Don\u2019t step over the line and re-militarize the Rhineland. Absorbing Austria would cross a red line. Breaking up Czechoslovakia is<\/p>\n unacceptable. Get out of Poland by the announced deadline. The rest was history.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t dare blow up another American military barracks overseas. Don\u2019t even consider another attack on the World Trade Center. Don\u2019t even try blowing up one more American embassy in East Africa. Don\u2019t ever put a hole in a U.S. warship again. The rest was history.<\/p>\n President Obama issued yet another one of those sorts of warnings to stop the violence to Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych just before protesters drove Yanukovych out of office. \u201cThere will be consequences if people step over the line,\u201d Obama threatened.<\/p>\n Ben Rhodes, Obama\u2019s deputy national-security adviser, amplified that veiled warning. He called the Ukrainian government\u2019s repression \u201ccompletely outrageous\u201d \u2014 as opposed to just outrageous or completely, completely outrageous.\u00a0<\/p>\n Secretary of State John Kerry joined the chorus of condemnation by hinting at economic sanctions if Yanukovych didn\u2019t stop his violent crackdown on protesters.<\/p>\n Why does this rhetorical assault sound familiar?<\/p>\n Over the last five years, Obama has issued serial deadlines to Iran to cease and desist from its ongoing enrichment of uranium. All the while, more Iranian centrifuges went on line.<\/p>\n Later, Obama turned from deadlines to red lines. He threatened Syrian president Bashar Assad with one about using chemical weapons. \u201cA red line for us,\u201d the president warned, \u201cis we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.\u201d<\/p>\n Assad moved over that American red line, using chemical weapons to gas his own people, and is now winning the war against the Syrian insurgents. In the end, an embarrassed Obama was reduced to denying that he had ever issued a red line in the first place: \u201cI didn\u2019t set a red line. The world set a red line.\u201d<\/p>\n The administration\u2019s latest cry of \u201coutrageous\u201d does not seem so absolute either. Remember, the president himself used that exact adjective to condemn the IRS scandal when it was revealed that the tax agency was inordinately focusing on conservative groups.<\/p>\n Later, after various key IRS officials had invoked the Fifth Amendment, resigned, or abruptly retired, Obama brushed off the scandal. It was, he said, mostly a media event conjured up by \u201coutraged\u201d journalists. Somehow, a scandal that the president once decried as institutional abuse ended up as a media melodrama perpetrated by unduly outraged reporters.<\/p>\n Will the Ukrainian mess now abate due to Kerry\u2019s hints at sanctions?<\/p>\n Given Kerry\u2019s loud global-warming sermonizing and the administration\u2019s serial threats, bad actors abroad probably believe that burning too much coal is more likely to anger the U.S. than shooting protesters or gassing enemies.<\/p>\n After the Obama administration finally assembled a coalition of allies to impose tough sanctions against Iran, and after the trade embargoes began to bite the theocracy, Obama, without warning his coalition, abruptly relaxed those embargoes and entered into talks with the Iranians.<\/p>\n The message? Imposing sanctions is a difficult business. When they finally work, they are likely to be abruptly lifted if the squeezed nation sends out a few peace feelers and wants to feign appearing reasonable.<\/p>\n The U.S. has now shot so many rhetorical arrows that its quiver of indignation is empty \u2014 and the world\u2019s troublemakers may know it. An administration that ignores almost all of its own Obamacare deadlines surely cannot expect others to abide by any timetables it sets abroad.<\/p>\n There may be no viable solutions to the violence in Syria or Ukraine. The messes in Egypt and Libya, the Chinese provocations to their neighbors, the North Korean lunacy, and the spiraling violence in Venezuela certainly have no easy answers. But not knowing quite what to do is not the same as knowing certainly what not to do.<\/p>\n Although the U.S. alone seems to honor its promised deadlines of withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq, the world\u2019s aggressors sense that the Obama administration\u2019s bluster will be followed by more bluster. Therefore, they have decided to risk aggrandizements while they can. In the mind of Vladimir Putin, today Ukraine, tomorrow the Baltic States or Eastern Europe. In the minds of the Iranian theocrats, if chemical WMD are okay in Syria, why not nuclear WMD in Iran? In China\u2019s view, when Japan backs off, why shouldn\u2019t Taiwan, South Korea, or the Philippines?<\/p>\n Such a seemingly insignificant loss of deterrence is how wars often start \u2014 when an aggressive nation bets that loud words signal that consequences will never follow. So it is emboldened to up the ante to try something even riskier.<\/p>\n America\u2019s step-over line\/deadline\/red line outrage is long past monotonous and empty \u2014 and the result has been an ever scarier world.<\/p>\n Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.<\/em>\u00a0His latest book is<\/em>\u00a0The Savior Generals<\/a><\/span>,\u00a0published this spring by<\/em>\u00a0Bloomsbury Books.<\/em>\u00a0You can reach him by e-mailing\u00a0<\/em>author@victorhanson.com<\/a><\/em>. <\/em><\/p>\n \u00a9 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The history of Obama’s foreign-policy posturing bodes ill for the future of Ukraine. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online\u00a0 Don\u2019t step over the line and re-militarize the Rhineland. Absorbing Austria would cross a red line. Breaking up Czechoslovakia is unacceptable. Get out of Poland by the announced deadline. The rest was history. Don\u2019t dare […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[929,146],"tags":[12,253,1062,726,1021,930,1083,76],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1PQ","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7069,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-stepping-stones-to-the-ukraine-crisis\/","url_meta":{"origin":7058,"position":0},"title":"The Stepping Stones to the Ukraine Crisis","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 3, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ NRO's The Corner\u00a0 Each step to the present Ukrainian predicament was in and of itself hardly earth-shattering\u00a0and was sort of framed by Obama\u2019s open-mic assurance to Medvedev to tell Vladimir that he would more flexible after the election. Indeed, Obama, as is his wont, always\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Ukraine"","block_context":{"text":"Ukraine","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/ukraine\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/3603451352_4b008e0c14-300x225.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7088,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-modest-proposal-on-ukraine\/","url_meta":{"origin":7058,"position":1},"title":"A Modest Proposal on Ukraine","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 6, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO's the Corner\u00a0 Of all the advice to Obama to reverse his brand of Carterism, the best might simply be to shut his eyes, and every time he gets angry and is about to say something about Israel, stop, and think first to substitute the reset\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Ukraine"","block_context":{"text":"Ukraine","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/ukraine\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12074,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/20-impeachment-what-ifs\/","url_meta":{"origin":7058,"position":2},"title":"20 Impeachment What-Ifs","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 26, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review The Democrats might have had a more persuasive case for impeachment if only\u2026 1) Donald Trump had cut off all military assistance to Ukraine. 2) Donald Trump got a Ukrainian prosecutor fired by leveraging U.S. aid. 3) Barack Obama earlier had not vetoed lethal\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9663,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/trumps-russia-reset\/","url_meta":{"origin":7058,"position":3},"title":"Trump’s Russia “Reset”?","author":"Megan Ring","date":"December 9, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ Defining Ideas \u00a0 Throughout the 2016 election, the American Left venomously attacked Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. 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The panic from the ongoing and worldwide Depression in the 1930s had empowered extremist movements the world over.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Ukraine"","block_context":{"text":"Ukraine","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/ukraine\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/pic_giant_021915_SM_ISIS-Putin-Iran-500x292.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7125,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-incoherence-of-western-foreign-policy\/","url_meta":{"origin":7058,"position":5},"title":"The Incoherence of Western Foreign Policy","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 19, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. 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