and institutions may take us part of the way in managing the rise of revanchist autocracies, but at some point preserving the autonomy of nations of the democratic West may require not just the exertion of neoliberal "confidence-building measures" (or boycotts), but hard military capabilities as well.

These considerations give added urgency to the debate in the U.S. over the redeployment of American troops from Iraq. Perhaps a debate over "permanent bases" in the Middle East and South Asia might not be such a bad thing after all?

Die-Hards Hang On in the Florida Keys

From Molly Hennessy-Fiske‏, at LAT, "The incredible stories of the die-hards who looked Irma in the face — and stayed":

As Hurricane Irma barreled into Key West, Peter Borch stood atop the oldest guesthouse in the city, a converted Victorian mansion built in 1880, to film the unfolding mayhem.

Storm gusts bent nearby palm trees nearly in half, stripping and scattering fronds down empty streets. The horizon was nearly obscured by a white wall of surf roaring in.

“The eyewall is about to hit here in Key West. No power. Trees down. No flooding,” Borch, 31, shouted to be heard over the wind.

Then he shifted focus to a porch below, where an older man sat, shirtless, sipping coffee from a mug, oblivious to the onslaught.

From initial reports Sunday, it appeared that the Florida Keys had taken a pounding but dodged the sort of catastrophic disaster that had been widely expected as Irma roared north out of the Caribbean. But there were reports of missing people, and fears for what might be found in the light of day on Monday.

Keys residents are a hardy, proudly eccentric bunch, accustomed to surviving storms. Many refused to evacuate ahead of Hurricane Irma, including residents at the tip of the island chain in Key West known as conchs. The keeper of Ernest Hemingway’s historic home stayed put to care for his brood of six-toed cats. Watering holes like the Blue Macaw stayed open, offering a drink special called the “Bloody Irma” (five shots of Tito’s vodka). But as the storm descended Sunday, some denizens reconsidered and headed for shelters of last resort like a school on Sugarloaf Key. Others hunkered down, set up live feeds and promised to stay in touch.

One holdout filmed himself nearly getting washed away by storm surf striking the red and yellow buoy at the southernmost point of U.S. Route 1. Florida snowbirds and other island regulars posted queries online: How were the federally protected Key deer faring? Key West’s roaming roosters? Initial reports were good.

Then the power went out, cell service ceased and with it, the live feeds. Only those with satellite phones and land lines could stay in touch with the outside world.

Those at the Sugarloaf School were among the lucky few with a satellite phone, and used it to report that those sheltering there had survived the storm unscathed. Volunteer rescuers used an app on their cellphones called Zello to report what else they were seeing.

“I’m in Key West and we’re all right down here. I never do run from a storm,” said a man who identified himself as P.J.

Judy Cox searched online for signs of her friend, Borch, one of several Key West neighbors who decided to weather the storm.

She last heard from him at 9 a.m., about an hour after he posted his last video. She said he told her “it was windy and not a lot of flooding. Some trees down and no power since last night.”

Now, she was worried.

She had trouble reaching another friend, a boat captain, who was weathering the storm by Schooner Wharf, she said.

“Last I heard he was on his boat,” Cox said...

More.

A Flourishing Democracy in Ukraine?

A flourishing Ukrainian democracy. 

That's what Vladimir Putin fears, according to Michael McFaul, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, along with Robert Person.

(Contrast this article to John Mearsheimer's, post earlier. The two contrasting takes represents a very common axis in international relations theory: realism vs. liberalism,)

At the Journal of Democracy, "What Putin Fears Most":

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has begun. Russian president Vladimir Putin wants you to believe that it’s NATO’s fault. He frequently has claimed (including again in an address to the nation as this invasion commenced) that NATO expansion—not 190,000 Russian soldiers and sailors mobilized on Ukraine’s borders—is the central driver of this crisis. Following John Mearsheimer’s provocative 2014 Foreign Affairs article arguing that “the Ukraine crisis is the West’s fault,” the narrative of Russian backlash against NATO expansion has become a dominant framework for explaining—if not justifying—Moscow’s ongoing war against Ukraine. This notion has been repeated by politicians, analysts, and writers in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. Multiple rounds of enlargement, they argue, exacerbated Russia’s sense of insecurity as NATO forces crept closer to Russia’s borders, finally provoking Putin to lash out violently, first by invading Georgia in 2008, then Ukraine in 2014, and now a second, likely far larger, invasion of Ukraine today. By this telling, the specter of Ukraine’s NATO membership points both to the cause of the conflict and its solution: take membership off the table for Ukraine, so the argument goes, and war will be prevented.

