The less Americans know, the more they want to intervene

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WestCoastJoe
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http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/worl ... t/6815709/
G-7 snubs Putin to meet on Crimea

Janelle Dumalaon and Oren Dorell, Special for USA TODAY 5:08 p.m. EDT March 24, 2014

LONDON - President Obama and the leaders of the world's biggest economies met Monday to solidify their resolve to isolate Russia for its takeover of Crimea in a gathering to which Russian President Vladimir Putin was not invited.

The United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan - collectively known as the Group of Seven - met on the sidelines of a scheduled nuclear summit in the Netherlands to discuss Crimea.

Russia usually joins such meetings of the group, which had been renamed the Group of Eight to reflects Moscow's participation.

"We're united in imposing a cost on Russia for its actions so far," Obama said after meeting with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.

In the interview with Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant , Obama conceded that the sanctions the U.S. and Europe imposed on Russia may not alter Moscow's stance in Ukraine, where people fear Putin may send his troops beyond Crimea into other parts of the country.

"If Russia continues to escalate the situation, we need to be prepared to impose a greater cost," Obama said.

The meeting at the Hague was previously scheduled to address nuclear terrorism, but Russia's military incursion into Ukraine would be a major source of discussion, said Obama's deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes.

Obama's arrival in Europe came on a day when Ukraine's government ordered troops to pull back Monday from Crimea after Russian troops captured a third Ukrainian military base in the province of Crimea.

Putin annexed Crimea last week after Russian forces and pro-Moscow Crimean militiamen booted Ukrainian elected officials and held a referendum to secede. The West tarred the vote as illegal, and Ukraine said it was rigged to favor secessionists.

Kiev fears that Putin will now move to take over parts of East Ukraine on the pretext he used in Crimea that the area historically belonged to Russia and that ethnic Russians are in danger under the government in Kiev.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met for the first time with his Ukrainian counterpart to discuss the situation after having said for weeks that Ukraine's government was illegitimate for having ousted pro-Moscow president Viktor Yanukovych.

Lavrov met with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Deshchytsia in the Hague, where both attended a summit on security.

Lavrov said Moscow was unconcerned by the snub of Putin. He said the meetings have been useful to discuss global crises but that Russia "will not be clinging to this format."

Obama told de Volkskrant that he does not want Europe to be viewed as a battleground between the East and West.

"That's the kind of thinking that should have ended with the Cold War," Obama said. "On the contrary, it's important that Ukraine have good relations with the United States, Russia, and Europe."

Analysts have said that the U.S. and EU have shown themselves to be relatively uniform in their efforts to bring Russia to heel.

"There has not been much difference between the details of the sanctions the U.S. and Europe have tried to mete out," said Wolfgang Richter, an senior associate at Berlin-based thinktank German Institute for International and Security affairs.

Europe has been cautious, critics say timid, about imposing harsh sanctions against Moscow because of the continent's economic relationship with the Russian government, especially when it comes to Russian natural gas.

"The U.S. is less dependent on mutual trade and gas imports from Russia," added Richter. "In addition, the U.S. only has an inter-agency process to cope with, Europe has 28 member states that have to agree."

Some analysts said fears that the two could be heading towards a new Cold War were misplaced.

"The Cold War analogy is a false analogy," said Judy Dempsey, the Berlin-based editor-in-chief of the Strategic Europe blog at think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"The Soviet Union no longer exists, this is the Russian Federation we are dealing with. This is a strategy game in a globalized world, where Russian oligarchs also capitalize on globalization."

Btu Clifford Gaddy, a Russia scholar at the Brookings Institution, said the USA and its allies in Europe are in a new Cold War with Russia. He said it's unclear how much they'll be willing to fight it.

"We're talking about a very confrontationist relationship," said Gaddy, who co-authored a biography titled "Mr. Putin; Operative in the Kremlin."

"Putin is not going to back down on Crimea. It's more likely he moves ahead on other parts of Ukraine and probably elsewhere. We're not going to formally declare that we accept that."

CRIMEA: Ukraine orders troop pullout from Crimea

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry said when Russian troops seized the marine base in the port of Feodosia - the tihird base to be taken - they detained up to 80 Ukrainian servicemen and took two injured Ukrainians away by helicopter.

