Have you been paying attention to the conflict between Russia and the Ukraine?

If not, maybe you should, because the Washington Post reports:

Think that’s bad? The London Daily Mail reports:

A treaty signed in 1994 by the US and Britain could pull both countries into a war to protect Ukraine if President Putin’s troops cross into the country.

Bill Clinton, John Major, Boris Yeltsin and Leonid Kuchma – the then-rulers of the USA, UK, Russia and Ukraine – agreed to the The Budapest Memorandum as part of the denuclearization of former Soviet republics after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Technically it means that if Russia has invaded Ukraine then it would be difficult for the US and Britain to avoid going to war.

Putin installed 150,000 troops along Ukraine’s borders after the overthrow of Moscow ally Viktor Yanukovych by pro-European protesters. …

Sir Tony Brenton, who served as British Ambassador from 2004 to 2008, said that war could be an option ‘if we do conclude the [Budapest] Memorandum is legally binding.’

It promises to protect Ukraine’s borders, in return for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons.

Today Kiev has demanded the agreement is activated after insisting their borders had been violated. …

Moscow has been sending mixed signals about Ukraine but pledged to respect its territorial integrity. Putin has long dreamed of pulling Ukraine, a country of 46 million people considered the cradle of Russian civilization, closer into Moscow’s orbit.

More on the treaty:

Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances was a international treaty signed on February, 5, 1994, in Budapest.

The diplomatic document saw signatories make promises to each other as part of the denuclearization of former Soviet republics after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

It was signed by Bill Clinton, John Major, Boris Yeltsin and Leonid Kuchma – the then-rulers of the USA, UK, Russia and Ukraine.

The agreement promises to protest Ukraine’s borders in return for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons.

It is not a formal treaty, but rather, a diplomatic document.

It was an unprecedented case in contemporary international life and international law.

Whether is it legally binding in complex.

‘It is binding in international law, but that doesn’t mean it has any means of enforcement,’ says Barry Kellman is a professor of law and director of the International Weapons Control Center at DePaul University’s College of Law told Radio Free Europe.

You may recall that the Clinton administration’s favorite military engagement was an engagement in which the U.S. had no actual strategic interests — to name two, Somalia and Kosovo. Twenty years later, we do have an actual strategic interest because Bill Clinton signed that treaty, unless you don’t think the U.S. signature on a treaty, or “diplomatic document,” should mean anything. (In which case we should immediately reinstitute the Monroe Doctrine and the Platt Amendment and eject the Castros from Cuba and the Chavezistas from Venezuela.)

One comment observed that such entangling alliances are what started World War I. The more apt comparison is to a smaller-scale version of the Cold War, the original of which was fought in Vietnam formally and Central America and Africa informally. Cold War II wouldn’t (or perhaps isn’t) between the U.S. and its allies and the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact. But Putin would love to reassemble the Soviet Union without Communism. This isn’t about ideology; it’s about power.

You’ll notice that Putin has become expansionist during the Obama administration. That’s because Putin has concluded the U.S. won’t do anything about it. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 because Japan thought the U.S. was weak. Osama bin Laden planned 9/11 because he thought the U.S. was weak. What do you think Putin sees when he observes Obama, Joe Biden and John Francis Kerry?

Robert W. Merry identifies “Barack Obama’s Biggest Failure”:

Of all the disappointments of the Barack Obama presidency, probably the greatest was his inability to honor his campaign commitment to change the political culture in Washington. Nearly everyone agrees that he came to power at a time of poisoned politics in the nation’s capital. He promised to change that. No one can credibly argue that things are better now. But there remains widespread and intense disagreement on who bears the blame for the ongoing rancor of our national politics some five years into the Obama presidency.

Looking at it from the standpoint of how American politics works, the blame rests with Obama.

During his initial 2008 presidential campaign, Obama promised to “turn the page on ugly partisanship in Washington so we can bring Democrats and Republicans together to pass an agenda that works for the American people.” On another occasion, he declared that “the time has come to move beyond the bitterness and anger that’s consumed Washington….To build a coalition for change that stretches through red states and blue states….We’re choosing unity over division.” …

Obama’s failure to redeem that promise has generated abundant commentary over the years, and it has generally fallen into three categories.

