Even when he occasionally gets it right, Obama screws it up
Posted by John Reed on
Even when Obama’s right no one believes him.
Obama’s current policy on Syria is correct for the right reasons: stay out—it’s a tar baby—it is not strategic—IS is not a threat to the U.S unless they become a rich state—Russia will bankrupt itself spending a lot of money trying to prop up Assad.
His prior policy—the red line and Assad must go were disasters because you don’t say stuff like that unless you mean to enforce it. But Obama has told so many lies and been so feckless and evasive in so many instances that he has turned himself, and the U.S., into the boy who cried wolf.
Another analogy is he is a poker player who bluffs too much. If you never bluff, you can only win when you have good cards. Which actually might work for the U.S. in geopolitics because we usually have the best cards in that realm.
Never bluffing works if you always have the best cards.
Sometimes bluffing enables you to win when you sometimes have bad cards.
But Obama’s approach, to always bluff, to speak loudly and carry a big stick that you never use, is disastrous. It means you can’t win even when you have the best cards. That’s a rather profound “accomplishment” if screwing things up super bad can be considered an accomplishment.
For all his dishonesty and being a jerk behavior, I do not believe The Donald would make mistakes like this. As a 40-year businessman in various very tough businesses, he may have tried this sort of behavior in his youth, but learned quickly not to do it. Obama, however, never left his youth. He is a permanent grad student—AND HE DOES NOT LEARN FROM HIS MISTAKES. He seems to have Leftist ideology inculcated from birth where the rest of us have brains. He is congenially anti-war. All you have to do to defeat an anti-war guy—even one with the most powerful military on earth—is to threaten him with war. Before Obama, Russia had to threaten us with World War III to get us to run up the white flag in Korea, Vietnam. With Obama, Russia only needs to threaten military actions.
I don’t think The Donald would lose with good cards, which is hard to do. Only Obama would screw things up so much that he would cause the U.S. to lose in situations where we have all the cards and the opponent has zilch.
Russia has the economy of Italy, a military that lost in Afghanistan and Chechnya, a shrinking population that is something like one tenth of America and its military allies. Their defense spending is a fraction of that of America and its allies. The impressive display of Russian military power in Syria is belied by the fact that they may have emptied the homeland of all their good stuff to make the world think they have lots of troops and military weapons.
Here is one comparison: https://socioecohistory.wordpress.com/…/russia-warns-nato-…/
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2 comments
Jan, interesting stuff. Thanks. Russia has nukes, but cannot use them, so what do they accomplish other than forcing us to have a deterrent equivalent? Their conventional forces are comparable to maybe Germany and Japan combined, yet Europe and the rest of he world are terrified of the Russians. The Russian military, other than useless nukes, is a Potemkin Village with what little facade they can muster on prominent display in Syria.
There is a report that Turkey shot down a Russian plane that went into its airspace. I hope it’s true. And I predict that Putin will huff and puff but not do anything concrete. He can’t. I am glad someone called his bluff if they did. The longer we wait to call his bluff, the greater the danger that he will go so far we have to respond and that could get dangerous to the extent that Russia would feel national pride requires nuclear war. About 100 million Russians would die in a nuclear war with NATO. That would leave 43 million Russians to occupy and defend their 6.6 million square miles. Probably their neighbors would then seize the relatively good parts using conventional weapons and Russia could do nothing about it. They would become a sort of second Mongolia.
Jack, your assessment of Russia is spot on. The wealth of Russia is narrowly focused in the hands of the newly rich and government. Not much different than from the time of the Tsars; a tiny group controlling what little wealth they have while the vast majority of the population live day to day.
Wife and I just returned from a trip through Russia and Eastern Europe. The biggest surprise to me was a notable absence of any agrarian class in Russia. We saw vast fields of farmland uncultivated, neglected. Only tractors we saw were pulling wagons in the cities, none in the fields. Past and present Russian policies have all but destroyed a vital segment of their country’s economy. Unlike Poland, where it seemed every inch of fertile land we saw was being worked. Polish farmers were plowing their fields on a Sunday. Cultivators and harvesters in the fields waiting to be used. Cattle and sheep were grazing in the pastures. We saw no farm equipment anywhere in Russia.
Those talk about unequal distribution of wealth here in the USA, have no idea how wealthy our country really is. Life in the smallest appalachian town is far more comfortable than the life of the Russian countryman who are still waiting for indoor toilets and running water.