Cereal Industry Responds to Michelle's Call for Better Food
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Now for some humor that might splinter you
"A woman from LosAngeles, who was a tree hugger, a liberal Democrat, and
an anti-hunter, purchased a piece of timberland near Colville, WA. There
was a large tree on one of the highest points in the tract. She wanted a
good view of the natural splendor of her land so she started to climb
the big tree. As she neared the top she encountered a spotted owl that
attacked her. In her haste to escape, the woman slid down the tree to
the ground and got many splinters in her crotch. In considerable pain,
she hurried to a local ER to see a doctor. She told him she was an
environmentalist, a democrat, and an anti-hunter and how she came to get
all the splinters. The doctor listened t o her story with great
patience and then told her to go wait in the examining room and he would
see if he could help her. She sat and waited three hours before the
doctor reappeared.l The angry woman demanded, "What took you so long?"
He smiled and then told her, "Well, I had to get permits from the
Environmental Protection Agency, the Forest Service, and the Bureau of
Land Management before I could remove old -growth timber from a
"recreational area" so close to a waste treatment facility. I'm sorry,
but due to Obama-Care...they turned you down."
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Review of Netanyahu's speech to APAC and meeting with Obama before hand. (See 1 below.)
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Friedman on the Ukraine. (See 2 below.)
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You would think a liar would know when someone else is lying. Putin lies and Obama also lies, so why is Obama unable to realize when he is being lied to.?
Perhaps Obama is so used to lying he no longer can distinguish between lies and truth. (See 3 below.)
We all have them but Obama is unable to find where they are located! (See 3a below.)
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Of to Orlando tomorrow and not able to send memos for a week.
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Dick
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1)Netanyahu meets with Obama and gives him both a lesson in Israel's history with Palestinians and why being tough is better than being a wimp.
You may get more with honey than vinegar but sometimes honey is too sweet and bad for one's digestion.
Obama suggests he does not understand what benefits accrue from being tough when it comes to Putin yet, he is obdurate when it comes to dealing with Republicans.
To Obama, I guess, anything domestic is all about politics and winning at any cost because he is ideologically driven yet, when it comes to non domestic affairs his true character flaw - basic weakness - becomes exposed for all the bullies to see.
Obama is a bully domestically and a wimp in foreign relations when he comes up against other bullies. But then is that not what a true bully is all about?(See 1 below.)
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Dick
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1) At White House, Israel's Netanyahu pushes back against Obama diplomacy
1 OF 3. Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L) shakes hands with U.S. President Barack Obama as they sit down to meet in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington March 3, 2014.
CREDIT: REUTERS/JONATHAN ERNST
PrimeMinister Benjamin Netanyahu bluntly told Barack Obama on Monday that he would never compromise on Israel's security even as the U.S. president sought to reassure him on Iran nuclear diplomacy and pressure him on Middle East peace talks.
In a White House meeting overshadowed by the Ukraine crisis, the two leaders avoided any direct clash during a brief press appearance but were unable to paper over differences on a pair of sensitive diplomatic drives that have stoked tensions between them.
Obama assured Netanyahu of his "absolute commitment" to preventing Iran from developing atomic weapons, despite the Israeli leader's deep skepticism over U.S.-led efforts to reach a final international deal to curb Tehran's nuclear program.
But, warning that time was running out, Obama also urged Netanyahu to make "tough decisions" to help salvage a faltering U.S.-brokered peace process aimed at reaching a framework agreement with the Palestinians and extending talks beyond an April target date for an elusive final accord.
"The Israeli people expect me to stand strong against criticism and pressure," Netanyahu told the president.
Obama and Netanyahu, who have had strained relations in the past, showed no outright tension as they sat side-by-side in the Oval Office. Both were cordial and businesslike. But their differences were clear, and when the talks ended after nearly three hours there was no immediate sign of progress.
Netanyahu arrived in Washington to a veiled warning from Obama that it would be harder to protect Israel against efforts to isolate it internationally if peace efforts failed.
The Israeli prime minister used their brief joint appearance to put the onus on the Palestinians to advance prospects for peace and also to vow to hold the line on what he sees as Israel's security imperative.
HISTORY LESSON
In his remarks, Netanyahu offered Obama what was essentially a history lesson covering the last 20 years of conflict with the Palestinians as well as what Israelis see as an existential threat from Iran, arch-foe of the Jewish state.