UKRAINE CRISIS: U.S. exporters feel chill in Russia orders

Ukraine's Foreign Ministry said more Russian troops are coming into Crimea and large numbers of Russian forces bordering the mainland.

"The number of Russian armed forces on Crimean territory has risen to more than 22,000," Foreign Ministry spokesman Yevgeny Perebiynis told Interfax news agency.

Contributing: Associated Press
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LONDON - President Obama and the leaders of the world's biggest economies met Monday to solidify their resolve to isolate Russia for its takeover of Crimea in a gathering to which Russian President Vladimir Putin was not invited.

The United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan - collectively known as the Group of Seven - met on the sidelines of a scheduled nuclear summit in the Netherlands to discuss Crimea.

Russia usually joins such meetings of the group, which had been renamed the Group of Eight to reflects Moscow's participation.

"We're united in imposing a cost on Russia for its actions so far," Obama said after meeting with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.

In the interview with Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant , Obama conceded that the sanctions the U.S. and Europe imposed on Russia may not alter Moscow's stance in Ukraine, where people fear Putin may send his troops beyond Crimea into other parts of the country.

"If Russia continues to escalate the situation, we need to be prepared to impose a greater cost," Obama said.

The meeting at the Hague was previously scheduled to address nuclear terrorism, but Russia's military incursion into Ukraine would be a major source of discussion, said Obama's deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes.
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http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/03/24 ... ions-says/
With Russia kicked out of what is one of the world’s most exclusive clubs, the G8 – scheduled for Sochi, Russia in early June – will become a G7. That summit will now take place in Brussels just before the 70th D-Day anniversary commemorations in France.
No G-8 in Sochi? Ahhh ... too bad. No chance to see the toxic waste dumps. No chance for Putin to strut on the World stage.
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Doubt very much that Russia's expulsion from the G8 will have any affect
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WestCoastJoe
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Here is the view of a liberal journalist, Gwynne Dyer. I respect his opinions. I find him insightful, and oftentimes agree with him. Not everyone's cup of tea, of course. He was born in Newfoundland. He has served in the naval reserves of Canada, the US and the UK. He has lectured at military colleges in all three countries.

BA in History from Memorial U in Nfld. MA in military history from Rice U. PHD in military and Middle Eastern history from King's College in London.

He was senior lecturer in war studies at Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.

Officer of the Order of Canada in 2010.

I've heard him speak in person a few times. I have found him an impressive speaker, working without notes. Taking questions later. I don't always agree with what he says, but I find his world view to be fair.

Here is his take on Ukraine, Putin's options, and what he might do.

Ukraine: Putin’s choice

By Gwynne Dyer

Story Created: Mar 23, 2014 at 10:35 PM ECT

Crimea is going to be part of Russia, and there is nothing anybody else can do about it. The petty sanctions that the United States and the European Union are currently imposing have been discounted in advance by Moscow, and even much more serious sanctions would not move it to reconsider its actions. But Vladimir Putin still has to decide what he does next.

One option, of course, is to do nothing more. He has his little local triumph in Crimea, which is of considerable emotional value to most Russians, and he has erased the loss of face he suffered when he mishandled the crisis in Kiev so badly. If he just stops now, those sanctions will be quietly removed in a year or two, and it will be business as usual between Moscow and the West.

If it’s that easy to get past the present difficulties in Moscow’s relations with the US and the EU, why would Putin consider doing anything else? Because he may genuinely believe that he is the victim of a Western political offensive in Eastern Europe.

Paranoids sometimes have real enemies. NATO’s behaviour since the collapse of the Soviet Union, viewed from Moscow, has been treacherous and aggressive, and it doesn’t require a huge leap of the imagination to see the European Union’s recent policy in Ukraine as a continuation of that policy.

After non-violent revolutions swept the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe from power in 1989, the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, made a historic deal with former US president George HW Bush. It was unquestionably the most important diplomatic agreement of the late 20th century.

Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to bring all the Soviet garrisons home from the former satellites, and even to allow the reunification of Germany—a very difficult concession when the generation of Russians that had suffered so greatly at Germany’s hands was still alive.

In return, the elder president Bush promised that the countries that had previously served the Soviet Union as a buffer zone between it and Germany—Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria—would not be swept up into an expanding NATO. They would be free, but NATO’s tanks and aircraft would not move a thousand kilometres (five hundred miles) closer to Moscow.

