Richard Fernandez, in discussing Vlad The Shirtless, King Of Rus & Muscovy, nails our Feckless Leader to a Weeping Willow Tree:
…Like a one-trick orator you can almost see president Obama rising to his full height and reaching a peroration that has served him so well in the past.
“We’ll be here for Estonia. We’ll be here for Latvia. We’ll be here for Lithuania. You lost your independence once before,” Obama said. “With NATO, you’ll never lose it again.”Splat. That was the kidnapping. The rotten tomato is all over the great speaker’s face. And in the audience, Vladimir Putin sardonically asking, “who threw that?”
Putin has drawn a Red Line he reckons Obama won’t cross. By speaking pointedly of Russia’s nuclear weapons and boasting his armies could reach Kiev in a couple of weeks, he’s made it clear he wants to mix it up. He’s rolled up his shirt and cut himself a few times across the abs just to demonstrate he doesn’t mind bleeding. He has all but dared Obama to cross the line from words to risky action.
Putin is betting, with the calm calculation of a professional thug, that he’s dealing with a tenderfoot unused to getting hurt and losing teeth, who may squeal as he strips him of his possessions, but who will acquiesce anyway — out of fear, out of civility, out of unfamiliarity with pain and the astonishment of someone actually laughing at him.
Like a tiger who’s tasted blood, Putin has lost his fear of Obama. Unless that caution can be reinstated, and unless that dangerous animal is caged, a very great danger faces the world; for now the tiger, who earlier could have been cowed with but a little effort, must now belatedly be forced back at grave risk and possible injury or death.
That caution that must be reinstated in Would-Be-Tsar Vladimir, Mr. Fernandez speaks of, is a very limited time offer and will certainly have expired by 20 January 2017, so those nations in Eastern Europe that trusted us are well and truly royally screwed and the whole equilibrium of The West is poised to collapse in a heap of War.
Damn them all.
