High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft to buy additional rights. ft/cms/s/0/444958b6-a849-11e3-a946-00144feab7de.html#ixzz2vjFl4SlI ...the “weak Obama” story misses the point. This is not the cold war, in which US presidents were called upon to show unshakeable resolve, in a global struggle with an implacable Soviet enemy. Instead, the Ukraine crisis is a vital test of the foreign-policy rules of a new era – the era of globalisation, when the west’s most dangerous rivals are also often its key trading partners. The one continuity with the cold war is that in Ukraine in 2014, just as in Hungary in 1956, the US knows that it cannot use force. The fact that Mr Obama appears to have ruled out a military response is proof not that he is weak but that he is sane. However, the defining difference with the crises of the cold war is that nowadays a confrontation with Russia, and potentially one day with China, involves economic relationships that did not exist when the world was divided into rival political and economic blocs. What is not yet clear is whether the west has worked out how to play the economic cards that globalisation has dealt it. The problem is that, while western powers know they could damage Russia economically, they also know that in harming Russia they would also inflict plenty of collateral damage on their own economies. Are Europeans and Americans prepared to accept that?
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 06:53:36 +0000
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