It was a wise deal between two men who understood the burden of history, but they were both gone from power by the end of 1992—and Gorbachev had neglected to get the promise written into a binding treaty. So it was broken, and ALL those countries were in NATO by 2004—together with three other countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, that had actually been part of the Soviet Union itself.

NATO’s eastern frontier is now only 120 km (75 miles) from Russia’s second city, St Petersburg. The Russians were burned again when NATO encouraged the secession of Kosovo from Serbia (a handy precedent for Crimea’s secession from Ukraine), and once more when NATO got Moscow’s agreement to an emergency military intervention in Libya to stop a massacre, and expanded it into a campaign to overthrow the ruler, Moammar Gadaffi.

To Russian eyes, what has been happening in Ukraine is more of the same. If Putin believes that, then he thinks he is already in a new Cold War, and he might as well go ahead and improve his position for the coming struggle as much as possible. Specifically, he should grab as much of Ukraine as he can, because otherwise the western part will be turned into a NATO base to be used against him.

Crimea is irrelevant in this context: the Russian naval bases there are nostalgic relics from another era, of no real strategic value in the 21st century. What Putin does need, if another Cold War is coming, is control of the parts of Ukraine where Russian speakers are a majority or nearly so: not just the east, but also the Black Sea coast. But he shouldn’t occupy western Ukraine, because he would face a prolonged guerilla war if he did.

This is all extremely paranoid thinking, and perhaps it never passes through Putin’s mind at all. But if it does, then he knows that he has just over two months to make up his mind.

If Putin allows Ukraine to hold the scheduled national election on May 25, then even the preposterous pretext he has been using for the past month to justify his meddling—that he is intervening to protect Russian-speakers from a “fascist junta” in Kiev—will vanish. So we should know fairly soon which way he is going to jump.

My money says that Putin will stop with Crimea, because he’s not that paranoid, and because he understands how weak Russia is economically and how quickly it would lose a new Cold War. He has already saved his face; why run further risks? But I have been wrong in the past, once or twice.
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http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/24/politics/ ... ?hpt=hp_t2
The Hague, Netherlands (CNN) -- President Barack Obama and other world leaders have decided to end Russia's role in the group of leading industrialized nations, the White House said Monday.

The move to suspend Russia's membership in the G8 is the latest direct response from major countries allied against Russia's annexation of Crimea.

"International law prohibits the acquisition of part or all of another state's territory through coercion or force," the statement said. "To do so violates the principles upon which the international system is built. We condemn the illegal referendum held in Crimea in violation of Ukraine's constitution.

"We also strongly condemn Russia's illegal attempt to annex Crimea in contravention of international law and specific international obligations."
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Toppy Vann
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WestCoastJoe wrote:No riddle that I can see.

He is ex KGB. Cold blooded. Deceptive. Goal oriented. Does not reveal his true intentions.

Do not take his words at face value. Expect him to do those things that displease the world but satisfy a more selfish agenda. He would be pleased to be in the old Soviet system once again. He knew how to survive in that old system. This present state of affairs is easy meat for him.

He is a fox in the chicken coop. He is somewhat of a sociopath amongst the innocents and the trusting.
Others who study this part of the world and who are free to speak say the same thing.

Putin views Obama as weak and untrustworthy - he is right on both counts. Weak as he has too little backing of the Congress on anything at all. Untrustworthy as he has been the most strident President on how America should conduct itself but in reality he's been worse than those who didn't go that far. Obama is great at the spin though.

Putin can point to all kinds of US interventions like Iraq and Libya - and all he did was take back Crimea and didn't fire a bullet or drop costly bombs. He's just protecting Russians. What a nice guy. Or is the narrative - that there are no Russians in Crimea? No matter. He has it.

But you are right - he'd love to return Russia to the glory days of the USSR.


