Bashing Obama will do little to end the crisis in Ukraine

Bashing Obama will do little to end the crisis in Ukraine

After the Ukraine crisis following the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, President Obama’s critics tried to create the perception that he was inexperienced in foreign policy and perceived by world leaders as weak.

John McCain characterizes the president’s foreign policy as feckless. A panel of pundits on “Morning Joe” all agreed that the president’s Middle East policies had all been failures. Sarah Palin and other extremists went so far as to suggest that Russia’s military aggression in Crimea could have been averted with the speak-softly big-stick philosophy.

How this perception got in the heads of our compatriots is beyond human logic. When I listen to prominent foreign policy experts talk about the Crimean crisis, they don’t focus on Barack Obama. Take for example Professor Dr. Zibigniew Brzezinski, security adviser to Jimmy Carter.

In an interview on the “Morning Joe” show, he talked about how Ukraine and Russia are bound together by language, geography and historical factors that gave rise to the dilemma the West finds itself in today. The professor went on to talk about what the West must do to stop Russian aggression. Obama by himself can do nothing.

Scholar and historian Angela Stent just wrote a book called “The Limits of Partnership.” She was plugging her book on TV when an angry Obama critic called, blaming the president for foreign policy failures in the Middle East. In her response, she never mentioned the president’s name as she carefully made the point that American foreign policy has had a continuity from one president to the next.

Can you recall the time after the fall of Baghdad that Bush too soon gave his “Mission Accomplished’’ speech? You didn’t have to be a scholar to see that Bush knew little about Muslim culture. Yet, the nation stood behind him.

When Russia attacked Georgia in 2008, Bush did nothing. Nobody then characterized his foreign policy as feckless. They threw shoes at Bush during an Iraqi press conference and missed. Though humiliated, we laughed as comedians emphasized Bush’s resilience skills.

As the president is far into his second term, what can we possibly gain by listening to untruths and a lot of divisive political rhetoric? No one foresaw the present Ukrainian crisis coming. It requires that this nation speaks with one voice as the health of the world economy and the future of our children are at stake.

Alfred Spencer, Warren