By Alan
Caruba
We all
know that the “sanctions” Obama has placed on a few of Putin’s pals thus far
and those Obama wants the European Union to impose will have no affect whatever
on Putin’s decision to annex the Crimea from Ukraine.
One of
Obama’s solutions to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty includes giving it a billion
dollars because Russia has raised the price of the natural gas it sells to the
Ukraine. This means Putin just made a billion while reacquiring Crimea.
One way to
bring Russia to its knees would be for Obama--if he could--to impose the same things he is doing in
America on the Russian Federation:
# Require
Russia to adopt Obamacare.
# Ban the
mining and use of coal in Russia.
# Do not
allow any drilling on Russian publicly-held land.
# Redefine
the Russian work week to 30 hours.
# Raise
the Russian minimum wage.
# Mandate
overtime pay for Russian government workers.
# Demand
that Russia pay welfare benefits to its illegal immigrants.
# Require
Russia to enact the same regulations as the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency.
# Increase
the Russian national debt by $6 trillion dollars.
# Require
Russia to reduce all elements of its military force and capabilities by
reductions to its military budget.
These policies
since 2009 have weakened the United States and, if applied to Russia, they
would have the same affect. It’s bad enough what Obama has done and is doing to
the U.S., but neither we nor the rest of the world would be better off with a
weak Russia. Its economy is too tied into the world’s.
Putin
insists that it was the West led by the U.S. that resulted in the collapse of
the Soviet Union in 1991 after seventy years of communist rule, but it was Communism
that brought it to its knees. The other element was a decline in the prices of
oil and natural gas--still the primary source of income for the Russian
Federation—that undermined its economy.
While a
panoply of experts keeps talking about the prospect of Russia aggression toward
its former satellite nations in Eastern Europe, the simple fact is that Putin’s
reacquisition of the Crimea just added to Russia’s financial pressures. He can
barely afford Crimea. All the hand-wringing about its annexation ignores the
fact that it was part of Russia for hundreds of years.
Ruchir
Sharma, the head of emerging markets at Morgan Stanley Investment Management,
recently spelled out Russia’s economic woes in a Wall Street Journal commentary
titled “Putin’s Potemkin Economy.”
“Mr.
Putin’s real power base, the economy, is crumbling,” says Sharma. “Russia’s
economic growth rate has plummeted from the 7% average annual pace of the last
decade to 1.3% last year,” adding that “the Central Bank of the Russian
Federation has been fighting to prevent a ruble collapse since the Crimean
crisis began.”
Does that
sound like a Russia that wants to invade its neighbors at this time?
“The
result,” says Sharma, “is that the Russian state has few new sources of income
outside of oil and gas, at a time when it is taking on more dependents” in
Crimea. As for the rest of the Ukraine population, it’s only the younger
generation that did not grow up under the oppression of the former Soviet
Russia that thinks giving up its sovereignty is a good idea. Ukrainians with a
memory of the pre-1991 days know better.
Europe,
much of which depends on Russian gas, will be in no hurry to punish Russia
beyond a few relatively meaningless sanctions. It’s all a charade.
It’s true
that Europe went to war twice for far less reason than the Crimean annexation,
but its present leaders have no wish to repeat that error for all the talk
about international law.
What is
being debated now is whether Putin will, for whatever reason, invade Ukraine.
Only Putin knows that and the decision would be a bad one for him and everyone
else.
As we
strive to survive Obama’s war on the U.S. economy and the current havoc
resulting from Obamacare, it is doubtful that even Obama has any inclination to
see Russia collapse and could not reverse the Crimean situation even if he
cared about it.
He doesn’t seem to care about what he’s doing to the rest of us so it’s
the war at home which we have to survive.
© Alan
Caruba, 2014
4 comments:
Alan, You hit hit the nail right on the head, problem is, I don't think the people of these other countries would allow Obama to do to them what he has done to us.
Obama is the greatest traitor in American history. It is clear that his purpose since January 20, 2009 has been the complete destruction of the United States of America.
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”
― Cicero
Can America survive Obama?
I surely hope we can survive Obama. He has done a lot of damage in six years, but he's running out of support except from the extreme Left.
Another excellent contribution Alan. Thanks also to Ronald for the appropriate quote by Cicero. Amazing how much things stay the same and almost nothing is learned from history.
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