The evidence that Putin provided the SA11 missile system and the requisite training and or actual participation for the dissident Russian forces in the Eastern Ukrainian is mounting. An effort to withhold evidence and conceal it adds to the calumny about this Malaysian airliner blown from the skies. Yet President Obama’s initial reaction to the destruction of flight 17 and its 298 passengers was so wooden and lacking in compassion, one might think this atrocity was a daily occurrence.
The murder of 298 innocents points to a clear moral divide in world affairs. Mr. Putin does not have a moral compass. His mindset is national assertiveness. As an economy, Russia is backward, relying solely on oil and natural gas for hard currency. Longevity is decreasing; alcoholism is increasing. What it has are sophisticated weapons given to the separatists to wage war. Putin does so with impunity because President Obama does not have a genuine understanding of his adversary. For Obama, Putin is not an adversary, but a political ally.
While President Obama recognizes the danger of aggression, for him it is an abstraction unrelated to specific actors. The attack on the embassy in Benghazi was tragic, but Obama never tied events to al Qaeda.
Putin, on the other side of the divide, sees Obama’s equivocation and reluctance to name assailants as weakness—weakness he can exploit and has exploited. Putin learned about world affairs from his former seat at the KGB. For him, there is only one goal on the global front: disrupt the post-Cold War period by restoring the Greater Russian or Soviet antebellum and becoming the Eurasian power.
In the face of this ambition, Obama has dismissed a “reset” in relations. When the mic was off, he even referred to additional “flexibility” vis-à-vis U.S.-Russian relations. That, as much as anything else, explains why Putin did not have the slightest hesitation in supplying weapons to the separatists fighting against the Ukrainian government.
When Obama squirmed but did not react to the Russian land grab of Crimea—despite the fact Russia signed the Budapest accord recognizing the integrity of the Ukraine—diplomatic impediments of any kind were futile. Putin was tacitly given a free ride. To make matters worse, President Obama refused a request from the Ukraine for heavy weapons.
Putin is shameless. Employing hypocrisy on an Orwellian scale, he maintained that “the government over whose territory this happened bears the responsibility for this terrible tragedy.” On the one hand, Putin subverts, or is attempting to subvert, the government of a sovereign nation; and on the other hand, he blames it for the murder of those on flight 17. That he gets away with this thus far suggests the feeble nature of the present administration’s response.
Some may ask, What can you do? Is this mass murder over the Ukrainian skies a casus belli? Clearly the U.S. is not prepared to go to war and, as clearly, censure through the U.N. Security Council will be vetoed by Russia. There remains, however, many actions the U.S. can adopt, from freezing Russian assets, to providing the weapons requested by the Ukrainian government. But action is dependent on will.
Putin knows what he wants; so too does Obama. But while the former is an activist intent on reclaiming the “near abroad” or what might be described as the former Soviet Union, the latter is engaged in a reformation of U.S. foreign policy predicated on withdrawal from most deployments abroad. The question that arises from this comparison is how does a nation in retreat subvert a nation on an imperial mission.
Herbert London is President of the London Center for Policy Research, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of the book The Transformational Decade (University Press of America). You can read all of Herb London’s commentaries atwww.londoncenter.org
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