Putin is holding a good hand (and CRIMEA) and knows no one will risk a war over this. He also has his hands on the gas levers and Germany needs the energy to keep fueling its economic superiority in all of Europe. This is no time to risk production levels.
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Sir Purrcival
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Frankly, Obama is in his last part of his presidency. Why Putin would see him one way or the other is beyond me. He can think what he likes but the truth is he will be dealing with someone else in the not too distant future and that he certainly knows.
He timed this to be sure but he was very careful to make sure the Olympics were over before he acted. That shows me that he does care somewhat about world opinion and the economic backlash has already begun to hurt both the Russian economy and the Ruble. That is going to cause him problems at home before too long and it is likely he won't be able to cut off the Oil and gas because it is going to be his one of the few real sources of foreign income. They need it as much as Europe needs the fuel. They also import textiles, foods and pharmaceuticals and because of the drop in the ruble, those things are going to cost more. While they may have lots of raw resources, they are far from self sufficient. Trade sanctions with Europe are going to hurt. In the long run, Crimea may be a very expensive and costly proposition. They may have it but they will have lost a great deal elsewhere.
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WestCoastJoe
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Putin might be a little bit paranoid. And he might have reason to distrust the West. But he is not crazy.

Crimea is gone. It is back in Russia.

And yet this has to be a good sign. If Putin had designs on Ukraine, that would raise the ante big time.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/31/world/eur ... ?hpt=hp_t2
Germany: Putin says he's pulling some troops back from Ukrainian border

By Jason Hanna, Marie-Louise Gumuchian and Alla Eshchenko, CNN

updated 2:53 PM EDT, Mon March 31, 2014

(CNN) -- Potentially easing a diplomatic standoff with the West, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday that he'd ordered a partial withdrawal of Russian troops from his country's border area with Ukraine, Merkel's office said.

Putin made the comment to Merkel in a phone call about Ukraine, her office said. The Kremlin made no mention of a withdrawal in its description of the call but said the two leaders discussed Ukraine, including "possibilities for international assistance to restore stability."

Further details about Putin's reported order weren't immediately available. But a withdrawal may ease tensions simmering since Russia annexed Ukraine's Black Sea peninsula of Crimea this month -- a move that has led to the worst East-West relations since the Cold War.

Earlier Monday, Russian media reported that one Russian infantry battalion was being moved from the border area to its base deeper into Russia.

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that if reports about Russia removing troops from the border were accurate, "it would be a welcome preliminary step."

Putin calls Obama to discuss Ukraine

"We would urge Russia to accelerate this process," Psaki said. "We also continue to urge Russia to engage in a dialogue with the government in Kiev to de-escalate the situation, while respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine."

The news about Russian troops came on the day that Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev traveled to Crimea -- the highest-level visit from Moscow since Russia annexed the region -- in part to unveil measures aimed at integrating the peninsula into the Russian economy.

Ukrainian and Western officials for weeks have voiced alarm about Russia's reported military buildup on Ukraine's eastern border, which has raised fears that Russian troops would enter the Ukrainian mainland. Russia may have 40,000 troops near its border with eastern Ukraine and another 25,000 inland on alert and prepared to go in, two U.S. officials have told CNN.

Moscow has said it had no intention of ordering armed forces to cross over into its neighbor, insisting its troops have been conducting exercises. But Putin has said Russia reserves the right to protect ethnic Russians in Ukraine from what he calls threats from Ukrainian nationals -- a reasoning he also used in this month's annexation of Crimea

Putin's conversation with Merkel came a day after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov held talks in Paris about ways to defuse the crisis over Ukraine.

Kerry told Lavrov that progress depended on a Russian troop pullback from Ukraine's borders but no breakthrough was announced.

The West imposed sanctions against some Russian officials because of the Crimea crisis and threatened more if tensions weren't eased.

Is Crimea gone?

Ukraine: Russian troops 'conducting unclear maneuvers'

Amid reports that Russia may have started withdrawing from the border, but before the Merkel announcement, government sources in Kiev told CNN that Russian troops were not backing away but were repositioning their forces farther north.

One Ukrainian official said intelligence indicated that Russian troops are "conducting unclear maneuvers at the Ukrainian border."

Meanwhile, Russian state news agency ITAR-Tass reported Monday that one Russian infantry battalion was being withdrawn from a region bordering Ukraine. That battalion, having finished military exercises, is returning to its base in Russia's Samara region, hundreds of miles away from the border, the outlet reported, citing Russia's Defense Ministry.

Details about how many troops are in that battalion weren't immediately available.

During a daily briefing Monday, Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Evhen Perebyinis said Russia had not told Kiev about the intentions of any military forces in the area.

