What could Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea possibly have to do with the upcoming midterm elections in the United States? Indirectly, a very great deal. But only indirectly.
It has become the most conventional of conventional wisdoms that American voters have tired of controversies beyond our shores, like Crimea. They want to focus on problems at home, not to get involved in what a notable figure of the 1930s described in a different context as “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.”
This opinion is supported by an undeniable sea-change in the nation’s attitude toward military power generally: A bipartisan consensus in Washington has effectively agreed to shrink the US military to its smallest size since the demobilization after World War II, which will make the projection of American power abroad vastly more difficult in the coming decade.
Left-liberal ambivalence about military spending is decades old. But these liberals have now found unexpected allies in today’s House Republicans, who believe they’re serving the wants and wishes of their constituents on reducing the federal debt by supporting these severe cuts.
Nearly half the GOP members of the House were first elected in 2010 or 2012. This means they are from the post-Bush, post-Iraq era, and don’t share the older conservative zeal for national defense and national security.
The new Republican Party has, to some extent, detached itself from its long-established moorings.
With the exception of Ted Cruz, the loudest and most eloquent voices attacking President Obama on foreign-policy matters over the past few days have been John McCain and Mitt Romney, both of whom the president easily defeated and who therefore define their party’s past rather than its future.
And yet, even if Republican politicians don’t take the lead in pressing the argument, there is strong reason to believe Barack Obama will be held accountable for the Crimean disaster by voters — and that Democratic candidates will pay the price in November.
He is the president. It’s his watch. Americans may be war-weary, but they still look to the man in the White House to provide an overall sense of stability and safety.
Democrats need Americans to feel positively about the president going into the 2014 elections. All election experts say the party’s showing nationally in November will correlate strongly with how the country feels about the job the president is doing.
His poll numbers sank into the low 40s with the botching of the ObamaCare rollout. The incompetence and sense of disorder caused by that domestic-policy catastrophe can only be deepened by the worldwide chaos right now, and will only make the effort to climb out of the hole all the more difficult — and unlikely.
At the least, it should feel like the president has his hand on the tiller, keeping things steady or trying to. And it doesn’t feel that way.
Russia has stolen Crimea, and is on the verge of gobbling up Eastern Ukraine. We protest, and our UN ambassador is photographed berating their UN ambassador — while Putin is celebrated in Moscow with a massive parade that gives off a May-Day-in-the-Communist-Soviet-Union vibe.
Syria isn’t dismantling its chemical weapons, as it promised Russia and the United States it would do by this week to avoid an American airstrike last September. Why should it? The last rebel stronghold has fallen to the regime, because Syria understood it could act with utter impunity once the September deal had been struck.
Syria has effectively won its civil war, at a cost of perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives, in part because it used chemical weapons and got away with it. Now it’s going to keep them, too. Oh, and it’s started attacking border towns in Lebanon for good measure.
On another front, we’ve gone back into talks with Iran on its nuclear program again, only a day after a senior State Department official told Reuters that Iran is “very actively trying to procure items for their nuclear program and missile program and other programs” — a clear violation of the agreement that started the talks and of existing UN resolutions.
Meanwhile, the president has spent two days meeting with the head of the Palestinian Authority begging the man to accept a simple trade — thousands of square miles for a Palestinian state in exchange for his signature on a piece of paper that says, yes, Israel is a Jewish state. The president won’t get it.
Who knows what hell there will be to pay after these “framework” talks on which our secretary of state has labored relentlessly for seven months break down.
Even the haunting confusion over the missing Malaysian aircraft, for which no rational person could hold our president responsible, is surely contributing to a general sense that the world is coming unglued — and that the president is hunting around under his desk for a glue stick he hopes one of his predecessors might have left there for him.