President Obama, after announcing new sanctions on the Russian economy on Tuesday, said he wouldn’t characterize the relationship between the U.S. and Russia as a return to the Cold War.
“No, it’s not the new Cold War,” Obama said when asked by a reporter if he would describe the situation that way.
The new sanctions will target the country’s energy, arms and finance sectors.
Obama said that the Russian-backed separatists still won’t cooperate with the international investigation into the downed Malaysian plane, and he mentioned the U.S. satellite images showing that Russia recently fired missiles across the border into Ukraine.
If Russia doesn’t change its policy toward Ukraine, the “costs will continue to grow,” Obama warned.
“Today is a reminder that the United States means what it says,” he said.
The president added that since the new sanctions were coordinated with similar efforts by the European Union, the move “will have an even bigger bite.”
Oooh, the Teabaggers, GOPers and talking heads will not be happy that President Obama is not being nice to their hero, Putin.
So no mention that the E.U. also announced more sanctions against Russia as well?
Nope, guess that might give the impression that President Obama is leading international efforts, not just U.S. ones to get Russia to change course with regards to Ukraine.
Last week: Republicans criticize President Obama for not doing anything about the situation in the Ukraine.
This week: Republicans criticize President Obama for doing something about the situation in the Ukraine.
If the guy walked on water, they’d complain that he can’t swim.
His saying it was not does not itself make it not, plus his denial will be disputed by Republicants as showing him up as ‘naive, out of touch, self-deluded, unserious, incompetent, dangerous’.
If he’d said it was, that would not itself have made it so, although more people might well think it so since he’d said it as POTUS, and, regardless, his assertion would have then been disputed by Republicants as showing him ‘self-serving, grandiose [uppity], ignorant of history’, and probably just as ‘out of touch, self-deluded, unserious, incompetent’, but in a differently ‘dangerous’ way.
It’s still a very big deal. Many billions in US dollar equivalence are involved in these sanctions, it’ll make Putin even more vulnerable than he is already to Russia’s regional autocrat boyars, and isolate him further, and he’s being made to look ridiculous.
Working the diplomatic and phone lines to form an international consensus that’ll be effective, that’s so girly-man. If he was a manly Republicant-type man president with big man hair and a big man hat and big man boots, then he’d show REAL leadership by ignoring consultation and consensus, wave his big nuke in Putin’s face and go in both boots, carriers a-swarming and bombs a-dropping, in a totally futile campaign of gestures that risks destroying whatever remains of the nation’s cred and sinking the world economy.
Also, nasty things - he’d say 'em about Putin; call him names. None of your effete Nobel measured tones and Harvard b.s., it’d be ‘Putin, you commie pinko slime, put down them missiles, call off yer tanks, and come out of yer underground dacha with yer hands up’.