The 80’s Called & They Want Their Foreign Policy Back – Obama: Hey, I warned you that Putin “was always ruthless”

by ED MORRISSEY

One of the advantages that clairvoyants and eminences grises have is the ability to remind us of the accuracy of their forecasts. Barack Obama took advantage of that Wednesday at the University of Chicago, discussing his prescient alarms over the threat that Vladimir Putin posed to world order. It’s a couple of days old but worth watching to recall his brilliance at the time:
 

 
Oh, wait — sorry, that wasn’t the correct clip, was it? My bad. I seem to have had a mix-up in my Official Barack Obama Brilliance Media Catalog. That was from 2012, when Obama lectured Mitt Romney on the dangers of al-Qaeda shortly after bailing out of Iraq and allowing the AQ affiliate there to turn into ISIS and necessitating a return of our military in 2014.
 
Let me look again. I think this is the one where Obama explains how tough he was on Putin:
 

 
Doggone it — I clearly need an intern to go back through my indices and reorganize. I’m pretty sure that this is the one that demonstrates Obama’s firm resolve to deal with Putin and his allies, especially when committing atrocities:
 

 
Ahem. Sorry, dear readers, I’m just having one hell of a time finding where Barack Obama ever took Putin seriously as a threat … at least while in office. The New York Post finally helps out with this clip of Obama lecturing Jeffrey Goldberg about his leadership in dealing with the Russian tyrant. Ironically, one of the themes of this event was — wait for it — “disinformation”:
 

Former President Obama shares his thoughts on Putin's invasion of Ukraine at a University of Chicago lecture:

"He was always ruthless. You witnessed what he did it Chechnya. He had no qualms about crushing those who he considered a threat." pic.twitter.com/Gc1UP2zPzu

— The Recount (@therecount) April 7, 2022

 
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The former president was participating in the “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy” conference at the University of Chicago, where he told the audience and The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, that he had been encouraged by the global response to aid Ukraine after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded the country in February. He also remarked that when he was president, he recalled having to “drag” U.S. allies to take action against Russia.
 
“I will say that, as someone who grappled with the incursion into Crimea and the eastern portions of Ukraine, I have been encouraged by the European reaction. Because, in 2014, I often had to drag them kicking and screaming to respond in ways that we would’ve wanted to see, from those of us who describe ourselves as Western democracies,” the former president said.
 
However, Obama’s portrayal of how his presidency was tough on Russia didn’t ring true to many people on Twitter, who criticized and mocked the president for his memory on the issue.
 
Terrorism expert and International security professor at Northeastern University Max Abrahms blasted Obama’s answer as “self-serving revisionist history.”
 
“Watch Obama’s self-serving revisionist history of how his administration responded the last time Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014,” Abrahms wrote.

This is utter nonsense, and one has to wonder why Goldberg didn’t call out Obama himself after his reporting on the “red line” debacle. It’s sheer gaslighting, especially the reference to Chechnya. That war took place in 1999-2000, nine years before Obama took office. And yet Obama spent most of his eight years accommodating and appeasing Putin rather than confronting him, even after Putin’s 2014 invasion of Crimea and the Donbas.

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