WarSclerotic

Israel Hayom | Who’s on another planet?.

Boaz Bismuth

From the moment Russia invaded Crimea, German Chancellor Angela Merkel hasn’t put the phone down for a second. She is calling Russian President Vladimir Putin, U.S. President Barack Obama, and she is of course calling her partners in the EU — she has 27 of these.

Merkel is on the lines trying to prevent a war in Ukraine, not because she simply feels like talking…

The New York Times reported on Monday that Merkel — during a phone conversation with Obama in which she updated him on her chat with Putin — said she believed the Russian president was out of touch with reality. Putin is “in another world,” she told Obama. While the paper did not reveal Obama’s reply despite the newspaper’s close ties to his administration, we can assume Obama did not exactly contradict her sentiments and perhaps even affirmed them.

Almost simultaneously, on Sunday U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” that Russia’s invasion was “a 19th-century act in the 21st century.”

Kerry in essence told us that Putin is not only from another planet, he is also from another century — an alien. It is not surprising, therefore, that the West finds it hard to read his moves.

The tragedy in this story is that the West, our allies — they are the ones living in a fantasy land. Putin is living in the actual reality of our world, the same one where the leaders of China and Assad, Khamenei and Kim Jong Un also live. Everyone is on the same planet, and, believe it or not, even in the same century.

The leader of the free world, Obama, believes in a world where all is fine and dandy. Due to the status of his position, he is also dragging the Europeans along in this dream. Even the Europeans, who were indeed severely traumatized by World War II, have understood that sometimes there is no choice (Great Britain with the U.S. in the back seat in Libya, the French in Mali, Germany with NATO forces in Kosovo) and that there is such a thing as a “just war.”

The American president, however, truly believes that the age of wars is over, and that trusting in smiles is better than acknowledging the bombs. Generally speaking, he was elected to end wars (in Iraq and Afghanistan), not start new ones (in Syria). And we cannot, after all, forget that he has received the Nobel Peace Prize — a type of certification for living in la-la land. He even got a medal for it.

Obama of 2014 is very far from the person who won the election in November 2008. The “dream president” has become a president with a dream, and not a very realistic one. It’s too bad that the events in Egypt, Syria, Libya, China (provoking Japan) and Russia (the Crimea invasion) haven’t brought Obama back down to Earth. What a shame there is no ladder in Obama’s dream; otherwise he could climb down to us and see what is really going on down here, and not just in the Middle East.

The American press has also come to realize the president’s weakness on matters of foreign affairs. While The New York Times was revealing an important part of Merkel’s conversation with Obama, The Washington Post ran a highly critical piece headlined “Obama’s foreign policy is based on fantasy.” It’s as if the newspapers were working in coordination: The Post with an analysis of the story in The Times.

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