It seems Russian troops – even though they (mostly) are not yet labeled as such – are in the Crimea to stay. Reclaiming that strategic peninsula for Ukraine would require the use of force, something no state outside of the Ukraine is willing to contemplate, and before which even Ukraine authorities themselves should hesitate due to the risk of thereby only losing more of their territory.

What the West is left with is proceeding with a deliberate worsening of relations with Vladimir Putin’s regime as punishment: denying him the chance to get yet more mileage out of his $51 billion Sochi reconstruction by staging a G8 summit there, for instance. But the unfortunate problem is that, to a great extent, this can turn out to be self-defeating as the West needs Russia just as Russia needs the West.

Anyone who follows international affairs regularly can name two vital areas right off the bat for which that is true: Iran and Syria. For the former, the West seems very close to achieving a remarkable deal that will safeguard against any nuclear weapons ambitions Iran might have – but one for which Iran’s willingness has been predicated upon united political and economic pressure from the West and from Russia. As for Syria, the regime there is already behind on the schedule for the elimination of its chemical weapons that Russia did quite a lot to help draw up.

(Now, this NYT piece claims that Syria is ready to try to speed things up to try to make up lost ground – but the article is dated March 4. Returning to Russia’s potential reluctance for any more international cooperation, there are always those inspections that Putin, in good times, ordinarily consents to undergo in relation to various arms-control treaties.)

Then there are the more tangible things – like natural gas. (OK, it’s a gas, but still slightly more tangible than a pure concept such as “arms control.”) Plenty of European countries are still dependent on gas supplies from Russia, piped through the Ukraine. And so we get this:

I know, that must seem at first sight like some confused jumble. “V4,” for example: what’s “V4”?* That is shorthand for the “Visegrad 4,” itself a shorthand for the Central European countries Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. And what the governments of those countries have done is think ahead a bit in light of this new geopolitical confrontation with Putin. (more…)

Uh-oh. It seems a certain American English expression is spreading overseas, and not one we might prefer:

US-Haushaltsstreit: “Go f… yourself!” – Washingtons Nerven liegen blank http://t.co/XlE06lIu

January 3, 2013 4:48 am via SocialFlowReplyRetweetFavorite

@welt

DIE WELT

This is of course the Twitter-link to Die Welt’s recent coverage of that ordeal of the “fiscal cliff” (Finanzklippe in German, if you’re interested). And, since it’s a reliable way to let others provide you with grist for your column (just ask the NYT’s Thomas Friedman, for example), journalist Ansgar Graw gives us here, right off-the-bat, a cabbie interview. The driver’s name’s Timothy, he comes from Jersey, and at least he’s capable of keeping a civil tongue as he transports Graw to his DC destination. “If I can’t make ends meet with my money,” he observes, “I can’t simply demand more from you [or “youse guys”?]. I have to start saving. But what does Washington do? They raise taxes, to avoid the ‘fiscal cliff’!”

That’s quaint. First rule of Macroeconomics: the family budget is a faulty analogue for the financial issues of a government, particularly one in charge of its own currency. Back to the Congress, Graw attributes all that profanity flying around to the “frayed nerves” left over from the recent brinksmanship. He errs, however, when he tells his readers that John Boehner’s headline “request” to Harry Reid occurred “in the White House lobby” – accounts rather place the incident to just outside the Oval Office, as both Congressional leaders were waiting to confer with President Obama.

Maybe we shouldn’t begrudge Boehner his letting-off of a little steam, though, because (as Graw notes, and everybody knows) an equally fraught confrontation over the US debt ceiling is less than two months away. Speaker Boehner might even be out of a job by then: he was left high-and-dry when his House Republican majority refused to back his “Plan B” budget program of December’s last week, and his immediate deputy, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, was careful to vote “No” himself on that “fiscal cliff” legislation.

UPDATE: Goodness, goodness. Now this completely uncensored bit from Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza:

Go fuck yourself http://t.co/dSLBpgdr

January 5, 2013 5:01 am via Gazeta WyborczaReplyRetweetFavorite

@gazeta_wyborcza

Gazeta Wyborcza.pl

Apologies to anyone who needs them, this blog has never claimed to be G-rated. The occasion for this particular tweet, by the way, is a Gazeta twit – just click through to behold his mugshot – who needed an attention-getting title for his time-line editorial recounting the “fiscal cliff” craziness.

The US midterm election returns are now in, for the most part. The result? Greater-than-expected Democratic losses in the House of Representatives – and a loss of their majority in that chamber – together with somewhat less-than-expected losses in the Senate, capped by the unexpected electoral survival of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

His counterpart as most powerful official of the House now becomes Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, someone relatively unknown to this point even within the US, and certainly internationally. The Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung steps into the breach today with a brief portrait entitled The Patriot.

“Patriot”? That’s taking Boehner at his own word. President Obama is of a slightly different opinion; as the election neared and he started sharpening his rhetoric against his political opponents, he began to zero in on Boehner as the face of the Republican Party – “the Party of No” – as a whole, often singling out his name multiple times in campaign speeches. (That face, FAZ correspondent Matthias Rüb adds, which is always “tanned brown.”) He also was the presumed target of the President’s now-infamous remark during an interview with a Spanish-language radio station about how Latino voters needed to start voting to “punish their enemies” who stood in the way of legislation they want, like immigration reform. No, I’m a patriot, is how Boehner responded in his own campaign speech soon afterwards, since he is against high taxes and high government indebtedness.

Be that as it may, it will no longer be possible simply to dismiss John Boehner after 3 January when he becomes Speaker of the House, so Obama and the rest of us need to get to know him better. (Naturally, Obama is way ahead on this.) He is said by author Rüb to be “amiable,” and renowned as a “renewer and clean-up man” (Erneuerer und Saubermann) within the halls of Congress, which he first started to prowl in 1991. Since that freshmen term his rapid rise to the top came about through close association with, first, Newt Gingrich and then with Tom Delay, whom he succeeded as House minority leader after the latter resigned his seat in February 2006 over corruption allegations (only now coming to trial). Interestingly, before that point his main legislative accomplishment was probably the “No Child Left Behind” education act, which he maneuvered through Congress in cooperation with then-President George W. Bush and noted liberal grandee Senator Ted Kennedy.

But there is also no need to idealize the man. For one thing, there was his own remarkable admission in a recent interview that, as far as he was concerned, the chief Republican legislative goal was to ensure that Obama becomes a one-term president. At the same time, he is by far the champion fund-raiser for Republican electoral coffers, largely because of how especially “amiable” he is towards lobbyists for financial and big business concerns, as noted in this NYT piece of only a couple months ago. But we probably cannot expect the FAZ – even the paper’s dedicated Washington correspondent – to be able to fully fathom the increasingly commercial nature of American legislative deliberations.

Post modified: Sorry, it was rather Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell who stated the bit about making Obama a one-term president being the Republican Party’s #1 objective.