So it was an act of war, but we didn’t go to war? I think the terms here are unclear.
We came within an ass hair of going to war over Cuba. My father was in the military police at the time of the Cuban Missle Crisis. Want to know how close we came to war? His unit was sitting in a plane, ready to be deployed to some Gulf Coast location that would have been considered a front-line base (he mentioned a state; I forget which one it was). And they knew what their assignment was going to be: After the missles stopped flying, they were to patrol Havana. Or what was left of it, at least.
This. Time is on the side of peaceful nations. Overreacting to every little provocation serves only to assuage the easily offended and the fearful.
Let’s keep waitin’ 'em out.
…and we’d have been fucked. Cuba already had Russian missiles, and would have retaliated very effectively.</aside>
This isn’t the Cold War anymore and everyone knows we’re not going to be launching missiles for the likes of Ukraine. I think people feel better if they believe their president is willing to bomb the hell out of someone else because of the “AMERICA! FUCK YEAH!” attitude but they never think about the consequences. I’m fine with how Obama’s handled it
As for Sweden, they don’t need America to speak for them. Who cares what Putin warned them about?
There’s the problem. Putin knows we’re not going to go to war over the Ukraine, too. That’s why he felt comfortable enough to annex Crimea, and why he’s still fighting a proxy war in eastern Ukraine. Once the controversy dies down, western nations will quietly start to normalize relations again. It’s probably happening now.
This, I know. Apparently, when there was a re-union of a whole bunch of old Cold Warriors, from both sides, who got together to talk about it, they all turned pale and gasped, “You did what?” Even 45 years later (whenever that conference was) people were coming up with new surprises about how damn close we came.
My only quibble was over terminology. If the blockade was “an act of war,” then we were, by that definition, “at war.” More technically, the blockade was an act which the Soviet Union could legitimately have taken as an act of war, but which wasn’t so declared at the time.
(Just as when a U.S. Border Patrol agent fired his revolver at a fugitive who was on the Mexican side of the border, that could be taken as an act of war…but wasn’t.)
I’m looking at the difference between common language and terms of art.
I’d say that it’s reasonable to not engage Putin directly. There was the small opening, when he first moved troops into the Crimea where we could have gone Crazy Monkey and announced that we were flattening the peninsula in two weeks time, but that opportunity has passed.
Since then, the focus should be on destroying Putin’s base of power. We should be talking to the high ups in Russian business and mafia to tell them that we’d be very supportive of them, if they remove support from Putin, but otherwise we’re going to do our darnedest to move global oil to America, the Middle East, and South America and online porn/piracy/etc. to China and other takers. Spread rumors that Putin has a gay lover and is taking Steroids, etc.
Basically, make the man toxic to Russia and watch him implode.
Obama hurt Putin and Russia economically. Sanctions and watching as the price of oil tanked hit them where they lived. And it worked.
An “act of war” is “an aggressive act, usually employing military force, which constitutes an immediate threat to peace”. It’s something–like blockading* a country–which that country or its allies could reasonably (under customary international law definitions of “reasonable”) consider a justification for going to war. (*IIRC, the Kennedy administration referred to the blockade as a “quarantine” precisely because a blockade would be a clear-cut act of war–but if your “chicken” has webbed feet and a bill and swims around in the water making quacking noises, the other side may well call it a duck regardless of your terminology.)
In the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviets of course chose not to go to war over our “quarantine”, what with that whole “nuclear holocaust” thing.
MEBuckner: Cool! The ignorance was on my part, and thank you for clarifying the “term of art.” If I’m getting it now, one of my soldiers might shoot across the DMZ at one of your soldiers, and, while this is “an act of war,” it doesn’t mean that we have entered into a “state of war.”
This was what had me confoozled.
FWIW, it was oddly hard to find an online definition of the phrase. Wikipedia and Wiktionary were no help, but neither was Merriam-Webster Unabridged or even the Oxford English Dictionary. And for some reason Dictionary.com wasn’t working for me–I 'm able to get to it now, and in addition to that definition I gave from the Collins it also gives “an act of aggression by a country against another with which it is nominally at peace”. (Which fits well enough with the Collins definition.)
I don’t see how Obama has been indecisive on Russia. He’s made it pretty clear that sanctions are an option, and military force is not. And he’s stuck by that. I certainly don’t want to be at war with Russia with anything more than proxy forces. Do you?
All of which was a total overreaction. We had much larger quantities of nuclear weapons aimed at the Soviet Union in Turkey.