"At some border districts the troops are withdrawn, in others they approach the border," he said. "We are concerned about this movement of the army."

U.S. official: 'Too soon' to discern Russian intentions

Before Merkel's announcement, a U.S. official said Monday it was too soon to conclude whether Russia was moving its troops away from the Ukraine border. The official was reacting to statements from Ukraine about Russian troop maneuvers.

"We have nothing to back that up one way or the other so far," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Barring any significant withdrawal from the border, the Russians are positioned "in a way (that) they could conduct a swift movement into Ukraine," the official said.

Russian Prime Minister in Crimea

Medvedev arrived in Crimea's capital, Simferopol, for talks Monday on social and economic development.

"As a result of entering Russia, not a single citizen of Crimea should lose anything -- they need only to benefit from it," Medvedev said in a news conference carried by Russian state television. "Citizens need to understand that they're citizens of a powerful country."

The Premier met with Crimean officials, including its Prime Minister, the speaker of the regional parliament and mayor of Sevastopol, among others.

He said Crimean state salaries and pensions should be raised to Russian levels, as should the pay for military personnel, while compulsory social insurance would be introduced to the region next year.

Crimeans voted to secede from Ukraine and join Russia in a March 16 referendum dismissed as a sham by Western governments, which say it violated Ukraine's Constitution and was held only after pro-Russian forces had seized control.

In tense, defiant Ukraine border region, prayers for peace

Economic measures

Unveiling a list of measures for the region, Medvedev also said Moscow would make Crimea a special economic zone.

Tax breaks may also be offered to companies, he added, calling for mortgage programs to be introduced to the region and for a review of water supply projects.

Crimea was integrated into Ukraine's mainland economy and infrastructure -- 90% of its water, 80% of its electricity and roughly 65% of its gas have come from the rest of the country.

The absorption of Crimea and its 2 million residents creates an added financial burden on Russia, which is struggling with slow growth and facing Western sanctions over its move.

"The water system is old. ... We'll need to make sure that citizens of Crimea are provided with the fresh water," Medvedev said. "There are a few projects. We'll need to consider them and choose the most suitable."

With agriculture one of the region's main economic gainers, Medvedev said Crimea would be included in a Russian support program for the sector and would soon receive around 80 harvesters. Local wines, which he said were popular across Russia, would also receive special attention.

After visiting a school and children's hospital, Medvedev added that Crimea needed modern medical equipment and reforms in education. He offered to establish a new federal university.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/
The less Americans know, the more they want to intervene

Kyle Dropp, Joshua D. Kertzer and Thomas Zeitzoff

MONKEY CAGE | Those who cannot locate Ukraine on a map are more likely to back military action, a survey finds.
The less Americans know about Ukraine’s location, the more they want U.S. to intervene

By Kyle Dropp, Joshua D. Kertzer and Thomas Zeitzoff

April 7 at 10:18 am

Joshua Tucker: The following is a guest post from political scientists Kyle Dropp (Dartmouth College) Joshua D. Kertzer (Harvard University) and Thomas Zeitzoff (Princeton University).

*****

Since Russian troops first entered the Crimean peninsula in early March, a series of media polling outlets have asked Americans how they want the U.S. to respond to the ongoing situation. Although two-thirds of Americans have reported following the situation at least “somewhat closely,” most Americans actually know very little about events on the ground — or even where the ground is.

On March 28-31, 2014, we asked a national sample of 2,066 Americans (fielded via Survey Sampling International Inc. (SSI), what action they wanted the U.S. to take in Ukraine, but with a twist: In addition to measuring standard demographic characteristics and general foreign policy attitudes, we also asked our survey respondents to locate Ukraine on a map as part of a larger, ongoing project to study foreign policy knowledge. We wanted to see where Americans think Ukraine is and to learn if this knowledge (or lack thereof) is related to their foreign policy views. We found that only one out of six Americans can find Ukraine on a map, and that this lack of knowledge is related to preferences: The farther their guesses were from Ukraine’s actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene with military force.

Ukraine: Where is it?

Survey respondents identified Ukraine by clicking on a high-resolution world map, shown above. We then created a distance metric by comparing the coordinates they provided with the actual location of Ukraine on the map. Other scholars, such as Markus Prior, have used pictures to measure visual knowledge, but unlike many of the traditional open-ended items political scientists use to measure knowledge, distance enables us to measure accuracy continuously: People who believe Ukraine is in Eastern Europe clearly are more informed than those who believe it is in Brazil or in the Indian Ocean.

