Superpower Once Lived Here

 

The Foreign Policy Initiative   "Putin understands Obama’s message. He knows he’s won Crimea. The question is whether he’ll win Ukraine.

"He thinks he will. He’s dealing with the Obama administration, after all. He looks at the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, he witnesses the failure to enforce the red line in Syria and the subsequent successes of his friend Assad, he chortles at the relaxation of the sanctions on Iran and the desperate desire to cut a nuclear deal, and he sees Obama’s defense cuts. And he reads the New York Times, where David Sanger reports, “Mr. Obama acknowledges, at least in private, that he is managing an era of American retrenchment.”

"So Putin sees retrenchment. Putin sees retreat. And Putin sees that Obama is unlikely to reverse course."

DEBKAfile  World leaders play nuclear terror game. Obama more worried about nuke in Manhattan than Russia;  "The game was designed by American nuclear experts as a scare tactic “to make them think seriously about the security of their nuclear materials.”

Obama used the occasion to say he is far more worried about the possibility of a nuclear weapon exploding in New York City than he is about Russia. The German chancellor grumbled that the world’s leaders had more urgent business to attend to than playing games."