This argument has two flaws, one about history and one about Putin’s thinking. First, NATO expansion has not been a constant source of tension between Russia and the West, but a variable. Over the last thirty years, the salience of the issue has risen and fallen not primarily because of the waves of NATO expansion, but due instead to waves of democratic expansion in Eurasia. In a very clear pattern, Moscow’s complaints about NATO spike after democratic breakthroughs. While the tragic invasions and occupations of Georgia and Ukraine have secured Putin a de facto veto over their NATO aspirations, since the alliance would never admit a country under partial occupation by Russian forces, this fact undermines Putin’s claim that the current invasion is aimed at NATO membership. He has already blocked NATO expansion for all intents and purposes, thereby revealing that he wants something far more significant in Ukraine today: the end of democracy and the return of subjugation.

This reality highlights the second flaw: Because the primary threat to Putin and his autocratic regime is democracy, not NATO, that perceived threat would not magically disappear with a moratorium on NATO expansion. Putin would not stop seeking to undermine democracy and sovereignty in Ukraine, Georgia, or the region as whole if NATO stopped expanding. As long as citizens in free countries exercise their democratic rights to elect their own leaders and set their own course in domestic and foreign politics, Putin will keep them in his crosshairs....

The more serious cause of tensions has been a series of democratic breakthroughs and popular protests for freedom throughout the 2000s, what many refer to as the “Color Revolutions.” Putin believes that Russian national interests have been threatened by what he portrays as U.S.-supported coups. After each of them—Serbia in 2000, Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004, the Arab Spring in 2011, Russia in 2011–12, and Ukraine in 2013–14—Putin has pivoted to more hostile policies toward the United States, and then invoked the NATO threat as justification for doing so.

Boris Yeltsin never supported NATO expansion but acquiesced to the first round of expansion in 1997 because he believed his close ties to President Bill Clinton and the United States were not worth sacrificing over this comparatively smaller matter. Through Partnership for Peace and especially the NATO-Russia Founding Act, Clinton and his team made a considerable effort to keep US-Russian relations positive while at the same time managing NATO expansion. The 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia to stop ethnic cleaning in Kosovo severely tested that strategy but survived in part because Clinton gave Yeltsin and Russia a role in the negotiated solution. When the first post-communist color revolution overthrew Slobodan Milosevic a year later, Russia’s new president, Putin, deplored the act but did not overreact. At that time, he still entertained the possibility of cooperation with the West, including NATO.

However, the next round of democratic expansion in the post-Soviet world, the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, escalated U.S.-Russian tensions significantly. Putin blamed the United States directly for assisting in this democratic breakthrough and helping to install what he saw as a pro-American puppet, President Mikheil Saakashvili. Immediately after the Rose Revolution, Putin sought to undermine Georgian democracy, ultimately invading in 2008 and recognizing two Georgian regions—Abkhazia and South Ossetia—as independent states. U.S.-Russian relations reached a new low point in 2008.

A year after the Rose Revolution, the most consequential democratic expansion in the post-Soviet world erupted in Ukraine in 2004, the Orange Revolution. In the years prior to that momentous event, Ukraine’s foreign-policy orientation under President Leonid Kuchma was relatively balanced between east and west, but with gradually improving ties between Kyiv and Moscow. That changed when a falsified presidential election in late 2004 brought hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians into the streets, eventually sweeping away Kuchma’s—and Putin’s—handpicked successor, Viktor Yanukovych. Instead, the prodemocratic and pro-western Orange Coalition led by President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko took power.

