President Donald Trump blasted former President Barack Obama for “giving away” Crimea to Russia in 2014 during a Fox News interview on Tuesday.
“He demanded that they let it go,” Trump said, “and Russia came in and took it — like candy from a baby.”
Trump continued, “Nobody ever mentions that. If I ever did that, the fake news would be writing about me day and night for years.”
People can and will argue day and night over whether Crimea ought to be a part of Russia or Ukraine. But it’s a fact that both Washington and Moscow agreed in 1994 to recognize and guarantee Ukraine’s 1991 borders in exchange for Kyiv giving up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons.
It’s also a fact that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin violated that agreement with virtual impunity in 2014 on Obama’s watch, and again in 2022 on Joe Biden’s.
Weak American presidents invite aggression.
So here’s what happens when a U.S. president is weak.
In 2008, President George W. Bush was the lamest of ducks since LBJ removed himself from contention during the 1968 Democrat primaries. That August, Georgia tried and failed miserably to reassert sovereignty over its breakaway South Ossetia region. (South Ossetia had declared “independence” in the early ’90s with Russian connivance and assistance.) Russia responded with a full-scale invasion, securing control over South Ossetia and Georgia’s Abkhazia region, too.
France brokered a peace that (mostly) holds today.
Talk about weak — remember when Barack Obama was caught on camera in South Korea telling make-believe Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to tell the real Russian ruler, Putin, “After my election, I have more flexibility.” Obama was talking about reducing America’s missile defense commitment to our NATO allies, which Putin correctly read as weakness.
As it turned out, it was Putin who had more flexibility after Obama’s election, and he seized Crimea in 2014 and sent the Russian Army into eastern Ukraine after Russian-sponsored rebel forces failed to seize Ukraine’s Donbas region.
To be fair, sometimes Putin gets distracted, too. While he had (er, has) nearly all of the Russian Army’s combat power dedicated to the long, hard slog in Ukraine, Muslim Azerbaijan took the opportunity to seize part of Christian Armenia and cleanse it of Armenians. Putin was unable to live up to his CSTO security commitment to protect Armenia — and Trump 47 has done his best in recent weeks to clean up the mess, too.
And Another Thing: For a guy who likes to play up his nationalist-Orthodox street cred with certain right-wing types, Putin sure does bully or even wage war on an awful lot of Christian nations. Looking around Russia’s “near abroad,” the only way to stay safe from Moscow’s predations is to be NATO or Muslim. Don’t blame me, folks — I’m just reading the news and looking at the maps.
Then there’s poor Belarus. Anytime long-serving strongman Alexander Lukashenko fails to answer “How high?” to Putin’s “Jump!” Putin cracks the whip. There was 2009’s “Milk War” and a threatened invasion in 2021.
Given all of Russia’s cyberattacks on the tiny Baltic States, NATO membership is almost certainly the only thing saving them from physical attack. They’d likely long ago suffered Belarus’s fate as the Kremlin’s satraps.
But the main point, at long last, is this.
We’re 25 years and five presidential administrations into the 21st century. In all that time, the only administrations that didn’t see Russia invade a neighbor were both named Trump.
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