by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online – The Corner One of the more depressing things in watching Vladimir Putin is the manner in which Russian “experts” at home have for years now all but cheered him on. In the latest Nation magazine, Stephen Cohen has written one of the most embarrassing apologies of Putin’s imperialistic […]
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VDH commentary on the ‘CAN OR SHOULD THE WEST TRY TO STOP VLADIMIR PUTIN’S ATTEMPTS TO REABSORB PORTIONS OF THE OLD SOVIET UNION?’ issue 13 of Strategika by Victor Davis Hanson // Strategika Our elites often diagnose Vladimir Putin as acting from “weakness” in his many aggressions. A list of Russia’s symptoms of feebleness follows: demographic crises,
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Aggressors often attack weaker neighbors to restore a sense of pride. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a disaster of a declining population, corruption, authoritarianism, a warped economy, and a high rate of alcoholism. Why, then, would Putin want to ruin additional territory in Crimea and Ukraine the way
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He views Putin, the 21st century, and himself as in a fun-house mirror. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online President Obama talks about Vladimir Putin as if he were a Pennsylvania “clinger” who operates on outdated principles, who is driven by fear, and whom unfortunately the post-Enlightenment mind of even Barack Obama cannot always
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China and Russia are no more impressed with empty bluster today than Japan was in 1941. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The Roosevelt administration once talked loudly of pivoting to Asia to thwart a rising Japan. As a token of its seriousness, in May 1940 it moved the home port of the Seventh
Obama’s postmodernism has met its match in premodern Putin. by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media Vladimir Putin thinks he has a winning formula to restore the global clout of the old Soviet Union. Contemporary Russia is a chaotic, shrinking, and petrodollar-fed kleptocracy. It certainly lacks the population, the vast resources, and territory of its former
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by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine The crisis in Ukraine is just the latest in a long series of foreign policy failures brought about by the incoherence in our thinking about foreign relations. On the one hand, we have championed ethnic-national self-determination as the highest international good, while on the other we have assumed that
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by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine Vladimir Putin, playing geopolitical chess while our president plays tiddlywinks, has effectively taken over Crimea. Armed men, looking suspiciously like Russian military personnel, have seized both airports and established border checkpoints decorated with Kalashnikovs and Russian flags. This comes after other armed men seized two government buildings and raised
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by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner Each step to the present Ukrainian predicament was in and of itself hardly earth-shattering and was sort of framed by Obama’s open-mic assurance to Medvedev to tell Vladimir that he would more flexible after the election. Indeed, Obama, as is his wont, always had mellifluous and sophistic arguments
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Much of what we think we know is false; what really happened matters desperately to us today. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online This summer will mark the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I, and we should reflect on the “lessons” we have been taught so often on how to avoid another such
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