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Legally, no one is obliged to do anything at all. But all sides are obliged to follow their end of the agreement if they have any hope of being taken seriously in future agreements. For instance, Russia shirked their end of the agreement, and now it is highly unlikely that any other nation will give up their own weapons or defense systems in exchange for Russian protection.
The IMF is ordering the new Ukranian government to raise gas prices by 50%. The west wants their share of the looting that goes on there, so will turn thhe country into a shell.They'll sell off anything of value to foreigners.
Russia, China and India would make a very formidable competitor.
And they are not wallowing in debt like us and our European allies.
There is a chess game going on.
And we're losing.
The EU will be impacted by tough sanctions while we won't.
Is Obama speaking on behalf of the EU as well ?
Is Obama speaking on behalf of the UN ? I thought the UN had a leader.
It is true. Russia is a shell of what it was once. But that only means they can't march through central Europe. They can pick off whichever small former Republics if they wanted to. The Ukraine/EU relationship scared Putin into realize his sphere of influence is eroding.
Russia has more than 4 times as much proven natural gas reserves than the U.S. and also several times more proven oil reserves. And that is just known reserves...Huge areas of Russia have yet to surveyed. Iran is in a similar situation. China and India have relatively little. In little more than a month Russia will sign a deal to provide huge amounts of energy to China. The largest countries in the world, including India, China, Brazil, Indonesia all have good relations with Russia on a more fundamental level than they do with the U.S. The U.S. is often seen as a useful bully to many countries, but this is less true now than in the past...now it is no longer so useful.
The U.S. is desperately trying to position itself in that part of the world to have significant control and also maintain trade in petrodollars, but is failing quite miserably and continuing to make enemies. The U.S. dollar would be worth very little if it cannot maintain monopoly on petrotrade. Can you say bankruptcy and hyper-inflation?
Along with the 'regional power' statement Obama also stated the U.S. does not resort to military action to exercise influence. Obviously a complete lie, as evidenced by several hundred military installations around the world. Not to mention the invasions/occupations/instigations that regularly occur, with Iraq and Afghanistan being the most prominent...even those are essentially failures as proven by the Afghan president's support for Russia in this Ukraine issue. And of course, very few outside of the U.S. see what happened in Crimea as an 'invasion'. The U.S. has been proven many times to be behind coups...this will likely be no different, and will likely be disastrous, just as the one in Iran 1953 where U.S. and U.K. overthrew a legitimately elected government to install a puppet.
Oh, and Russia-China will be trading energy in their own currencies. Russia has no interest in fighting wars. That is a U.S. hobby.
Russia, China and India would make a very formidable competitor.
And they are not wallowing in debt like us and our European allies.
There is a chess game going on.
And we're losing.
The US has one glaring problem, and it is energy dependence on other nations. We are an easy nation to cripple where energy is concerned. We consume a lot of it, and produce entirely too little domestically. The Putin vs EU thing is solved in a few minutes if the US is a net exporter of energy, specifically to NATO nations. It weakens the only real power that Putin has. But we declared war on cheap energy 5 years ago, and well, here we are. Only a few hundred pundits have said the same thing, and the peaceful, easy solution for Ukraine is the US going all drill baby drill. Thing is, who matters more to the DNC - Ukraine, or the enviro-nazi voting bloc of America?
China and Russia are both way more energy independent than the US. That actually matters...a lot. They also don't need 10 years of committees and new bureaucracies to make more energy. If they want more, they just go do it, kind of like we used to back in the 30s-40s. We built the Pentagon in 18 months. Now, it would take 10 years if it took a day.
So Russia has chips in play that we cannot easily weaken, and they are far more capable of waiting out an extended siege. Russia's economy is dependent on exporting oil, preferably for more than $100 a barrel, but the EU and US economies are dependent on IMPORTING that oil, and Russia is better friends and owns more oil right leases with the world's oil exporters than the US or EU. Same with China. What oil rights exist in the Middle East that aren't owned by the host nation are owned by Russia or China. And it is still a petrochemical driven world folks.
And not for nothing, but China owns the rare earth metal market, and between Russia's alliance with them and Kazhakstan, Russia sits in the cat bird seat for energy independence, 25% of the world's uranium, and a whole bunch of oil leases in informal alliance territory.
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