Yesterday, President Obama explained that while “Russia’s actions are a problem,” it’s not really that big a concern. “They don’t pose the No. 1 national security threat to the United States,” said Obama. Russia, the president continued, is a “regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength, but out of weakness.”
That’s Obama—the evolved one, the world’s hall monitor. From his perspective, Russia acts out because it’s insecure, like all bullies. Maybe that’s always true of power politics, but American allies want a strategy and leadership, not descriptions of the world drawn from child psychology. Whether Obama wants to see it or not, Vladimir Putin, as Michael Doran writes in his recent column in Mosaic, has made himself “the permanent adversary of the United States.”
Doran considers Putin’s actions not just in Ukraine but also in the Middle East where, writes Doran, “Machiavelli’s logic is inescapable, and Putin grasps it intuitively. Not so Obama, who has convinced himself that he can hover above the gritty game on the ground yet somehow still remain an influential player.” Doran argues that Obama is simply overmatched. “Perhaps the single most revealing fact about [Putin],” writes Doran:
The Sambo approach to diplomacy is particularly suited to the Middle East, where international relations, more often than not, is a zero-sum game dominated by brutal men with guns. This is Putin’s natural habitat; as prime minister in 1999, he supported the Russian military’s use of ballistic missiles against civilians in Grozny. It is a simple truism that a leader habitually photographed shirtless while performing feats of derring-do will understand the politics of the Middle East better than sophisticated Westerners who believe that the world has evolved beyond crude displays of machismo.
Consequently, Doran concludes in his must-read essay, the Obama administration:
