Clarissa's Blog

Here is a very interesting analysis of foreign policy:

The slaughter of more than 3,000 civilians and Ukrainian soldiers and a growing toll of Russian mercenaries and conscripts in southeast Ukraine can hardly compete with ISIS’s (or ISIL’s, if you like) grisly You-Tube beheadings, but the potential risk posed by Russia’s War of Southeast Ukraine exceeds those emanating from the ISIS threat.

As I said before, the problem with Obama’s foreign policy is that it is purely reactive and is not guided by any consistent philosophy. So it’s all “Let’s remove Assad! No, let’s not remove Assad, especially if Putin asks us not to! Now let’s pretend we are against Putin! No, let’s actually support Putin! And now let’s go defeat Assad’s enemies! Leave Iraq! Go back to Iraq! No, let’s go into Syria instead!” 

The linked article says that Putin has pretty much won his war in Ukraine right now, owing to the complete indifference with which the West greeted his open invasion of the neighboring country in August. I don’t think Putin is a greater direct threat to our daily lives than ISIS. However, when Putin destroys NATO (as the linked piece suggests), this will make fighting ISIS a lot harder. Plus, Putin has serious problems with wahhabism in his own country. He might be very interested in turning his homegrown Wahhabi in the direction of the West (which is something he has been very successfully trying out in Ukraine.)

Ukraine is fighting on its own with little or no help from its feckless allies. Those who stand next in the line of victims understand the urgency of the situation. Others do not, if Obama’s remark at a recent fund raiser is accurate: “Geopolitically…what happens in Ukraine does not pose a threat to us.” That remark may go down in history along with Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” statement.

Read the article, it is shockingly good.