Jim Geraghty starts by chronicling a spectacularly bad prediction, continuing our theme of earlier today:
The always-reliable Eli Lake, quoting apparently fallible sources, February 27: “American intelligence has concluded that Russia won’t openly invade Ukraine, despite a massive military exercise on the border and the armed takeover of local airports. U.S. intelligence estimates conclude that Russia has no intention of invading Ukraine. This, despite the launch of a massive, new Russian military exercise near Ukraine’s border and moves from armed men to seize two key airports in the country’s Crimea region.”
Word Sunday night: “A senior administration official told reporters on a conference call that Russian forces were ‘now in complete operational control of the Crimean peninsula.’ The official said, ‘There is no question that they are in an occupation commission in Crimea. They are flying in reinforcements and they are settling in.”
(drumming fingers)
How do you botch that? Obviously, a lot of us don’t think terribly highly of the foreign-policy instincts and chops of John Kerry, Bob Kerrey, Susan Rice, Joe Biden, and Barack Obama. But is this all-star team getting bad intelligence on top of their other problems? Or is it that they only hear what they want to hear from the intelligence community?
A sample of John Kerry’s keen eye for foreign policy:
“Russia chose this brazen act of aggression and moved in with its forces on a completely trumped up set of pretext, claiming that people were threatened. And the fact is that that’s not the act of somebody who is strong, that’s the act of somebody who is acting out of weakness and out of certain kind of desperation.”
Is it really an act of weakness, John? Because right now, Putin controls Crimea and he’s got Kiev shaking in its boots, and the only thing that Washington and the European capitals can agree on is that they don’t want to get into a shooting war with Russia. What’s desperate about it? Right now, Putin is basically daring the West, seeing what they’re willing to do to stop him. Perhaps not quite as explicitly as the UK newspaper The Sun puts it…
Maybe they’ll throw Russia out of the G8. What other consequences are there?
In that interview, Bob Schieffer said the White House described Barack Obama’s 90-minute phone call with Putin “the toughest phone call of his presidency.”
Ah. A tough phone call.
Thus the arsenal of democracy is reduced to the tools of the telemarketer.
The Washington Post‘s Jackson Diehl: “New White House background spin for journalists: Putin has made such a big mistake by invading Crimea that it’s a good thing, really.”
We have a White House full of officials who think they can spin a Russian invasion. It’s as if they think they can alter reality with their minds.
As I mentioned in an earlier Jolt, shortly after the Syria debacle, the Obama administration came into power oblivious to some hard lessons of foreign policy, and has proven strikingly resistant to those lessons: Being nicer to countries like Russia will not make them nicer to you. The United Nations is not an effective tool for resolving crises. Some foreign leaders are beyond persuasion and diplomacy. There is no “international community” ready to work together to solve problems, and there probably never will be.
You can pin this on Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Susan Rice, but most of all, the buck stops with the president. Those of us who scoffed a bit at a state senator ascending to the presidency within four years on a wave of media hype and adoration are not quite so shocked by this current mess. We never bought into this notion that getting greater cooperation from our allies, and less hostility from our enemies, was just a matter of giving this crew the wheel and letting them practice, as Hillary Clinton arrogantly declared it, “smart power.” (These people can’t even label a foreign-policy approach without reminding us of how highly they think of themselves.) They looked out at the world at the end of the Bush years, and didn’t see tough decisions, unsolvable problems, unstable institutions, restless populations, technology enabling the impulse to destabilize existing institutions, evil men hungry for more power, and difficult trade-offs. No, our problems and challengers were just a matter of the previous hands running U.S. foreign policy not being smart enough.
The whole “reset button” ceremony with Hillary Clinton and Russia’s Sergey Lavrovwas a formal commemoration of the incoming administration’s naïveté. The “famously stormy” relationship between Condi Rice and Lavrov was not a matter of Rice not being diplomatic enough or nice enough or trying hard enough. It reflected that Vladimir Putin and most of Russia’s highest levels of government defined their interests as opposing our interests.
This had to hurt the New Republic to recall this:
In the course of the last presidential campaign, Mitt Romney made a comment about America’s number one “geopolitical foe,” which Romney claimed was Russia. He was mocked by the president and many liberal commentators. Here are Romney’s remarks, in their full context, which came during a conversation with Wolf Blitzer:
ROMNEY: Russia…is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe. They fight every cause for the world’s worst actors.
BLITZER: But you think Russia is a bigger foe right now than, let’s say, Iran or China or North Korea? Is that—is that what you’re suggesting, Governor?
ROMNEY: Well, I’m saying in terms of a geopolitical opponent, the nation that lines up with the world’s worst actors. Of course, the greatest threat that the world faces is a nuclear Iran. A nuclear North Korea is already troubling enough.