"Iran calls openly for Israel's destruction, so I'm sure you'll appreciate that Israel cannot permit such a state to have the ability to make atomic bombs to achieve that goal," Netanyahu said. "And I, as the prime minister of Israel, will do whatever I must do to defend the Jewish state."
Obama is seeking room for diplomacy with Iran, while Netanyahu, who has stoked U.S. concern in the past with threats of unilateral strikes on Iran's nuclear sites, has complained that sanctions on Tehran are being eased prematurely.
The meeting with Netanyahu marked a new direct foray into Middle East peacemaking by Obama, whose first-term efforts ended in failure.
Secretary of State John Kerry has been trying to persuade Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to agree to a framework deal that would enable land-for-peace negotiations to continue, even though there is widespread skepticism inside and outside of the region about his chances for success.
Abbas, who seeks Palestinian statehood, is due at the White House on March 17. He has resisted Netanyahu's demand, repeated during the Oval Office meeting, for the Palestinians to recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.
Netanyahu appeared to be pushing back implicitly against Obama's warning in a Bloomberg View interview of "international fallout" for Israel if peace efforts break down and the building of Jewish settlements continues.
Israelis, increasingly concerned about an anti-Israel boycott movement, view such U.S. warnings as an attempt to squeeze out concessions.
Possibly further complicating the talks, an Israeli government report showed that Israeli construction starts of settler homes had more than doubled last year.
Palestinians seek to establish a state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. Israel captured those areas in the 1967 Middle East war and in 2005, pulled out of the Gaza Strip, now run by Hamas Islamists opposed to Abbas's peace efforts.
OBAMA URGES COMPROMISE
"Israel has been doing its part, and I regret to say that the Palestinians haven't," Netanyahu said, an assertion he is likely to repeat on Tuesday to the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, a past podium for some of his most strident speeches.
Obama commended Netanyahu for his role in the talks that resumed in July but warned that "the time frame that we have set up for completing these negotiations is coming near."
"It's my belief that ultimately it is still possible to create two states," he said. "But it's difficult and it requires compromise on all sides."
Palestinians point to Israeli settlement-building in occupied West Bank territory as the main obstacle to peace.
Netanyahu told Obama that Jewish history taught Israelis that "the best way to guarantee peace is to be strong."
His remark harkened, but without the stridency, to an Oval Office visit in 2011 when he famously lectured the U.S. president on the long struggles of the Jewish people, as he sought to counter Obama's call to base any peace agreement on borders that existed before the 1967 Middle East war.
Ukraine has dominated Obama's agenda. "I know you've got a few other pressing matters on your plate," Netanyahu joked to Obama, who used his press appearance to warn Russian President Vladimir Putin that Moscow faces international isolation for its military intervention in Ukraine's Crimea region.
On Iran, Obama and Netanyahu gave no real sign of progress in bridging fundamental differences.
Netanyahu, whose country is widely believed to be the Middle East's only nuclear-armed nation, has denounced as a "historic mistake" an interim deal that world powers reached with Iran in November, under which it agreed to curb sensitive nuclear activities in return for limited sanctions relief.
He has insists that any final deal must completely dismantle Tehran's uranium enrichment centrifuges, a position that is at odds with Obama's suggestion that Iran, which says its nuclear program is peaceful, could be allowed to enrich on a limited basis for civilian purposes.
On Netanyahu's visit to Congress, where pro-Israel sentiment runs strong, House Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor told him he backed his demands to dismantle Iran's nuclear program and for Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
(Additional reporting by Mark Felsenthal, Roberta Rampton; Editing by Bernadette Baum,Tom Brown and Mohammad Zargham)
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2) Ukraine and the 'Little Cold War'
Editor's Note: In place of George Friedman's regular Geopolitical Weekly, this column is derived from two chapters of Friedman's 2009 book, The Next 100 Years. We are running this abstract of the chapters that focused on Eastern Europe and Russia because the forecast -- written in 2008 -- is prescient in its anticipation of events unfolding today in Russia, Ukraine and Crimea.
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2) Ukraine and the 'Little Cold War'
Editor's Note: In place of George Friedman's regular Geopolitical Weekly, this column is derived from two chapters of Friedman's 2009 book, The Next 100 Years. We are running this abstract of the chapters that focused on Eastern Europe and Russia because the forecast -- written in 2008 -- is prescient in its anticipation of events unfolding today in Russia, Ukraine and Crimea.