About one in six (16 percent) Americans correctly located Ukraine, clicking somewhere within its borders. Most thought that Ukraine was located somewhere in Europe or Asia, but the median respondent was about 1,800 miles off — roughly the distance from Chicago to Los Angeles — locating Ukraine somewhere in an area bordered by Portugal on the west, Sudan on the south, Kazakhstan on the east, and Finland on the north.

Who is more accurate?

Accuracy varies across demographic groups. In general, younger Americans tended to provide more accurate responses than their older counterparts: 27 percent of 18-24 year olds correctly identified Ukraine, compared with 14 percent of 65+ year-olds. Men tended to do better than women, with 20 percent of men correctly identifying Ukraine and 13 percent of women. Interestingly, members of military households were no more likely to correctly locate Ukraine (16.1 percent correct) than members of non-military households (16 percent correct), but self-identified independents (29 percent correct) outperformed both Democrats (14 percent correct) and Republicans (15 percent correct). Unsurprisingly, college graduates (21 percent correct) were more likely to know where Ukraine was than non-college graduates (13 percent correct), but even 77 percent of college graduates failed to correctly place Ukraine on a map; the proportion of college grads who could correctly identify Ukraine is only slightly higher than the proportion of Americans who told Pew that President Obama was Muslim in August 2010.

Does accuracy matter?

Does it really matter whether Americans can put Ukraine on a map? Previous research would suggest yes: Information, or the absence thereof, can influence Americans’ attitudes about the kind of policies they want their government to carry out and the ability of elites to shape that agenda. Accordingly, we also asked our respondents a variety of questions about what they thought about the current situation on the ground, and what they wanted the United States to do. Similarly to other recent polls, we found that although Americans are undecided on what to do with Ukraine, they are more likely to oppose action in Ukraine the costlier it is — 45 percent of Americans supported boycotting the G8 summit, for example, while only 13 percent of Americans supported using force.

However, the further our respondents thought that Ukraine was from its actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene militarily. Even controlling for a series of demographic characteristics and participants’ general foreign policy attitudes, we found that the less accurate our participants were, the more they wanted the U.S. to use force, the greater the threat they saw Russia as posing to U.S. interests, and the more they thought that using force would advance U.S. national security interests; all of these effects are statistically significant at a 95 percent confidence level. Our results are clear, but also somewhat disconcerting: The less people know about where Ukraine is located on a map, the more they want the U.S. to intervene militarily.
How dare I post such a message?

I do love the USA. Like a big brother, who means well, but frequently breaks stuff, and who frequently charges off full of purpose, but lacking judgment.
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notahomer
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WestCoastJoe wrote:How dare I post such a message?

I do love the USA. Like a big brother, who means well, but frequently breaks stuff, and who frequently charges off full of purpose, but lacking judgment.

:rotf: Well put, WCJ.

The problem with military interventions, IMO, is that it seems the ones clamouring 'for a message to be sent' are not willing to admit they lobbied for such interventions when those interventions turn out to have reprecussions politically, financially and with the loss of life. Just my :2cents:
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Sir Purrcival
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Americans have been missing the mark for when to get involved militarily as long as I have been alive and longer. Sadly, when they do get involved in things, it seems that the populace buys the "For the Glory of the Stars and Stripes" schtick without really applying any critical thought to why and how to be involved. When the rah, rah fades, it seems so do their memories about how they felt and acted. They have cocked things up ranging from WWI all the way through to Iraq. Mostly they seem to stand back when they should be involved and fail to stand back when they should. But even more profoundly pathetic are the situations where organizations like the CIA have been involved. El Salvador, Panama, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, (the first time), Cuba, Iran. A veritable waterfall of missteps, mistaken allegiances, inappropriate resourcing and so on.

Does it surprise me that most Americans don't know where the Ukraine is? Nope. They are a very insular people in someways and it seems to translate to their foreign policy. For all the faults of Canadians, I would much rather see the likes of us, and other generally peaceful countries in charge of the UN security council. The Russians, Chinese, Americans, British, French et al, just don't cut it as permanent members. Between that lot there has been more insecurity than anything.
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