Ukraine and Obama: it ain’t pretty

Frontline came out with a new episode on Ukraine called The Presidents and Putin. This is the latest in a series that recounts the origins of the war in Ukraine but in this case presents each presidents’ encounters and responses to Valdimir Putin. The short summary is that Bill Clinton and Joe Biden read Putin accurately as a anti-Democratic former KGB agent with ill intent in his heart, assuming he had one. Every other president between those two bookends got it disastrously wrong.

In this Frontline episode, what was previously hinted about Obama finally comes out unsparingly. In fact, the diplomats, military specialists and other experts that worked for or covered Obama finally said what they only danced around in prior episodes: Obama’s response to the annexation of Crimea in 2014 was baffling, infuriating and went against everyone’s advice at the time including Joe Biden’s.

It’s both refreshing and strange to see the facade of the myth of Obama’s greatness finally crack. They didn’t just criticize him on Ukraine but his response to Mubarak in Egypt and Assad in Syria came under scrutiny as well.

Part of the reason for why Putin “rolled” Obama had to do with the years of inaction to every infraction by the Bush Administration. Putin has a knack for sizing his opponents up and using their own identities against them. In Bush’s case, it was his evangelical Christianity. So Putin told Bush a chicken soup story about how his saintly mother survived WWII, starvation and the loss of two children during the war while wearing a little wooden cross. And that little cross was one of a small handful of objects that survived a devastating fire at his family’s dacha. And now he carries that cross with him everywhere to remember his mother and as a symbol of his faith.

Bush ate it up and looked into Putin’s soul. Then Putin started to rebuild his empire.

Julia Ioffe who covered Russia during the Putin years says that Putin evaluated Obama as a young, naive, idealistic and inexperienced black man. Obama fans will zero in on the “black” part of this equation and immediately jump to “racism”. Ioffe acknowledges that Putin is a racist. But what I think she eventually gets to is that Putin thought Obama was a lightweight and easy to manipulate.

The risk America took when we elected Obama is that he would be a president without the confidence to make decisions because he didn’t know what he was doing. Was he smart? I’m assuming that he was. Was he charismatic? Not to me but I’m sure he sized up his competition and audience and knew what buttons to push in his base and his backers.

But he was very new to government and he came with a focus group tested set of ideals and a bankroll of money from his backers whose motives seemed to be focused on saving their asses from the mess on Wall Street that they created. If you don’t believe that, consider who really did well during the Obama years.

I think Obama was smart enough to know he was inexperienced and over his head. That tends to trigger insecurity and indecision. That was probably more important to him than the fact that Putin is a racist. If Putin’s racism did get into Obama’s head, then what was the point, all you civil rights era boomers? Did it feel so good to elect the equivalent of the Huxtables to the White House that you were willing to overlook Obama’s actual record or the lives of not upper middle class black families?

Putin sized him up pretty well. So when he invaded Crimea and all of Obama’s advisor’s and vice president were running around with their hair on fire, Obama did nothing. As one interviewee says, Ukraine “wasn’t on his agenda”.

Add that to protecting women’s access to abortion, paycheck fairness, protection for homeowners after the crash, protection of millions of Americans who were thrown out of work for extended periods of time and have never recovered their financial stability (moi) because his stimulus package was half of what it should have been.

Why am I so incensed about Obama all these years later? It’s not because he was black. It’s that his blackness was used as a tool by some pretty savvy and cynical backers and campaign people to run a stealth candidate for president. One that was young, naive, idealistic and inexperienced and consequently felt uneasy making decisions that had the power to affect the entire world. He was no threat to Putin or any other ultra wealthy powerbroker.

As Garry Kasparov says, if you don’t get rid of a dictator early, the price of doing so goes up as time goes by. Obama was not the only president who miscalculated or made stupid decisions. Bush and Trump were much worse. But Obama had a chance in 2014 to stop Putin in his tracks with regard to Ukraine and instead of punching the dictator, he did…

nothing.

And here we are.

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