We must consider the future of Eurasia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Since 1991, the region has fragmented and decayed. The successor state to the Soviet Union, Russia, is emerging from this period with renewed self-confidence. Yet Russia is also in an untenable geopolitical position. Unless Russia exerts itself to create a sphere of influence, the Russian Federation could itself fragment.
For most of the second half of the 20th century, the Soviet Union controlled Eurasia -- from central Germany to the Pacific, as far south as the Caucasus and the Hindu Kush. When the Soviet Union collapsed, its western frontier moved east nearly 1,000 miles, from the West German border to the Russian border with Belarus. Russian power has now retreated farther east than it has been in centuries. During the Cold War it had moved farther west than ever before. In the coming decades, Russian power will settle somewhere between those two lines.
After the Soviet Union dissolved at the end of the 20th century, foreign powers moved in to take advantage of Russia's economy, creating an era of chaos and poverty. Most significantly, Ukraine moved into an alignment with the United States and away from Russia -- this was a breaking point in Russian history.
The Orange Revolution in Ukraine, from December 2004 to January 2005, was the moment when the post-Cold War world genuinely ended for Russia. The Russians saw the events in Ukraine as an attempt by the United States to draw Ukraine into NATO and thereby set the stage for Russian disintegration. Quite frankly, there was some truth to the Russian perception.
If the West had succeeded in dominating Ukraine, Russia would have become indefensible. The southern border with Belarus, as well as the southwestern frontier of Russia, would have been wide open.
Russia's Resurgence
After what Russia regarded as an American attempt to further damage it, Moscow reverted to a strategy of reasserting its sphere of influence in the areas of the former Soviet Union. The great retreat of Russian power ended in Ukraine. For the next generation, until roughly 2020, Russia's primary concern will be reconstructing the Russian state and reasserting Russian power in the region.
Interestingly, the geopolitical shift is aligning with an economic shift. Vladimir Putin sees Russia less as an industrial power than as an exporter of raw materials, the most important of which is energy (particularly natural gas). He is transforming Russia from an impoverished disaster into a poor but more productive country. Putin also is giving Russia the tool with which to intimidate Europe: the valve on a natural gas pipeline.
But the real flash point, in all likelihood, will be on Russia's western frontier. Belarus will align itself with Russia. Of all the countries in the former Soviet Union, Belarus has had the fewest economic and political reforms and has been the most interested in recreating some successor to the Soviet Union. Linked in some way to Russia, Belarus will bring Russian power back to the borders of the former Soviet Union.
From the Baltics south to the Romanian border there is a region where borders have historically been uncertain and conflict frequent. In the north, there is a long, narrow plain, stretching from the Pyrenees to St. Petersburg. This is where Europe's greatest wars were fought. This is the path that Napoleon and Hitler took to invade Russia. There are few natural barriers. Therefore, the Russians must push their border west as far as possible to create a buffer. After World War II, they drove into the center of Germany on this plain. Today, they have retreated to the east. They have to return, and move as far west as possible. That means the Baltic states and Poland are, as before, problems Russia has to solve.
Defining the limits of Russian influence will be controversial. The United States -- and the countries within the old Soviet sphere -- will not want Russia to go too far.
Russia will not become a global power in the next decade, but it has no choice but to become a major regional power. And that means it will clash with Europe. The Russian-European frontier remains a fault line.
It is unreasonable to talk of Europe as if it were one entity. It is not, in spite of the existence of the European Union. Europe consists of a series of sovereign and contentious nation-states.
In short, post-Cold War Europe is in benign chaos. Russia is the immediate strategic threat to Europe. Russia is interested not in conquering Europe, but in reasserting its control over the former Soviet Union. From the Russian point of view, this is both a reasonable attempt to establish some minimal sphere of influence and essentially a defensive measure.
Obviously the Eastern Europeans want to prevent a Russian resurgence. The real question is what the rest of Europe might do -- and especially, what Germany might do. The Germans are now in a comfortable position with a buffer between them and the Russians, free to focus on their internal economic and social problems. In addition, the heritage of World War II weighs heavily on the Germans. They will not want to act alone, but as part of a unified Europe.
Russia is the eastern portion of Europe and has clashed with the rest of Europe on multiple occasions. Historically, though, Europeans who have invaded Russia have come to a disastrous end. If they are not beaten by the Russians, they are so exhausted from fighting them that someone else defeats them. Russia occasionally pushes its power westward, threatening Europe with the Russian masses. At other times passive and ignored, Russia is often taken advantage of. But, in due course, others pay for underestimating it.