Compared to Serbia in 2000 or Georgia in 2003, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 was a much larger threat to Putin. First, the Orange Revolution occurred suddenly and in a much bigger and more strategic country on Russia’s border. The abrupt pivot to the West by Yushchenko and his allies left Putin facing the prospect that he had “lost” a country on which he placed tremendous symbolic and strategic importance.

To Putin, the Orange Revolution undermined a core objective of his grand strategy: to establish a privileged and exclusive sphere of influence across the territory that once comprised the Soviet Union. Putin believes in spheres of influence; that as a great power, Russia has a right to veto the sovereign political decisions of its neighbors. Putin also demands exclusivity in his neighborhood: Russia can be the only great power to exercise such privilege (or even develop close ties) with these countries. This position has hardened significantly since Putin’s conciliatory position of 2002 as Russia’s influence in Ukraine has waned and Ukraine’s citizens have repeatedly signaled their desire to escape from Moscow’s grasp. Subservience was now required. As Putin explained in a recent historical article, in his view Ukrainians and Russians “were one people” whom he is seeking to reunite, even if through coercion. For Putin, therefore, the loss of Ukraine in 2004 to the West marked a major negative turning point in U.S.-Russian relations that was far more salient than the second wave of NATO expansion that was completed the same year.

Second, those Ukrainians who rose up in defense of their freedom were, in Putin’s own assessment, Slavic brethren with close historical, religious, and cultural ties to Russia. If it could happen in Kyiv, why not in Moscow? Several years later, it almost did happen in Russia when a series of mass protests erupted in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other cities in the wake of fraudulent parliamentary elections in December 2011. They were the largest protests in Russia since 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed. For the first time in his decade-plus in power, ordinary Russians showed themselves to have both the will and the capability to threaten Putin’s grip on power. That popular uprising in Russia, occurring the same year as the Arab Spring, and then followed with Putin’s return to the Kremlin as president for a third term in 2012, marked another major negative turn in U.S.-Russian relations, ending the reset launched by Presidents Obama and Medvedev in 2009. Democratic mobilization, first the Middle East and then Russia—not NATO expansion—ended this last chapter of U.S.-Russian cooperation. There have been no new chapters of cooperation since.

But U.S.-Russian relations deteriorated ever further in 2014, again because of new democratic expansion. The next democratic mobilization to threaten Putin happened a second time in Ukraine in 2013–14. After the Orange Revolution in 2004, Putin did not invade Ukraine, but wielded other instruments of influence to help his protégé, Viktor Yanukovych, narrowly win the Ukrainian presidency six years later. Yanukovych, however, turned out not to be a loyal Kremlin servant, but tried to cultivate ties with both Russia and the West. Putin finally compelled Yanukovych to make a choice, and the Ukrainian president chose Russia in the fall of 2013 when he reneged on signing an EU association agreement in favor of membership in Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union. To the surprise of everyone in Moscow, Kyiv, Brussels, and Washington, Yanukovych’s decision to scuttle this agreement with the EU triggered mass demonstrations in Ukraine again, bringing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians into the streets in what would become known as the Euromaidan or “Revolution of Dignity” to protest Yanukovych’s turn away from the democratic West. The street protests lasted several weeks, punctuated by the killing of dozens of peaceful protestors by Yanukovych’s government, the eventual collapse of that government and Yanukovych’s flight to Russia in February 2014, and a new pro-Western government taking power in Kyiv. Putin had “lost” Ukraine for the second time in a decade.

This time, Putin struck back with military force to punish the alleged American-backed, neo-Nazi usurpers in Kyiv. Russian armed forces seized Crimea; Moscow later annexed the Ukrainian peninsula. Putin also provided money, equipment, and soldiers to back separatists in eastern Ukraine, fueling a simmering war in Donbas for eight years, in which approximately 14,000 people have been killed. After invading, not before, Putin amped up his criticisms of NATO expansion as justification for his belligerent actions.

In response to this second Ukrainian democratic revolution, Putin concluded that cooption through elections and other nonmilitary means had to be augmented with greater coercive pressure, including military intervention. Since the Revolution of Dignity, Putin has waged an unprecedented war against Ukraine using a full spectrum of military, political, informational, social, and economic weapons in an attempt to destabilize and eventually topple Ukraine’s democratically elected government.

