On CNN.com, we read:
As Air Force One landed in Estonia’s capital Wednesday, President Barack Obama’s message to Vladimir Putin — only 500 miles away in Moscow — was clear: Stay put.
In a speech in Tallinn, Obama said the vision of a Europe dedicated to peace and freedom is “threatened by Russia’s aggression against Ukraine,” but said NATO will not allow that aggression to go unchecked.
“We will defend our NATO allies, and that means every ally,” he said. “We will be here for Estonia. … You lost your independence once before. With NATO, you will never lose it again.”
It’s too late for that. The Estonians have already lost their independence. And it wasn’t taken from them. They straight-up gave it away.
After centuries of domination under foreign powers, the Estonians finally gained full independence in 1991 when they ratified secession from the USSR. In a stunningly blind move, Estonia enjoyed independence for less than 25 years before eagerly submitting to NATO and the European Union in 2004, and discarding their independent currency for the Euro in 2011.
The Estonians are not independent. They are subjects to Brussels politically, to the European Central Bank monetarily, and to NATO militarily. What else is left?
“One of our goals at the summit over the next several days is to once again project unity across NATO on behalf of Ukraine’s efforts to maintain its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Obama said.
He added that Russia was “paying a heavy price for its actions,” in part through Western sanctions imposed over Ukraine, and that NATO is poised to do more to help Ukraine defend itself.
Obama and the other foreign policy elites will keep repeating “NATO” over and over to reinforce the notion that any Ukrainian intervention will be a NATO coalition. That’s a load of bull. If NATO intervenes in Ukraine, it will be an American war with peripheral support from Europe, Turkey, and Canada. American troops will take the brunt of the action, and the American taxpayers will take the brunt of the cost; all other NATO members will just be along for the ride.
Russia is currently occupying the Crimean peninsula, which is legally a part of Ukraine (at the moment). Furthermore, Russia is threatening to invade under the auspices of protecting the ethnic Russian population that lives in Ukraine. With that in mind, let me ask you this: Do you actually care?
According to some recent polls, a lot of folks apparently do not care:
Most Americans don’t think the U.S. is obliged to intervene in the recent annexation by Russia of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. A majority of 61 percent of Americans do not think the U.S. has a responsibility to do something about the situation between Russia and Ukraine, nearly twice as many as the 32 percent who think it does. There is widespread bipartisan agreement on this.
I could hardly care less about what happens in Ukraine. Sounds harsh? That’s subjective. It’s not that I’m a heartless bastard who doesn’t care about people; make no mistake, my heart goes out to all the innocent people being dragged into war and brutalized by Russian rebels and the Ukrainian military. I have no doubt that there are innocent civilians on both sides who’d just like to live out their lives in peace and away from the madness. But do I care in the sense that I see some type of threat to my own longevity, safety, or quality of life? Absolutely not. Why should I? What threat does Russia pose to the USA, really?
Russia is a 2nd World nation that continues to exist only because they can pull minerals out of the ground. The Kremlin is run by ex-Communist bureaucrats who are just as inept and kleptocratic as they were under the Hammer and Sickle, except that now they don’t have any sort of guiding principles, period (not that they had much in the way of principles during the Soviet years, either). The birth rate in Russia is horrendous, and the emigration rate amongst Russian youths is obscene; within 100 years, the ethnic Russian population will be in serious danger of dissipating into the European and Asiatic gene pool forever. Furthermore, there is a very real chance that Chinese settlers may simply walk into Siberia and take it over within the next 50 to 100 years, and the Kremlin will be unable to do anything about it. All in all, the point is that Russia has some extremely significant problems on its hands. All of the aforementioned considerations put Russia under some serious constraints. Anyone who foresees Russia reviving the USSR as some kind of international superpower is seriously mistaken. Those days are long gone. I have written about this before.
How does the Ukrainian situation really affect the USA? I frequently hear appeals to some abstract notion that Russia, under the Hitler-like influence of Vladimir Putin, will use Ukraine as a stepping stone to conquer all of Europe, and then the USA itself. If you really think that Russia is capable of pulling this off, considering their downright perilous economic and domestic situation, then I have bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
The real answer is that Russia’s actions in Ukraine do not pose a direct threat to the USA, or even any indirect threat that I can think of. There is no justifiable reason for the USA to become involved. What is happening in Ukraine is too bad, and I hope it can be resolved as quickly and peacefully as possible; but I strongly oppose any effort to plunge ourselves into the conflict under the ostensible guises of being “humanitarians”. Just leave it alone.
You want to know what I think is really going on here? The US government and the European Union are trying to distract the public from problems at home by hyping the Russian bogeyman as the next big thing, with Vladimir Putin as the object of our own national “2-minutes’ hate”. Russia ain’t nuthin but a thang; the amount of time I spend worrying about Russia is approximately 0 seconds. What the US government wants is to use the false threat of Russia to distract people from the real threat that we face in the near future: the bankruptcy of Social Security and Medicare, and the ultimate bankruptcy of the federal government.