But when these—these terrible actors pursue their course in the world and we go to the United Nations looking for ways to stop them, when—when Assad, for instance, is murdering his own people, we go—we go to the United Nations, and who is it that always stands up for the world’s worst actors? It is always Russia, typically with China alongside.
And—and so in terms of a geopolitical foe, a nation that’s on the Security Council, that has the heft of the Security Council and is, of course, a—a massive nuclear power, Russia is the—the geopolitical foe.
This all seems…exactly right.
George Will adds:
One hundred years after a spark in Central Europe ignited a conflagration from which the world has not yet recovered and from which Europe will never recover, armed forces have crossed an international border in Central Europe, eliciting this analysis from Secretary of State John Kerry: “It’s a 19th-century act in the 21st century. It really puts at question Russia’s capacity to be within the G8.”
Although this “19th-century act” resembles many 20th century (and 16th, 17th and 18th century) acts, it is, the flabbergasted Kerry thinks, astonishing in the 21st century, which he evidently supposes to be entirely unlike any other. What is more disconcerting — that Kerry believes this? Or that his response to Putin’s aggression is to question Russia’s “capacity” — Kerry means fitness — for membership in the G8?
For many centuries, European peace has been regularly broken because national borders do not tidily coincide with ethnic, linguistic and religious patterns. This problem was intensified by World War I, which demolished the Habsburg, Romanov and Ottoman empires. Ukraine is a shard of the first two, and a neighbor of a remnant of the third.
The problems bequeathed by that war were aggravated by a peacemaker, one of Kerry’s precursors among American progressives eager to share with the world their expertise at imposing rationality on untidy societies. Unfortunately, Woodrow Wilson’s earnestness about improving the world was larger than his appreciation of how the world’s complexities can cause improvers to make matters worse.
Wilson injected into diplomatic discourse the idea that “self-determination” is a universal right and “an imperative principle of action.” Several of his Fourteen Points concerned self-determination. But of what “self” was he speaking? Sometimes he spoke of the self-determination of “nations,” at other times of “peoples,” as though these are synonyms. Wilson’s secretary of state, Robert Lansing, wondered “what unit has he in mind” and warned that “certain phrases” of Wilson’s “have not been thought out.” But they resonated. In the Atlantic Charter of 1941, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill affirmed the rights of “peoples.” The U.N. Charter endorses the self-determination of “peoples.” Which became a third ingredient, ethnic self-determination. Wilson had sown dragon’s teeth.
Lansing said the “undigested” word “self-determination” is “loaded with dynamite. … It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives.” While Wilson was making phrases in 1918, a German corporal recovering from a gas attack was making plans. And on Sept. 27, 1938, the corporal, then Germany’s chancellor, said “the right of self-determination, which had been proclaimed by President Wilson as the most important basis of national life, was simply denied to the Sudeten Germans” and must be enforced. So Czechoslovakia was dismembered. Still, the war came. …
“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you,” supposedly said Lev Bronstein, as Leon Trotsky was known when he lived in the Bronx, before he made the Red Army, the parent of the forces Putin is wielding. Barack Obama, who involved the United States in seven months of war with Libya, perhaps because the project was untainted by U.S. national interest, is seeking diplomatic and especially economic leverage against Putin’s ramshackle nation in order to advance the enormous U.S. interest in depriving him of Ukraine.
Unless Obama finds such leverage, his precipitous slide into Jimmy Carter territory will continue. As an expression of disdain for a U.S. president, Putin’s seizure of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula is symmetrical with Leonid Brezhnev’s invasion of Afghanistan late in Carter’s presidency. Large presidential failures cannot be hermetically sealed; they permeate a presidency. Putin’s contribution to the miniaturization of Obama comes in the context of Obama’s self-inflicted wound — Obamacare, which simultaneously shattered belief in his competence and honesty, and may linger as ruinously for Obama as the Iranian hostage crisis did for Carter.
And Putin’s not done, according to CNS News:
During his 90-minute phone conversation with President Obama on Saturday, Russian President Vladimir Putin hinted that Russian military intervention in Ukraine could go beyond Crimea, the region now under effectively occupied by Russia.
That’s according to the Kremlin’s brief account of the phone call, initiated by Obama.
“Vladimir Putin stressed that in case of any further spread of violence to Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, Russia retains the right to protect its interests and the Russian-speaking population of those areas,” it said. ,,,
“Vladimir Putin noted that in case of any escalation of violence against the Russian-speaking population of the eastern regions of Ukraine and Crimea, Russia would not be able to stay away and would resort to whatever measures are necessary in compliance with international law,” his office said in a statement.
The White House readout of the Obama-Putin call made reference to other parts of Ukraine, too.
“The United States calls on Russia to de-escalate tensions by withdrawing its forces back to bases in Crimea and to refrain from any interference elsewhere in Ukraine,” it said.
And all of this is happening not because the U.S. is strong, but because Putin believes the U.S. under Obama is weak.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
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