Listening to the administration's remarks today, I realized that our current leadership is treating global politics like a high school lunch room - their punishment for Russian aggression is to banish him from their table.
This kind of social ostracism may work for teenagers, but it is woefully inadequate as foreign policy. "Suspending" Russia's participation in the G-8 is the weakest of tea, and its message is laughable: You can't be with us any more.
Maybe they assumed that, like them, Vladimir Putin would rather hang with the prom queens and class council than the chess club, but I would wager the opposite is true: Putin is a consummate strategist with little interest in who is dating whom.
The constant reference to "this is the 21st Century" also reinforces my sense that these people think calling someone "uncool" is a crushing insult. As if.
I think that the Democrat leadership has been fawned over and petted for so long, they actually think they are all that. I'm sure that Barack Obama can imagine no greater punishment than to be banished from his illustrious prescence.
However, not all other share their inflated views of themselves.
Once upon a time, "realists" were about, well, real things: tanks, battleships, economic resources, industrial output. Now they seem to think exclusion from a social club is going to cause a nuclear-armed nation to cede vital strategic real estate.
Again, I hear 80s dialogue in my mind - "Sure I'll give up effective control of the Black Sea in exchange for an annual conference. Not."
Let us be even blunter: Vladimir Putin is poised to seize some of the most productive agricultural land on the planet, a region so rich in resources that Hitler was willing to risk destroying Germany to obtain it.
And our deterrence? Scratching him off the social calendar.
The mullahs in Iran and the Chi-Com leadership are both laughing hysterically at this nonsense and planning their own challenges. If the price for the South China sea is being kept away from a luncheon in Davos, so be it. It's a price they are happy to pay.
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