Misreading Putin, and history

Three months from the end of the war in Europe, the architects of the impending victory — Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin — met at a town on the Crimean peninsula where Putin is now tightening his grip. Conservatives who should know better have often said the Yalta Conference “gave” Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union. Actually, the Red Army was in the process of acquiring it. This process could no more have been resisted militarily by Stalin’s allies, which the United States and Britain then were, than Putin’s aggression can be.

“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you,” supposedly said Lev Bronstein, as Leon Trotsky was known when he lived in the Bronx, before he made the Red Army, the parent of the forces Putin is wielding. Barack Obama, who involved the United States in seven months of war with Libya, perhaps because the project was untainted by U.S. national interest, is seeking diplomatic and especially economic leverage against Putin’s ramshackle nation in order to advance the enormous U.S. interest in depriving him of Ukraine.

Unless Obama finds such leverage, his precipitous slide into Jimmy Carter territory will continue. As an expression of disdain for a U.S. president, Putin’s seizure of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula is symmetrical with Leonid Brezhnev’s invasion of Afghanistan late in Carter’s presidency. Large presidential failures cannot be hermetically sealed; they permeate a presidency.