David Goldman at Pajamas Media writes Ukraine is Hopeless… Not Serious [1].
Excerpts:
Ukraine isn’t a country: it’s a Frankenstein monster composed of pieces of dead empires, stitched together by Stalin. It has never had a government in the Western sense of the term after the collapse of the Soviet Union gave it independence, just the equivalent of the family offices for one predatory oligarch after another–including the “Gas Princess,” Yulia Tymoshenko. It has a per capital income of $3,300 per year, about the same as Egypt and Syria, and less than a tenth of the European average. The whole market capitalization of its stock exchange is worth less than the Disney Company. It’s a basket case that claims to need $35 billion to survive the next two years. Money talks and bullshit walks. Who wants to ask the American taxpayer for $35 billion for Ukraine, one of the most corrupt economies on earth? How about $5 billion? Secretary of State Kerry is talking about $1 billion in loan guarantees, and the Europeans are talking a similar amount. That’s not diplomacy. It’s a clown show.
HKO thoughts:
A lot of blustering from the right about the presidents “failure”, but other than various protests what would you do AT THIS POINT. We are not going to invade, or bomb, and we are not going to out finance Russia on this either.
The act of invasion is immediate, but the conditions that influenced and facilitated it have consumed much time. Leading from behind, drawing meaningless red lines, pushing reset buttons, and recent talk of drastic cuts in the military leaves a leadership void. Such power voids beg to be filled.
We as a country cannot be a force for peace or war when our policies change radically every 4-8 years. Our opponents think in much greater time frames.