 

China, International Institutions, and Power Transitions

Can the West handle the growth of Chinese power? Certainly, as long as China's rise is contained within the global system's multilateral institutionalist framework, led by the United States. This is G. John Ikenberry's basic point in his new essay on the growth of Chinese power at Foreign Affairs, "The Rise of China and the Future of the West." Ikenberry's one of the very top international relations scholars working from a neoliberal institutionalist perspective. I particulary liked his edited volume, America Unrivaled: The Future of the Balance of Power. I find myself agreeing with much of Ikenberry's argument in his current Foreign Affairs essay. Here's the introduction:

The rise of China will undoubtedly be one of the great dramas of the twenty-first century. China's extraordinary economic growth and active diplomacy are already transforming East Asia, and future decades will see even greater increases in Chinese power and influence. But exactly how this drama will play out is an open question. Will China overthrow the existing order or become a part of it? And what, if anything, can the United States do to maintain its position as China rises? Some observers believe that the American era is coming to an end, as the Western-oriented world order is replaced by one increasingly dominated by the East. The historian Niall Ferguson has written that the bloody twentieth century witnessed "the descent of the West" and "a reorientation of the world" toward the East. Realists go on to note that as China gets more powerful and the United States' position erodes, two things are likely to happen: China will try to use its growing influence to reshape the rules and institutions of the international system to better serve its interests, and other states in the system - especially the declining hegemon - will start to see China as a growing security threat. The result of these developments, they predict, will be tension, distrust, and conflict, the typical features of a power transition. In this view, the drama of China's rise will feature an increasingly powerful China and a declining United States locked in an epic battle over the rules and leadership of the international system. And as the world's largest country emerges not from within but outside the established post-World War II international order, it is a drama that will end with the grand ascendance of China and the onset of an Asian-centered world order. That course, however, is not inevitable. The rise of China does not have to trigger a wrenching hegemonic transition. The U.S.-Chinese power transition can be very different from those of the past because China faces an international order that is fundamentally different from those that past rising states confronted. China does not just face the United States; it faces a Western-centered system that is open, integrated, and rule-based, with wide and deep political foundations. The nuclear revolution, meanwhile, has made war among great powers unlikely - eliminating the major tool that rising powers have used to overturn international systems defended by declining hegemonic states. Today's Western order, in short, is hard to overturn and easy to join. This unusually durable and expansive order is itself the product of farsighted U.S. leadership. After World War II, the United States did not simply establish itself as the leading world power. It led in the creation of universal institutions that not only invited global membership but also brought democracies and market societies closer together. It built an order that facilitated the participation and integration of both established great powers and newly independent states. (It is often forgotten that this postwar order was designed in large part to reintegrate the defeated Axis states and the beleaguered Allied states into a unified international system.) Today, China can gain full access to and thrive within this system. And if it does, China will rise, but the Western order - if managed properly - will live on. As it faces an ascendant China, the United States should remember that its leadership of the Western order allows it to shape the environment in which China will make critical strategic choices. If it wants to preserve this leadership, Washington must work to strengthen the rules and institutions that underpin that order - making it even easier to join and harder to overturn. U.S. grand strategy should be built around the motto "The road to the East runs through the West." It must sink the roots of this order as deeply as possible, giving China greater incentives for integration than for opposition and increasing the chances that the system will survive even after U.S. relative power has declined. The United States' "unipolar moment" will inevitably end. If the defining struggle of the twenty-first century is between China and the United States, China will have the advantage. If the defining struggle is between China and a revived Western system, the West will triumph.

