More than a few of us scoffed loudly when former president Barack Obama rewrote history and made himself sound like a lone, brave voice standing up against Vladimir Putin when he was in the Oval Office: “As somebody who grappled with the incursion into Crimea … I have been encouraged by the European reaction because in 2014 I often had to drag them kicking and screaming to respond in ways we would have wanted to see.”
The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal has a clearer and more accurate memory: “Start with Mr. Obama’s claim he was a champion of harsher measures against Russia after the invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014. His Administration imposed only mild, targeted sanctions on Russia—and then joined with Moscow to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran. He refused to sell Javelin antitank weapons to Ukraine. Germany pushed ahead with its Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in this era with nary a peep from Washington until the Trump Administration.”
But it goes well beyond those examples. Back in June 2019, I reviewed Jim Sciutto’s book, The Shadow War: Inside Russia’s and China’s Secret Operations to Defeat America. Sciutto works for CNN now, but at the end of 2011, Jim Sciutto moved to Beijing to become chief of staff and senior policy adviser to U.S. Ambassador to China Gary Locke, after spending a decade as ABC News senior foreign correspondent. Sciutto was surprisingly blunt about how the Obama administration kept shrugging off aggression and provocations from Beijing and Moscow.
Geoffrey Pyatt was U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2013 to 2016. Pyatt describes a meeting early in his time in that post with European Union official Stefan Rule during a conference in Yalta, Crimea: “It was the first time I had ever met him, and he came on very, very strongly and said basically, ‘Where the hell are the Americans? Don’t you realize that there is a great struggle that’s going on right now to define the future of the European periphery? We need an engaged America.’”
“Kerry was still talking in terms of ‘Russia must not overstep,’” said Pyatt. “And it was while they were already running the place.
Inside the Obama administration, discussions focused on providing Moscow with a diplomatic ‘off-ramp’ to defuse the crisis and eventually exit Crimea in a face-saving way. . . “The Russian objective was not to win the argument,” Pyatt emphasized. “It was to win a war.”
Pyatt tells Sciutto in another passage, “When I arrived in Kiev, my instructions were, Europe is in the lead.”
In 2018, those noted crazed right-wingers at the… er, Brookings Institution offered a damning assessment of how Obama handled Russia during his eight years in the White House:
We should not slip into collective amnesia over the Obama administration’s weak and underwhelming response to Russian aggression. Throughout his presidency, Obama consistently underestimated the challenge posed by Putin’s regime. His foreign policy was firmly grounded in the premise that Russia was not a national security threat to the United States. In 2012, Obama disparaged Mitt Romney for exaggerating the Russian threat—“the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years,” Obama quipped. This breezy attitude prevailed even as Russia annexed Crimea, invaded eastern Ukraine, intervened in Syria, and hacked the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Obama’s response during these critical moments was cautious at best, and deeply misguided at worst. Even the imposition of sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine was accompanied by so much propitiation and restraint elsewhere that it didn’t deter Russia from subsequent aggression, including the risky 2016 influence operation in the United States. Obama, confident that history was on America’s side, for the duration of his time in office underestimated the damaging impact Russia could achieve through asymmetric means.
But in Obama’s mind, he was always the stalwart and farsighted hero of the story.