Obama’s balancing act
Mar 1, 2014, 5:51 PM | Updated: 6:40 pm
President Obama has a decision to make.
After Russia used military force in Ukraine, the president of our country warned Russia to stop its stiff-armed aggression that is a reflection of its past Communist playbook when the former USSR occupied countries like Georgia, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania and the Ukraine.
But for most Americans, especially if you’re under the age of 40, the Cold War is something that exists in textbooks or stories of relatives and friends who lived in fear of bomb drills in schools, the Bay of Pigs, mutually assured destruction and the Miracle on Ice.
As a country, we have moved on from the Cold War, but the leaders of Russia (formerly the USSR during the reign of Communism) seemed to have forgotten Gorbachev and Glasnost.
So now, the president has to figure out how to deal with Russia. Will he evoke the Kennedy Administration, choosing to stare down an enemy, or will he act like George W. Bush and do nothing as the former Communist state keeps up the facade that they are all about Western freedom, while acting like the old hammer-and-sickle, Iron Curtain dictatorship?