Geographic Handicaps, Energy Assets
If we are going to understand Russia's behavior and intentions, we have to begin with Russia's fundamental weakness -- its borders, particularly in the northwest. On the North European Plain, no matter where Russia's borders are drawn, it is open to attack. There are few significant natural barriers anywhere on this plain. Pushing its western border all the way into Germany, as it did in 1945, still leaves Russia's frontiers without a physical anchor. The only physical advantage Russia can have is depth. The farther west into Europe its borders extend, the farther conquerors have to travel to reach Moscow. Therefore, Russia is always pressing westward on the North European Plain and Europe is always pressing eastward.
Europe is hungry for energy. Russia, constructing pipelines to feed natural gas to Europe, takes care of Europe's energy needs and its own economic problems, and puts Europe in a position of dependency on Russia. In an energy-hungry world, Russia's energy exports are like heroin. It addicts countries once they start using it. Russia has already used its natural gas resources to force neighboring countries to bend to its will. That power reaches into the heart of Europe, where the Germans and the former Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe all depend on Russian natural gas. Add to this its other resources, and Russia can apply significant pressure on Europe.
Dependency can be a double-edged sword. A militarily weak Russia cannot pressure its neighbors, because its neighbors might decide to make a grab for its wealth. So Russia must recover its military strength. Rich and weak is a bad position for nations to be in. If Russia is to be rich in natural resources and export them to Europe, it must be in a position to protect what it has and to shape the international environment in which it lives.
In the next decade, Russia will become increasingly wealthy (relative to its past, at least) but geographically insecure. It will therefore use some of its wealth to create a military force appropriate to protect its interests, buffer zones to protect it from the rest of the world -- and then buffer zones for the buffer zones. Russia's grand strategy involves the creation of deep buffers along the North European Plain, while it divides and manipulates its neighbors, creating a new regional balance of power in Europe. What Russia cannot tolerate are tight borders without buffer zones, and its neighbors united against it. This is why Russia's future actions will appear to be aggressive but will actually be defensive.
Russia's actions will unfold in three phases. In the first phase, Russia will be concerned with recovering influence and effective control in the former Soviet Union, re-creating the system of buffers that the Soviet Union provided it. In the second phase, Russia will seek to create a second tier of buffers beyond the boundaries of the former Soviet Union. It will try to do this without creating a solid wall of opposition, of the kind that choked it during the Cold War. In the third phase -- really something that will have been going on from the beginning -- Russia will try to prevent anti-Russian coalitions from forming.
If we think of the Soviet Union as a natural grouping of geographically isolated and economically handicapped countries, we can see what held it together. The countries that made up the Soviet Union were bound together of necessity. The former Soviet Union consisted of members who really had nowhere else to go. These old economic ties still dominate the region, except that Russia's new model, exporting energy, has made these countries even more dependent than they were previously. Attracted as Ukraine was to the rest of Europe, it could not compete or participate with Europe. Its natural economic relationship is with Russia; it relies on Russia for energy, and ultimately it tends to be militarily dominated by Russia as well.
These are the dynamics that Russia will take advantage of in order to reassert its sphere of influence. It will not necessarily recreate a formal political structure run from Moscow -- although that is not inconceivable. Far more important will be Russian influence in the region over the next five to 10 years.
The Russians will pull the Ukrainians into their alliance with Belarus and will have Russian forces all along the Polish border, and as far south as the Black Sea. This, I believe, will all take place by the mid-2010s.
There has been a great deal of talk in recent years about the weakness of the Russian army, talk that in the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union was accurate. But here is the new reality -- that weakness started to reverse itself in 2000, and by 2015 it will be a thing of the past. The coming confrontation in northeastern Europe will not take place suddenly, but will be an extended confrontation. Russian military strength will have time to develop. The one area in which Russia continued research and development in the 1990s was in advanced military technologies. By 2010, it will certainly have the most effective army in the region. By 2015-2020, it will have a military that will pose a challenge to any power trying to project force into the region, even the United States.
Editor's Note: Subscribers are invited to access the full text of the chapters that focused on Eastern Europe and Russia from George Friedman's 2009 book, The Next 100 Years, by clicking the links below. Excerpts reprinted with permission from Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House, Inc.
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3) Anatomy of a Feckless Presidency
Vladimir Putin seized Ukraine's Crimean peninsula on Thursday, and Barack Obamadelivered a short statement about it on Friday. The former tells us nothing we didn't know already about Russia's strongman. The latter tells us everything we need to know about a weak president's feckless foreign policy.
