Clarissa's Blog

Here is another vivid example of why short-term thinking that plagues American politics is dangerous.

The other day, President Obama finally declared economic sanctions against 11 of Russia’s politicians. Among them, only one is somewhat involved in what is happening in Ukraine. The rest have nothing whatsoever to do with the issue. They also don’t have a whole lot of importance in Russian politics. For instance, Elena Mizulina is a loud homophobe and promoter of ultra-patriarchal values. She appears on TV shows to yell and foam at the mouth. For Putin, she is a useful clown, nothing more. Mizulina has zero political influence on her own and is nothing but a silly, bumbling pawn. In Russia, both the Putinoids and the dissidents are laughing at the ridiculousness of these “sanctions” that don’t really punish anybody for anything.

Based on everything that the White House has been doing about the situation in Ukraine, I have a very strong suspicion that there is simply nobody in the President’s entourage who is capable of analyzing the situation in the region and advising Obama accordingly.

In 1991, Americans unilaterally and baselessly declared that the Cold War was now over and hastened to dismantle every program of study that trained specialists capable of understanding Russia. Now it will take forever to create at least a few places where such professionals would be educated. We are talking about really tiny amounts of money here that in no way impacted the economy of the country as a whole. Still, these puny little “savings” mattered more than the need to train specialists who’d understand what was happening in the largest country on the planet.