It is time to threaten a credible response.

It is time to threaten a credible response.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/nato-still-answer_787373.html?utm_campaign=Washington+Examiner&utm_source=washingtonexaminer.com&utm_medium=referral

The threat should be the cutting of the Russian oil connection to Europe. This will not only be a threat to Russia but to the European states, which have refused to participate in their own defense.

Liberal Europe, should welcome this forceable return to green energy, but they won't.

"" When the alliance's 2008 Bucharest Summit rejected the U.S. plan for Ukraine and Georgia, the defeat was widely attributed to Bush's unpopularity, stemming from the Iraq war, a convenient excuse for both Europeans and America's media. The real reason, however, was Europe's growing reliance on Russian oil and gas, and its barely concealed fear of Moscow's response to NATO admitting two critical constituent parts of the former USSR.

Moscow has long understood Western cowardice. Just four months after Bucharest, in a laboratory-like causal connection rare in global politics, Russia dramatically escalated its simmering conflict with Georgia, bombing its tiny neighbor and surging troops to within 30 miles of the capital, Tbilisi. Faced with a U.S. response that looks robust compared with our reaction today in Ukraine, Russia withdrew to Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the two provinces it most wanted to hive off, and hunkered down into the stalemate that Georgia still endures. ""

If the Russian pipeline were mined in the western part of the Ukraine, and control were given as a fail-safe territorial defense, the Ukrainians would have a weapon against both Russia and the European states. Wouldn't be ironic if Russian forces rushed in and set off the pipeline themselves?

With the mines in place, the west could rapidly increase oil supplies with an eye toward a soon to be new market. Liberal solidarity could be used to overcome the self destructive green movement. A hostage to Green cooperation would be the threat to have a massive release of green house gasses. (This would be a nice demonstration of the immunity of the environment to such a release or the end of the world, whichever)

Russia would notice. Not that we were resolute, but that we are genuinely crazy, a much more motivating stance.

In conjunction with the mined section, would be a valve. Now Russia can cut off oil, or the Ukraine cut cut off oil, (and turn it back on) and a genuinely crazy Ukraine is a credible threat.

""Some argue that NATO should never have admitted any ex-Warsaw Pact members, and most certainly should not have added former Soviet republics, because geography and history relegated these countries to Russia's sphere of influence. That argument has the virtue of consistency, but nothing more. In fact, it proves too much. One could as easily argue that Poland is in Germany's sphere of influence rather than Russia's. That kind of dispute, in short form, is why Europe saw two world wars in the 20th century. It is precisely to prevent such wars, and thus further effusions of American blood, that we bring otherwise vulnerable countries into NATO, thereby simultaneously protecting U.S. interests and stabilizing Europe.""

The answer to this argument is a drive to utterly destroy Russia. Then they can be removed from the equation. The Russians have done a reasonably well job of this themselves. Removing the Oil income and further isolating Russia could do the trick. Maybe the Russians will realize they are all truly Ukrainian and move there. A Russia that actually works could evolve (Unlike the Crimea, which now doesn't work at all)






Dave Farnsworth