Bobby Jindal:
Sixty-nine years after the American president traveled to the Crimean peninsula to capitulate to a Russian strongman, Barack Obama’s weakness is pushing the United States to another generational conflict with Moscow.
In exchange for some phony promises of future, multilateral cooperation, Franklin Roosevelt in 1945 sated Joseph Stalin’s appetite to expand the population of subjugates under Moscow’s thumb. Eastern European innocents would pay for that mistake in the cold, dark shadow of totalitarianism for nearly half a century. And Americans paid for it with a multibillion-dollar cold war that strained our budgets, dragged our economy, and posed an ever-present threat to the national psyche.
Roosevelt’s failure was to believe a land-grabber could be coaxed, instead of confronted, into submission. Of Stalin, he said, “I think that if I give him everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.” Sound familiar? President Obama’s performance in the current Crimean crisis bears all the marks of that same naïveté.
Obama seems to believe or, at a minimum, to hold out hope that multilateral shame can make a tyrant blush. Roosevelt, similarly, conceded Russian domination of Eastern Europe in exchange for Stalin’s agreement to become a member of the United Nations, where, Roosevelt presumably thought, Stalin would sit around the international family table and play nice.Since Russian troops began massing on the border of Crimea, and then surrounding Ukrainian military assets, President Obama has couched his response only in terms of what the United States is doing to consult its allies. This leader of the free world, when put under pressure that only his office can address, resorts to speaking about process instead of principle. And as is ever the case, this president confuses talking with doing, and consultation with commitment.
The president speaks of a “cost” that Putin will pay for misbehavior in Ukraine, but no doubt the Russian president hears only echoes of the “red line” that Obama failed to enforce in Syria when Bashar Assad used chemical weapons against his own people.
In Roosevelt’s case, Crimea was but the scene of the mistake. For Obama, it’s more than a venue. The sovereign state of Ukraine has been called the “crown jewel” of the now-independent former Soviet Republics. It was home to a large share of the USSR’s nuclear weaponry, missiles the Ukrainians freely relinquished in exchange for promises — from Russia, promises of peace, and from the U.S. and United Kingdom, promises of protection. These accords, the Budapest Memorandum, weren’t a formal treaty, but for a president who uses scarcely any tool but rhetoric, that distinction should matter little.
