Don’t Expect Putin to Stop At the Ukraine, Warns Amb. John Bolton

John Bolton, the former US Ambassador to the UN, warned on Friday’s Secure Freedom Radio that if Vladimir Putin is successful in Ukraine, “all of the former Republics—including the three NATO members, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—are going to be coming next.” And after that, Bolton predicts, Putin will set his sights globally.

Bolton argued that Putin’s boldness is due largely to the lack of western resistance he is receiving.  He blamed European inaction on economic fears, and American inaction on President Obama’s foreign policy.

“The Europeans allowed themselves to become increasingly dependent on Russian oil and gas. Putin is going to exploit that. He’s going to exploit the fears in the Western European countries that their economies, their fragile economic recoveries, will tank if sanctions are imposed and trade is cut off, and, in turn, if Russia imposes sanctions on the West,” said Bolton.

Ambassador Bolton maintained that the current crisis could have been prevented had Western Europe been braver about incorporating former Soviet republics into their economic sphere.

“I think Europe flunked one test back in April of 2008 at the Bucharest NATO summit, when President Bush put on the table the idea of bringing both Ukraine and Georgia on a very clearly defined timetable into NATO. That was intended to avoid exactly what happened four months later when the Russians attacked Georgia, and what we’re seeing now in Ukraine,” Bolton said. “The Europeans were too worried, too nervous about Russia’s reaction, and they wouldn’t accept the idea. And we’re now playing out the consequences of that.”

Bolton was also sharply critical of President Obama’s handling of the entire situation.

The Russians, he said, “are operating under a grand strategy and they’re going to continue to pursue it.” On the other hand, Bolton said, “the President just doesn’t pay attention to national security issues. He doesn’t care about it. He sent John Kerry to negotiate with Sergey Lavrov: that’s like sending a warm stick of butter to negotiate with a steak knife.”

After host Frank Gaffney brought up the underreported use of cyber warfare by the Russians in Ukraine, Bolton said he is not optimistic about the choices Obama will likely make in the near future on that front.

He doesn’t “doubt that [Russia would] be delighted to negotiate a treaty with us that would solemnly foreswear the use of cyber warfare in international relations—and then they’d probably violate it. We, on the other hand, especially in the Obama administration, would adhere to it. So the Russians would advance, the Iranians, the North Koreans. Everyone would advance except us. This is exactly the wrong way to proceed, so I have no doubt it will become a priority for Barack Obama,” he commented wryly.