The lack of any significant deterrent to Russia’s annexation of Crimea makes more territorial grabs far more likely and is made possible by repeated demonstrations of U.S. weakness throughout the Obama administration.
On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomed Crimea as part of Russia despite most western nations declaring Sunday’s referendum illegitimate. In announcing the annexation of Crimea, Putin also declared Russia has no more territorial ambitions, a statement that experts say should send a chill down our spine.
“When you hear someone who has just gobbled up a piece of real estate say they’re not going to do it again, the first thing you better look at is where they’re likely to go next,” said Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney, who served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy in the Reagan administration.
“As with Adolf Hitler, who promised after he gobbled up the Sudetenland that he would not take all of Czechoslovakia and did and then proceeded to move rapaciously through the rest of Europe, my feeling is we’re likely to see a similar kind of agenda playing out with Vladimir Putin,” said Gaffney.
Gaffney says eastern Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia and Lithuania are all extremely vulnerable to Russian annexation.
“Nobody knows for sure but what I think is likely is that we’re going to see more of this if there isn’t any appreciable cost to Putin. At the moment, such cost as the United States and its European allies have been willing even to discuss, let alone to impose, are clearly inadequate to the task,” said Gaffney.
On Monday, President Obama announced he was tightening sanctions on a handful of key Russian individuals and that the U.S. would be in close consultation with our European allies. Gaffney says Obama’s response is “cosmetic” and barely got the attention of Putin and other key officials. However, he believes there is a successful blueprint from the Reagan years.
“If we were serious about this, what we should be doing, recognizing that what we’re up against now is a guy with the ambition of constituting maybe the Soviet Union 2.0 minus the communist ideology. Maybe it’s just the Russian empire. Whatever it is, it’s something very much akin to what we’ve seen in the past. When we dealt effectively with it in the past under Ronald Reagan, we not only contained this kind of behavior, we rolled it back. I think that’s the plan that needs to be adopted now,” said Gaffney.
So how much different is our standing with Russia than just five years ago at the close of the George W. Bush presidency? How has Obama’s “reset button” and gestures like scrapping plans for a missile shield in eastern Europe hurt our ability to deter aberrant behavior by Russia? And how would Putin calculate differently if this was early 2009? Gaffney sees one major difference that emboldens Putin.
“For one thing, we would not have essentially eviscerated the United States military. We would not have seen the sequence of steps that have been perceived by our enemies. I call it the Obama doctrine, emboldening our foes,undermining our friends and diminishing our country. The combination of hollowing out our armed forces and demonstrating this kind of behavior has created what (former Defense Secretary) Don Rumsfeld I think quite accurately has described as a phenomenon of weakness that is provocative,” said Gaffney.
“I think if you were to go back to 2009 and you had not seen these sort of steps, we might have been in a position to check this kind of aggression or deter it in the first place, which we are sadly not able to do today,” said Gaffney.
But now that we’re in our current position, what does Gaffney expect from Obama if Putin seeks to acquire more territory?
“My guess is from what we have witnessed to date, both in this immediate crisis and over the previous five years of this presidency is that he will basically say never mind about those red lines. He will find a way to accommodate himself to the new reality, only in this case that reality is going to continue to become uglier by the day,” said Gaffney.
