Our President gets some respect

Crimean Prime Minister Sergey Aksyonov tweeted a photoshopped image of President Barack Obama in a Russian military uniform, and suggested he had received a promotion for the good "work" he had done.

Good work, as in flaccidly allow the Russians to seize the Crimea, and soon perhaps the rest of the Ukraine. Now Obama will have to change his first name to "Neville."

Sultan Knish points out the obvious:

Wilson's "definite guarantee of peace" had failed miserably. International law had been exposed as magical thinking. When confronted with aggression, the diplomats who had talked boldly of ending war crawled on their bellies and proposed territorial partitions, desperately trying to appease Japan, Germany and Italy. 

The end of war really meant the beginning of a self-righteous appeasement in which decadent states besotted with their own moral high ground sacrificed the weak to the strong in exchange for maintaining the moral illusion of their peacemaking. 

The rhetoric of the illusionists of peace hasn’t changed. Diplomacy must be given time to work. The invaded countries brought it on themselves. The invaders have a legitimate territorial claim. Does anyone really want to die for Manchuria, the Sudetenland and Abyssinia? They didn't. Instead they ended up having to die for Hawaii, London and Paris.

Debating whether Putin is following the Hitler playbook displays a basic ignorance of history. Japan followed that same playbook in its invasion of Manchuria; a staged incident, a rapid invasion and a puppet regime. It didn't originate that playbook. It's probably as old as human history. Hitler's invasion of Poland made it notorious in a world that has managed to forget everything else that happened around that time.

The Pax Americana is over. We have been living on bluff and Putin called it.

International law is a Potemkin village. A hollow facade upheld by the might of the United States. A post-American world means the end of international law.