3) Anatomy of a Feckless Presidency
Gone are the days when the American president was capable of articulating the American interest.
By Bret Stephens
Vladimir Putin seized Ukraine's Crimean peninsula on Thursday, and Barack Obamadelivered a short statement about it on Friday. The former tells us nothing we didn't know already about Russia's strongman. The latter tells us everything we need to know about a weak president's feckless foreign policy.
Let's take a look at what Mr. Obama had to say:
"I also spoke several days ago with President Putin, and my administration has been in daily contact with Russian officials."
OK, but why? What's the point of talking if you won't even make use of what's said?
On Oct. 18, 1962, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko visited President Kennedy in the Oval Office and told him that the Soviet Union would never deploy offensive military capabilities in Cuba. This was a lie, as Kennedy already knew, and four days later he called Gromyko out on the lie in his famous "quarantine" speech, usefully embarrassing the Soviets and rallying U.S. public opinion at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Fifty-plus years later, Mr. Putin told Mr. Obama that Russia had intervened in Crimea because "the lives and health of Russian citizens and the many compatriots" were at imminent risk. That, too, was a transparent lie, as every report out of Crimea attests. The difference this time is an American president who registers no public complaint about being brazenly lied to by a Russian thug.
"We've made clear that they can be part of an international community's effort to support the stability and success of a united Ukraine going forward, which is not only in the interest of the people of Ukraine and the international community, but also in Russia's interest."
In case Mr. Obama hadn't noticed, Mr. Putin isn't exactly keen on "the stability and success of a united Ukraine going forward." It is precisely because a stable, successful and united Ukraine is inimical to Russia's ethnic, ideological and geopolitical interests that Mr. Putin seized the moment to strike.
Presidents Obama and Putin at the G-8 summit in Northern Ireland in June. AFP/Getty Images
Give the Russian president this much: He pursues Russia's national interests, baldly and expediently, as he sees them. The American president, by contrast, does nothing more than patronizingly lecture other countries about where their respective interests should lie.
Yet at no point in his statement did Mr. Obama make an effort to define, much less explain, the U.S. interest in all this. Why should Americans be alarmed that Russia is carving territory from a country they know little, and care even less, about? It would be good to hear the president give an account of just what is at stake for the American people. Instead, the closest he gets to identifying the American interest is to refer to the views of "the international community." Why should U.S. foreign policy be conducted according to the imaginary views of an imagined community?
"The United States will stand with the international community in affirming that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine."
Is there any reason for Russia to think Mr. Obama means business? What were the costs to Russia for harboring Edward Snowden ? When the Kremlin was considering in June what to do with the fugitive NSA contractor living in a Moscow transit lounge, Mr. Kerry warned that there would be "consequences" for giving him asylum. He got asylum; there were no consequences.
Related Video
Global View columnist Bret Stephens on why President Putin ordered a surprise military exercise amid upheaval in Crimea. Photo credit: Associated Press.
Two months later, Mr. Obama was happy to accept Russian mediation for a face-saving deal on Syria's chemical weapons rather than impose the consequences he had promised if Bashar Assad used them. A few months after that, the administration quietly eased its enforcement of the Magnitsky Act sanctioning corrupt Russian officials.
It's probably asking too much of this president to see a connection between his Syria capitulation and this month's events in Ukraine. But Republicans who contributed to last September's fiasco might consider where their isolationist dalliance has led.
"I also commend the Ukrainian government's restraint."
The Ukrainian government isn't showing restraint; it is merely tragically impotent in the face of blunt aggression and domestic disarray. It used to be that defiance, not restraint, was considered the appropriate response to a foreign invasion.
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The liberal press is now filled with news analyses about America's limited policy options, beyond perhaps expelling Russia from the G-8. Nonsense. "In Russia," the historian Dietrich Geyer once wrote, "expansion was an expression of economic weakness, not exuberant strength." Mr. Putin's Russia is a petro-oligarchy whose survival depends on high oil prices and privileged access to the West for the politically connected elite. Raise interest rates, investigate the finances of Mr. Putin's inner circle, impose travel bans on Putin's cronies and broaden the scope of the Magnitsky Act, and we'll see just how resilient the Moscow regime really is. Only a president as inept as Barack Obama could fail to seize the opportunity to win, or even wage, the new Cold War all over again.
