President Obama, like Jimmy Carter before him, is finally getting a late education in how the world works. It’s not how he wants it to be.◼ Provocative Weakness - Bobby Jindal/National Review Online
The world is a dangerous place, where history and greed trump good intentions. Words are cheap.
Obama should learn from history and consider Russian ambition at Yalta 69 years ago.
Sixty-nine years after the American president traveled to the Crimean peninsula to capitulate to a Russian strongman, Barack Obama’s weakness is pushing the United States to another generational conflict with Moscow.
In exchange for some phony promises of future, multilateral cooperation, Franklin Roosevelt in 1945 sated Joseph Stalin’s appetite to expand the population of subjugates under Moscow’s thumb. Eastern European innocents would pay for that mistake in the cold, dark shadow of totalitarianism for nearly half a century. And Americans paid for it with a multibillion-dollar cold war that strained our budgets, dragged our economy, and posed an ever-present threat to the national psyche....
President Obama is often praised for his intelligence. The events in Crimea should spur us to revisit that notion, or at least to mark the difference between wisdom and intelligence. While the president of Russia is using military force to invade neighboring countries, our president is reducing the size of our military and boasting about the record number of Americans on food stamps. Obama conveys weakness to our allies and our enemies, but wise presidents have always understood that American weakness leads to violence, American strength to stability.