Ikenberry's correct to note the importance of China's rise, although I think he needs to specify more carefully just when America's "unipolar moment" will end. Indeed, my main quibble with his piece is that his major premise of American decline (and China's rise) is an assumption. Some of the best recent work on the contemporary balance of power predicts a shift to multipolarity in about 20 or 30 years (and even Christopher Layne's important argument to that effect was more theoretically-driven than empirically substantiated). Fareed Zakaria, in a recent Newsweek essay, actually made a nifty little data-based case for the likelihood of continuing American global leadership:

Over the past 20 years, America's growth rate has averaged just over 3 percent, a full percentage point higher than that of Germany and France. (Japan averaged 2.3 percent over the same period.) Productivity growth, the elixir of modern economics, has been over 2.5 percent for a decade now, again a full percentage point higher than the European average. In 1980, the United States made up 22 percent of world output; today that has risen to 29 percent. The U.S. is currently ranked the second most competitive economy in the world (by the World Economic Forum), and is first in technology and innovation, first in technological readiness, first in company spending for research and technology and first in the quality of its research institutions. China does not come within 30 countries of the U.S. on any of these points, and India breaks the top 10 on only one count: the availability of scientists and engineers. In virtually every sector that advanced industrial countries participate in, U.S. firms lead the world in productivity and profits.

But with specific reference to China, Walter Russell Mead argues in today's Los Angeles Times that the Chinese challenge is not as pressing as many assume:

The most important story to come out of Washington recently had nothing to do with the endless presidential campaign. And although the media largely ignored it, the story changes the world. The story's unlikely source was the staid World Bank, which published updated statistics on the economic output of 146 countries. China's economy, said the bank, is smaller than it thought. About 40% smaller. China, it turns out, isn't a $10-trillion economy on the brink of catching up with the United States. It is a $6-trillion economy, less than half our size. For the foreseeable future, China will have far less money to spend on its military and will face much deeper social and economic problems at home than experts previously believed.

Mead goes on:

The political consequences will be felt far and wide. To begin with, the U.S. will remain the world's largest economy well into the future. Given that fact, fears that China will challenge the U.S. for global political leadership seem overblown. Under the old figures, China was predicted to pass the United States as the world's largest economy in 2012. That isn't going to happen. Also, the difference in U.S. and Chinese living standards is much larger than previously thought. Average income per Chinese is less than one-tenth the U.S. level. With its people this poor, China will have a hard time raising enough revenue for the vast military buildup needed to challenge the United States. The balance of power in Asia looks more secure. Japan's economy was not affected by the World Bank revisions. China's economy has shrunk by 40% compared with Japan too. And although India's economy was downgraded by 40%, the United States, Japan and India will be more than capable of balancing China's military power in Asia for a very long time to come.

Mead notes that in terms of absolute gains, the overestimation of China's comparative power has real negative implications for the quality of life for the Chinese people. When China's growth is calculated more accurately, the downward revisions mean in effect that fewer Chinese have escaped the burdens of poverty. But back to Ikenberry's argument: Beyond Chinese relative power, Ikenberry provides a couple of questionable examples to support his case on embedding great power change within an institutional framework. For example, check out this passage on the Soviet Union's power transition in the 1980s:

As the Soviet Union declined, the Western order offered a set of rules and institutions that provided Soviet leaders with both reassurances and points of access - effectively encouraging them to become a part of the system. Moreover, the shared leadership of the order ensured accommodation of the Soviet Union. As the Reagan administration pursued a hard-line policy toward Moscow, the Europeans pursued détente and engagement. For every hard-line "push," there was a moderating "pull," allowing Mikhail Gorbachev to pursue high-risk reforms. On the eve of German unification, the fact that a united Germany would be embedded in European and Atlantic institutions - rather than becoming an independent great power - helped reassure Gorbachev that neither German nor Western intentions were hostile.

This is a particularly benign take on the Soviet view of the world correlation of forces during the Reagan years. While the Europeans may have been more accomodating of an institutionalist bargain facilitating Soviet accession to German independence, material factors - the Soviet Union's dramatic relative decline in the international system - just as likely contributed to Gorbachev's decisionmaking on international reform (or, there could be multi-level interaction effects; see Seweryn Bialer, "Domestic and International Factors in the Formationof Gorbachev's Reforms"). Ikenberry also makes an odd point on NATO and the need to "renew" Western institutions to channel China's multilateral integration:

Renewing Western rules and institutions will require, among other things, updating the old bargains that underpinned key postwar security pacts. The strategic understanding behind both NATO and Washington's East Asian alliances is that the United States will work with its allies to provide security and bring them in on decisions over the use of force, and U.S. allies, in return, will operate within the U.S.-led Western order. Security cooperation in the West remains extensive today, but with the main security threats less obvious than they were during the Cold War, the purposes and responsibilities of these alliances are under dispute. Accordingly, the United States needs to reaffirm the political value of these alliances - recognizing that they are part of a wider Western institutional architecture that allows states to do business with one another.

