Is the United States simply incapable of making well-informed decisions about the crisis in Ukraine and Crimea? For Italy’s tp24 Rubriche, columnist Leonardo Agate writes that American democracy, and particularly President Obama, is simply too immature to help Europe overcome the crisis, the roots of which are centuries old, and warns against ‘being dragged’ into U.S.-imposed sanctions.
For Italy’s tp24 Rubriche, Leonardo Agate lays out his case for not going along with tough sanctions on Russia:
For Italians it is important that Russian sanctions not bring us to our knees and force us to ask for the support of our brother countries. That would have another downside. If we cannot now, with our consent, afford certain expenditures imposed by the E.U., how much harder will it be when Germany has to support us through some new adversity?
The policy adopted by the West in response to the crisis in Crimea denotes a subjugation to the intentions of Washington. Americans are less suited than we are to assess the situation in Europe. Europe pretends not to recognize this and gets dragged along.
The Crimean plebiscite in favor of annexation by great mother Moscow is not the result of a manipulation by Russian police to preordain the election outcome. Sixty percent of the peninsula’s population are ethnic Russians and native Russian speakers. Crimea was part of Russia since Czar Alexander II’s army conquered it in the 1860s. That is, until 1954, when Khrushchev, in the mood for reform and helped along by some vodka, transferred Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which did nothing to alter the social fabric for its millions of inhabitants.
Obama, who has dragged European countries along, some unwillingly and to the detriment of themselves, suffers due to a remoteness from the European situation, and cannot overcome the obstacle of his lack of historical experience. The president of the most powerful nation on the planet supposes he can condition the development of international crisis by applying criteria that are too recent to be concretely actionable.
The new frontier of American international political activism since the Second World War suffers from a lack of depth. It lacks a deeper awareness in respect to situations that arise out of events that occurred many centuries ago. American democracy is too young to understand, and the U.S. president, whose American origins are more recent than those of the Mayflower pioneers who reached the shores of the New World in the 17th century, understands even less than presidents of more ancient lineage.
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