U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton accuses President Barack Obama of “trembling inaction” in the face of Russian aggression.
Perhaps the first-term Republican congressman speaks metaphorically or with hyperbole for effect.
Cotton is not an intimate of this White House, to understate. Presumably he has not been in the recent personal presence of Obama to observe actual fear-induced shaking and paralysis.
But it’s an image Cotton surely is happy to invoke. He revels in his right-wing extremism’s raging personal disdain for this president.
He and his ilk seek not to manage the world carefully, as Obama does. Instead they insist on reacting vocally, if not in actual deed accompanied by actual responsibility, to exploit any opportunity for the rhetoric, if not the rise, of freedom and democracy.
Cotton also knows that there is a powerful political advantage as a candidate for the U.S. Senate from Arkansas in pandering to his state’s overwhelming enmity for the Democratic president.
So he essentially labels his nonbellicose president a yellow-belly, a chicken, a coward, a wimp who trembles before the more impressive testosterone secretions of Vladimir Putin.
It’s doubtful one could say anything too insulting about Obama for the tastes of the Arkansas electorate.
Cotton also chooses to liken the president’s modulated response to the Ukraine crisis to world acquiescence to the Nazi invasion of Austria in 1938.
The rules of context, fairness, perspective and discretion normally require that Nazi comparisons be limited by great and studied reserve. That means they should not be used until sometime after Obama emerges from discussions with allies to give the American people a fuller public assessment of Russian’s transgression and America’s counteraction, indeed the entire West’s counteraction.
Taking one’s time and engaging allies in a coordinated response might turn out, with the emergence of more information, to be far less a matter of historical shame and disgrace than appeasement of Hitler.
But a politically ambitious war hawk and right-wing zealot does not cotton, you might say, to understated deliberation.
There are things easy to say for a first-term Republican congressman seeking the Senate in a Republican-plunged state.
And here are some of the easy things Cotton chose to say in a news release over the weekend about Russia’s invasion of the Crimean peninsula of revolutionized Ukraine to take effective control of a separate sovereign province:
“At a minimum, President Obama should revoke travel visas and freeze assets of senior Russian officials and Putin cronies, freeze assets of Ukrainian oligarchs who assist the Russian invasion, stop transfers of assets out of Ukraine, support the Ukrainian transitional government and military as it defends Ukraine’s territorial integrity, recall our ambassador to Russia, reschedule the upcoming G-8 meeting from Russia to Western Europe or the U.S., and suspend Russia from the G-8. Putin must be punished for his outlaw actions and the Russian people and elites must recognize they will pay a price for them.”
Conceivably every one of those ideas might be valid.
But be aware that France and Germany say they don’t yet want economic sanctions, but diplomacy. Germany needs Russian natural gas.
Be aware that sanctions are less effective when not enforced uniformly by economically rich allies.
Be aware that isolating and alienating Russia might be more dangerous than effective, considering that European sources describe Putin as out of touch with reality.
And be aware that the American support of Ukraine militarily that Cotton invokes without elaboration or explanation … well, let us just say that modern history suggests that American support of foreign countries militarily does not uniformly produce benefits either for America or the other countries or the causes of freedom and democracy.
That’s the question, really. Is the menu of actions outlined by Cotton more than a personally satisfying set of punishments for Putin? Do those recommended actions offer any tactical and strategic credibility toward the real objectives—preserving Ukraine’s move toward freedom, liberating the Crimea region from Russian occupation and deterring Russia’s belligerence?
If not—if Cotton’s menu of actions is simply about making ourselves feel proud of our own chest-beating, except for that little parenthetical part about making a Republican candidate for the Senate in Arkansas more electable—then we need to work on a more purposeful plan.
Deliberation is not cowardice. Bellicosity is not bravery.
In fact, bellicosity might be closer to trembling than the bellicose would like to think.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.