"She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."

I've heard complaining that we were going to do nothing in Crimea.

Personally? I sure hope the complainers are right.

There's not much we can do. Certainly almost nothing without EU/NATO backing, and you can get great waffles in Brussels. I mean, London's entangled financially; Paris and Moscow have been seen holding hands under the table a lot over the last few years; and I could be wrong, but I doubt that de-nuclearized Germany is willing to shiver through the winters without Russian gas just to make a point.

If Putin wants to carve off Crimea and leave a Finlandized rump Ukraine, then that's what's gonna happen after all the posturing is said and done. Unless you're willing to go toe-to-toe with the Russkies over murky party politics in a country where we have no real national interests.

A lot of people have pointed out that it's a little hypocritical of the U.S. to get on our high horse about invading other countries, to which my rebuttal is that our invasions were classic models of Wilsonian post-war geopolitics: Soul-searching, consensus-building, going hat-in-hand to the League of Nations for resolutions. If Putin had done that, we'd still be stalling him in the Security Council and demanding to see the yellowcake.

Russia, on the other hand, is playing here by the rules of geopolitics as they have been since the founding of the first nation-state: Putin saw something within his sphere of influence that he felt was in his national interest, and he used troops to effect that interest with no more concern for what the neighbors might think than Queen Victoria would have felt.

My biggest worry right now is that all these dithering half-measures with lone destroyers and partial squadrons are ramping up the possibilities for an accidental incident with no real upside for us. We'd feel real stupid blundering into WWIII because imaginary patrol boats shot at the Truxton.

Die ganze Ukraine ist nicht die Knochen eines einzigen Alabaman Grenadier.

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