Israel is far more likely to strike Iran than they were a month ago. Why? Crimea gives another image of weakness:
Israel's defense minister has accused the United States of projecting weakness internationally and said Israel could not rely on its main ally to take the lead in confronting Iran over its nuclear program.
That's what we get when we lose our reputation.
I know that President Obama's defenders attack critics of him by saying President Bush didn't do anything about Russia's invasion of Georgia in August 2008. That comparison is wrong and we can only wish President Obama will be as effective as Bush was.
Remember, President Bush was constrained in his reaction by the election campaign about to begin as the two parties held their nominating conventions that month. Partisans on the left would have screamed (with actual flecks of flying spittle visible on the video) that the Bushtatorship was trying to gin up a manufactured crisis to help McCain.
And then there was that financial crisis in September that shook our economy dangerously.
Plus there was the natural desire not to risk a war that a successor will have to finish.
And keep in mind that Bush was president for only five more months, including 3 months of transition with the president-elect.
Yes, President Bush did not inflict pain on Russia (other than sticking to their missile defense plans in NATO over strenuous Russian objections) in those 5 months he was in the Oval Office.
But President Obama did nothing in the 5 years he has been in the Oval Office. And he ended the Bush-era missile defense plan.
Had he cared to, President Obama could have tried to stiffen the spines of the EU "investigation" of the war that bizarrely blamed Georgia as much as Russia for the war, and pretty much signaled that the West would do nothing.
On the Russo-Georgia War itself, remember that before Russia invaded, Russia already possessed the Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions of Georgia, with Russian garrisons on the ground supporting local pro-Russia militias.
When Russia invaded Georgia proper and headed for Tblisi to completely conquer the country, our efforts in support of Georgia (a Coast Guard ship docked in Georgia and we airlifted supplies and Georgian troops then deployed in Iraq to Georgia) and the poor performance of the Russian military in the fight combined to get Russia to back off from their expansive aim.
So at the end of the war, Russia held what they had before the war started.
In the Ukraine Crisis, Russia started with a lease on Sevastopol and has--so far--ended up with all of the Crimean Peninsula. So Russia has made a large gain--with no casualties on Russia's side.
And nobody worried that Bush was not a reliable ally as a result of the 2008 war. He had a reputation for being serious about defending our interests and allies. After the war, Georgia itself committed to sending their troops to Afghanistan to assist us there, indicating they thought we'd done enough in that crisis.
Ukraine has now reassured the world that they don't want to join NATO even after Russia stripped Crimea from their control.
The problem, as I said from the start, isn't that President Obama's reputation for "flexibility" encouraged Russia to invade Crimea. Surely it contributed, but the blame is 100% on Putin.
The main problem with our president's reputation is that our allies are rattled and worry about our ability to defend them. Israel is a case in point.
And foes gain the impression that this crisis isn't an exception to the rule of our resolve that won't apply to them if they step over a red line, but the rule itself that says we won't oppose them.
The problem is that the president's reputation hinders our effort to contain the damage to the crisis itself without shaking our allies and emboldening other enemies (including a Putin of the future) in contrast to Bush's reputation that led people to think of the war as a one-off event--and a one-off event that didn't gain Russia anything.
So even allies may take actions to defend themselves in ways President Obama does not want because these allies have low confidence in our ability to deter enemies and have low confidence in our resolve to come to their defense in a crisis.
When you put it that way, it doesn't seem like "Smart Diplomacy" at all, does it?
I remain amazed that fans of our president's handling of the Crimea Crisis want to argue on the ground of this comparison. It's the Charge of the Low Information Brigade, if you ask me.