Reading this passage one might get the idea that NATO's leadership in the multilateral coalition in Afghanistan is a fluke (see here, here, here, here, and here). Other than this, interestingly, Ikenberry's institutional case for integrating China into the Western order rests on fundamentally self-interested notions of maintaining U.S. international primacy. The article's an especially interesting contribution in that sense.

Putin Orders Deployment of Troops to Breakaway Regions in Ukraine (VIDEO)

Seems like Putin's going to get just about everything he wants. He's in the driver's seat for sure. Declaring "independence" of Donetsk and Luhansk is a prelude to reincorporating these areas into the Russian Federation, just like swiping the Crimea was in 2014.

Am I right about this? Who the fuck knows? 

I was talking with a buddy the other day, before the latest round of chest-thumping, nuclear-military demonstrations, and mentioned Putin's most likely to destabilize Kiev with targeted assassinations, including the murder of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. While that Foreign Policy piece was way more detailed than my conjectures, I'm not surprised the intelligence community came up with that angle. While a massive ground "incursion" --- the hip term for the media's CNN-Democrat-MSNBC nightly news psyops --- it's unlikely at this point. Modern warfare is waged on a multilevel cyber-disinfo-techno grid (so it's complicated), and don't forget Russian propaganda, the oldest disinformation technique in the book, and Moscow's psychological warfare spooks are the world's best.

In any case, a full-on invasion of Ukraine's going to take more than 150,000 troops. Putin needs to go in like the U.S. in the Persian Gulf War of 1991, in Operation Desert Storm of January 17th of that year. It took the Pentagon six-months to get enough troops on the ground. Putin seems to be assembling a massive Russian Army of the Donbas. If he goes in big, like the U.S. in the Gulf, he'll need at least 35-40 divisions, perhaps more. That'll take a long time to organize, equip, and establish an experienced officer corps. 

In any case, at the Wall Street Journal, "Putin earlier recognized their independence, escalating tensions with West":

Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the deployment of Russian troops to two breakaway regions of Ukraine after recognizing their independence, a move that threatened to scuttle negotiations with the West over the future security of Eastern Europe.

His two decrees were published on the Russian government’s legal portal after the conclusion of Mr. Putin’s televised address late on Monday. In it he went through a litany of grievances about the West’s support of Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Western arms deliveries to Kyiv against the backdrop of a massive Russian troop build-up near its borders.

Mr. Putin said Russian forces would act in a peacekeeping role once Russia has signed mutual assistance with the two regions.

“The situation in Donbas is becoming critical,” Mr. Putin said before launching into a lengthy examination of the relationship between the two countries and the Donbas region, where the two breakaway regions are located. “Ukraine is not just a neighbor. It is an inherent part of our own history, culture and spiritual space,” he said.

Before the address, Mr. Putin called French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and told them of his decision, the Kremlin said in a statement. The European leaders expressed their disappointment with this development, but indicated their readiness to continue contacts, the Kremlin said.

The decision to recognize the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk came as Kyiv, Ukraine, asked the United Nations Security Council for an urgent meeting to tackle the threat of a Russian invasion.

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said he made the request Monday after a substantial escalation in military activity between Russian-backed forces and Kyiv government troops.

Press secretary Jen Psaki said the White House would also announce additional measures in response to “today’s blatant violation of Russia’s international commitments.” She said those moves would be in addition to economic measures the U.S. has been preparing with allies should Russia invade Ukraine.

In a statement Monday evening, the European Union’s top officials called the step by Mr. Putin “a blatant violation of international law.”

They said the EU “will react with sanctions against those involved in this illegal act.” No further details were provided.