First, Obama supporters have placed the blame squarely on Republicans. “We met an implacable opposition in the Republican leadership,” said presidential acolyte David Axelrod. Former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel added, referring to the congressional opposition, “If you decide before you listen what your position is, it’s really hard to build trust, cooperation and openness.”

This is lame. Obama didn’t promise to change the political culture in Washington if the Republicans would let him. He issued his promise unconditionally. That placed a burden on him to find a way to make it work.

Second, many in the news media have simply dismissed the promise as impossible to fulfill in our time of polarized politics and hence not something to fret much about. A New Yorker writer described the promise as “not just naïve but delusional.” Balz wrote that, in light of subsequent events, it sounds “quaint, even naïve.” Obama himself acknowledged to Oprah Winfrey that he wasn’t able to alter Washington’s “tone” as much as he thought and was “probably…overly optimistic.” This is a cop-out. It might have some resonance had Obama made a serious and sustained effort to operate in a new political style, searching for a new political paradigm to replace the tired old nostrums contributing to governmental gridlock. But he didn’t.

Third, Republicans blame Obama for not reaching out to them at the start of his presidency, when he was pushing for a stimulus package to combat the recession that then had the nation in its grip. According to this view, expressed by House Speaker John Boehner, Republicans were prepared to work with Obama on that legislation but were stiffed in favor of a partisan approach in which Democrats took exclusive control of the process.

This is incomplete. If Obama truly had been serious about improving the political culture of Washington, he certainly had to find a way to work with Republicans (though not necessarily with Republican leaders). And the stimulus was a good place to start. But what’s missing from the Boehner formulation is any role for the American people. Nobody can change the culture of Washington by working simply within the culture of Washington.

Here’s where we get to the crux of Obama’s failed promise. Gridlock and political rancor occur when the parties cling to old ideas that no longer work, when events have moved beyond old political paradigms but politicians can’t bring themselves to shed them. That was the situation in 2009, when Obama became president. But, instead of crafting new paradigms for a new era and seeking to sell it them the American people (thus bringing new pressure on Washington to adjust to a changing nation), he doubled down on the tired old Democratic notions of income redistribution, class conflict and governmental aggrandizement.

It didn’t work. His greatest accomplishment in this realm was the Affordable Care Act, and this injected more rancor and political poison into the body politic than any other legislation of the past generation. As with his stimulus package, also a throwback to old Democratic formulas, Obama got his Obamacare legislation through Congress without a single Republican vote.

Thus, it wasn’t merely a matter of getting Democrats and Republicans to work together in the context of the old politics, which Obama had no intention of doing anyway. It was a matter of crafting a new brand of politics—growth strategies, tax reforms, entitlement initiatives, infrastructure projects, new foreign-policy thinking—all aimed at busting past the old political fault lines and creating new political coalitions.

That’s what great presidents do. If we look at the presidencies of Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, the two Roosevelts and Reagan, we see that each scrambled up the old terms of debate and in the process created new governing formulations that propelled the nation in new directions. And they did it in conversation with the nation at large, not just with the pols of Washington.

That’s how presidents can break up deadlocks and lance the boils of rancor and nastiness that are the product of deadlock.

Reagan comes to particular mind here. The Republican Party never had a majority in that dictatorship of the majority that is the House of Representatives. And yet Reagan went right over the top of Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill and got his major initiatives into law, particularly two major tax cuts. For that matter, Lyndon Johnson got John F. Kennedy’s civil rights legislation enacted with significant Republican support and significant Democratic opposition.

(I’d add Bill Clinton to this list, but I don’t think he counts because his interests were less ideology than his own political fortunes. In contrast, though, the Clinton presidency was a marvel of bipartisanism.)

Merry’s thesis demonstrates not only that Obama is a fraud. It also demonstrates a character flaw in the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W. Regardless of the election results, whoever wins the presidential election is supposed to be the president of all the American people, not just those who voted for him. The only thing that interests Obama is the political interests of his supporters. He has not now, nor has he ever, demonstrated unqualified love of this country and what it stands for, irrespective of whether he agrees with its politics.

I have always thought that Obama’s biggest mistake was his misreading of the 2008 election results, as if he won out of a huge Democratic mandate. (Which, if that were the case, magically disappeared two years later.) Voters do not want change per se; voters want improvement. Now I think Obama didn’t care what the 2008 election results meant. That either counts as misjudgement or arrogance, or perhaps both, either of which would be another character flaw.