Since Bud and Bryan got into a discussion the other day about Ukraine and chess, I thought y’all might enjoy this.
Here’s hoping that, as Phillip suggested earlier, Putin isn’t playing such a subtle game after all, and may have overreached…
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If you want to understand Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Putin, don’t read political science books. Go to fiction section and read Mario Puzo & his Godfather books. He’s not ideological. He’s not crazy. He’s coldly calculating.
Also, if you’re a person who advances the false choice between (a) doing nothing and (b) sending troops to attack Russia, I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain the adult world to you. I would rather you just went and sat at the kiddie table.
There is vast spectrum of real action between these two choices.
The West isn’t helpless.
You are most likely right. Perhaps I shouldn’t have used the word “helplessness” in my previous headline. Maybe “fecklessness” would have been better. That was actually my first thought, but I decided to be kinder to the West than that…
But what can we do that we didn’t do in Georgia in 2008? To no effect …
“America has long stood by Georgia as it has worked to strengthen its security and build its democracy. Hopefully the Obama administration will reward the accomplishments of that partnership by reenergizing the push for Georgia’s further integration into NATO at the next summit, to be held in Britain in September, and by continuing to support Georgia’s sovereignty and democracy.
Unfortunately, Georgia appears to be on a similar trajectory as Ukraine, where President Viktor Yanukovych’s penchant for jailing his pro-Western opposition precipitated the current crisis. Following Georgia’s first peaceful transfer of power through free and fair elections in 2012 and 2013, the new government has used the courts to detain several political opponents, including a former prime minister who is currently secretary-general of the main opposition party, the United Nations Movement (UNM). The courts have also been used to remove another UNM leader, the directly-elected mayor of Tbilisi, from office.” by Giga Bokeria, FEBRUARY 26, 2014
http://goo.gl/jTOXeL
Former president
Given the atrocious handling of the recent weather related shutdown in Atlanta maybe we can swap Georgias with the Russians.
Here’s another interesting facet to this thing…
A week ago, Robert was depicting Putin as a loser in Ukraine. See this cartoon.
Then, Putin muscles his way into Crimea, and suddenly he’s the great chess player, and we don’t know what to do — hence today’s cartoon.
Cartoons can be a good guide to the way things are playing in the collective gut. Putin managed to switch from a situation in which he is perceived as the loser to one in which he holds all the cards.
And you know what they say about perception in politics. It goes a long way in geopolitics, too.
Putin’s just playing the possession is 9/10’s of the law angle.
Where he miscalculated is sending in masked soldiers without identification. He blew the chance to project his ownership of Russia’s realpolitik right to its sphere of influence and he turned the “protection” into jack-booted thuggery. That was not a chess move. The visuals will cut against him for a long, long time; though I saw today that the masks were off the troops. Too late though…