Tensions have been steadily rising across the region, despite signs that diplomatic initiatives had been making tentative progress.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has proposed a meeting with Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart, this week in Europe that could lead to a summit between Messrs. Biden and Putin. On Sunday, in a move brokered in part by Mr. Macron, Mr. Biden agreed in principle to meet the Kremlin leader, provided that Russia pulls back from a potential attack on Ukraine.

Deciding to recognize the two territories in Donbas would likely grant the Kremlin greater sway over these regions, already proxies of Moscow, and hand Mr. Putin an additional trump card in negotiations in his current standoff with the West over the long-term security of Eastern Europe.

A White House official said Monday that President Biden was meeting with his national security team at the White House and was getting regular briefings on the situation with Russia and Ukraine. A White House official said Mr. Biden also spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and is also speaking with Messrs. Macron and Scholz.

In response to Mr. Putin’s announcement that he will recognize breakaway regions in Ukraine, the White House said Mr. Biden will issue an executive order that will “prohibit new investment, trade, and financing by U.S. persons’’ in those areas.

The White House said the order will also “provide authority to impose sanctions on any person determined to operate in those areas of Ukraine.” It’s unclear when the order will be issued.

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said he made the request Monday after a substantial escalation in military activity between Russian-backed forces and Kyiv government troops.

Deciding to recognize the two territories in Donbas would likely grant the Kremlin greater sway over these regions, already proxies of Moscow, and hand Mr. Putin an additional trump card in negotiations in his current standoff with the West over the long-term security of Eastern Europe.

A White House official said Monday that President Biden was meeting with his national security team at the White House and was getting regular briefings on the situation with Russia and Ukraine. A White House official said Mr. Biden also spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and is also speaking with Messrs. Macron and Scholz.

In response to Mr. Putin’s announcement that he will recognize breakaway regions in Ukraine, the White House said Mr. Biden will issue an executive order that will “prohibit new investment, trade, and financing by U.S. persons’’ in those areas.

The White House said the order will also “provide authority to impose sanctions on any person determined to operate in those areas of Ukraine.” It’s unclear when the order will be issued.

Press secretary Jen Psaki said the White House would also announce additional measures in response to “today’s blatant violation of Russia’s international commitments.” She said those moves would be in addition to economic measures the U.S. has been preparing with allies should Russia invade Ukraine.

In a statement Monday evening, the European Union’s top officials called the step by Mr. Putin “a blatant violation of international law.”

They said the EU “will react with sanctions against those involved in this illegal act.” No further details were provided.

Tensions have been steadily rising across the region, despite signs that diplomatic initiatives had been making tentative progress.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has proposed a meeting with Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart, this week in Europe that could lead to a summit between Messrs. Biden and Putin. On Sunday, in a move brokered in part by Mr. Macron, Mr. Biden agreed in principle to meet the Kremlin leader, provided that Russia pulls back from a potential attack on Ukraine.

On Monday, Mr. Putin appeared to make the case for invading Russia’s smaller neighbor, describing Ukraine as a tool being used by the West for confrontation with Russia that “poses a very large threat” to the country, he said.

Mr. Putin also accused Ukraine of taking a hostile stance toward Russian-controlled areas of Donbas and said the government in Kyiv wasn’t willing to implement the Minsk cease-fire agreement signed after Ukrainian forces were routed in Donbas in 2015. Ukraine has rejected Moscow’s interpretation of the deal, which it says provides Russia’s proxies in the region a veto over any attempt to align Ukraine more closely with the West.

The Russian leader also repeated his objections to Ukraine being allowed to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, saying that Kyiv would use it as an opportunity to forcibly try to retake the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014.

“If Russia faces such a threat as the admission of Ukraine to NATO, then the threats to our country will increase,” he said...

You got me why Ukraine's going to the Security Council --- where Russia has the veto and hence no major collective action agreement on sanctions or the authorization of military force can be enacted under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter. 

I don't know. Maybe the Ukrainians just want to foment some international drama and urgency, for without Russia's vote, the Security Council can't do jack. 

Still more.