Krauthammer has this interesting bit of insight:
Why did we deny Ukraine weapons? Because in the Barack Obama-John Kerry worldview, arming the victim might be taken as a provocation. This kind of mind-bending illogic has marked the administration’s response to the whole Crimea affair.
Why, after all, did Obama delay responding to Putin’s infiltration, military occupation and seizure of Crimea in the first place? In order to provide Putin with a path to de-escalation, “an offramp,” the preferred White House phrase.
An offramp? Did they really think that Putin was losing, that his invasion of Crimea was a disaster from which he needed some face-saving way out? And that the principal object of American diplomacy was to craft for Putin an exit strategy?
It’s delusional enough to think that Putin — in seizing Crimea, threatening eastern Ukraine, destabilizing Kiev, shaking NATO, terrifying America’s East European allies and making the West look utterly helpless — was actually losing. But to imagine that Putin saw it that way as well and was waiting for American diplomacy to save him from a monumental blunder is totally divorced from reality.
One, I share the bafflement that helping a country resist a direct invasion is somehow provocative.
But that's an aside. But what of that belief that we could save Russia with an "offramp" of our making?
The notion that the Russians wanted us to help them out of their "mistaken" invasion of Crimea is nonsense.
It's one thing to make a wrong assessment of the other side. That's tough enough to do.
But worse than a mere mistake, does Kerry (and his boss, I guess) still think that Lavrov actually saved us from our Syria policy and we owed them one?
Or just as pathetically, if we now understand that we were taken in (and that's why we are now supporting some rebels in Syria), did we think we could trick Lavrov over Crimea the same way Lavrov fooled Kerry over Syria?
That would be even more embarrassing.
