Is Now The Time To Draw The Line Against Russia?

Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) meets with U.S. President Barack Obama on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Hangzhou, China, September 5, 2016. Sputnik/Kremlin/Alexei Druzhinin/via REUTERS

David Sanger, New York Times: What Is Russia Up To, and Is It Time to Draw the Line?

WASHINGTON — Escalating airstrikes in Syria. Sophisticated cyberattacks, apparently intended to influence the American election. New evidence of complicity in shooting down a civilian airliner.

The behavior of Russia in the last few weeks has echoes of some of the uglier moments of the Cold War, an era of proxy battles that ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. President Obama, fresh from a meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin this month, wondered aloud whether the Russian leader was content living with a “constant, low-grade conflict.” His reference was to Ukraine, but he could have been addressing any of the arenas where Mr. Putin has reveled in his new role as the great disrupter of American plans around the globe.

“It seems to me we have Mr. Putin’s answer,” said Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of a coming book, “A World in Disarray.” “He’s answered in the affirmative. Low-grade conflict is his thing. And the question is how directly or indirectly we introduce costs.”

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WNU Editor: Who is going to draw the line .... President Obama? The U.S. election is only 6 weeks away, and a new President is going to occupy the Oval Office in 2017. I have said more than once in this blog that everything started to unravel with the overthrow of the Ukraine government in 2014, and the following civil war. Solve Ukraine .... all other tensions with Russia will dissipate quickly. Unfortunately .... it appears that drawing "red lines in the sand" is the preferred route ... at least for the New York Times.