3a) Putin's Achilles' Heel
Europe and the U.S. have leverage against Russia, if they'll use it.
Russia's Micex stock index fell 11% on Monday and the ruble hit an all-time low afterVladimir Putin's weekend invasion of Ukraine's Crimea peninsula. The sour reaction suggests that investors understand that Mr. Putin's Achilles' heel is the Russian economy and its access to world financial markets, if the West has the wit and will to exploit it.
The conventional wisdom in the pundit class is that Russia holds the economic edge because of its natural gas supplies to Ukraine and much of Europe. But that supply is a double-edged sword because Russia needs the foreign-exchange earnings as much as Europe needs the gas. With enough stockpiles to get through the rest of the winter, Ukraine and Europe are also less subject to immediate energy blackmail.
More broadly, the Russian economy is no global tiger. Last year it grew 1.3% and the ruble has been among the currencies hit hardest by the flight away from emerging markets as the U.S. Federal Reserve tapers its bond purchases. Russia's central bank raised its benchmark interest rate to 7% from 5.5% on Monday to stop further flight.
Russia's economy continues to be largely an oil commodity play that has diversified little thanks to Mr. Putin's treatment of foreign and domestic investors. As in most authoritarian regimes, Russia's economy is top-heavy and built on favors for oligarchs who do what the Kremlin wants. Do otherwise and you end up in Siberia like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, or dead like anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
No one knows this better than the Russians themselves, which is one reason they are so eager to negotiate a bilateral investment treaty with the U.S. They know most foreign investors won't come in without more protective rules. The U.S. should shut down these talks.
The headquarters of the Micex-RTS Moscow Exchange, Russia's benchmark stock index.Bloomberg
Even more important to the Kremlin and its cronies is access to the Western financial system, especially as a safe harbor for their investments. No sensible commissar keeps any more wealth than he has to inside Russia. Russians put their cash in Cyprus or Swiss banks, Miami or New York condos, or British sports teams.
This is where financial and visa sanctions can squeeze the would-be Bonapartes in Moscow. Some of us pushed so hard in 2012 for the Magnitsky Act to be passed along with normal trading relations with Russia precisely because we feared this kind of Kremlin power play. President Obama resisted the bill until it was forced on him, and then he limited the names on the sanctions list. But now he may be glad to have this foreign-policy tool.
Asset freezes and other sanctions could target the Russian elite and their financial links to the West. Call this the "Banco Delta Asia" approach, after the U.S. Treasury's 2005 money-laundering crackdown against a small Macau bank that held accounts for North Korean companies and the ruling Kim family. Washington discovered that making the bank a pariah institution had a huge effect on Pyongyang's ability to conduct trade.
These sanctions techniques have been refined even more thanks to experience with Iran. They can essentially make the Kremlin clique and other Russian elites persona non grata in the West. This would increase the domestic political pressure on Mr. Putin.
The question now is whether Mr. Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and their peers have the will for this kind of extended showdown. Mr. Putin's bet is that they don't. As John Vinocur notes nearby, European opinion runs the gamut from tough to timorous, with the Germans the worst.
On Sunday German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier even seemed to advise against cancelling the G-8 summit in Sochi later this year. "The G-8 panel is the only panel where we Westerners talk directly to Russia," he pleaded, as if Mr. Putin will be moved to compromise by more talk.
The European foreign ministers meeting Monday at least sounded more like vertebrates, floating the possibility of sanctions if Mr. Putin doesn't back down from his "act of aggression" in Crimea. But this game of maybe-someday-eventually will only play into Mr. Putin's conviction that he can dictate events on the ground and that Europe and the U.S. will give in as attention flags.
Mr. Putin's calculation is that Mr. Obama lacks the will for an extended confrontation because the U.S. President thinks he needs Russia's help on Iran and Syria. Even if Mr. Obama discovers some new and unlikely resolve, Mr. Putin figures he can divide Europe and the U.S. so any sanctions will be mild and muted. This is what happened after Russia's 2008 invasion of Georgia, for which he paid no price even as his troops still occupy Georgian territory.
The stakes are much larger in Ukraine, and any message of acquiescence will be that much louder. European leaders need to understand that Mr. Putin considers the Russian presidency to be a lifetime self-appointment, and he plans to use it to revise the post-Cold War power balance on the Continent. The way to defeat his plans is with a united U.S.-Europe front that exploits Mr. Putin's financial and economic vulnerability.
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