March 29, 2024 4:43 AM
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Opinion: Woke, Weakness and War – Buz Williams

While discussing the volatile situation in Eastern Europe, my wife, Judi, predicted that it was inevitable that Russia would invade Ukraine. She said that Putin annexed Crimea when Obama was president and the only response was some anemic sanctions that the Russians learned to live with. Putin didn’t try it when Trump was president because he feared an “America First” type response.

Vladimir Putin’s Russian war machine invaded Ukraine on Thursday, February 24, 2022. Putin has made no secret of his desire to reconstruct the old Soviet Union under the Russian government. As I write this, the Ukrainian people are putting up a valiant resistance.

The question remains to be asked: Why would Putin start a war at this particular time? The lesson that history teaches, is that weakness invites war. Human nature has shown that bullies, either on the playground or in the much larger geopolitical world, attack those they perceive as weak, never those that are strong. Why did Putin annex Crimea from Ukraine in 2014? Because after watching President Obama for six years, Putin saw him as a loudly barking dog with no bite.

It didn’t take the Russian tyrant nearly as long to determine that President Joe Biden was weaker than even Barack Obama. One of the cable news casters stated that an intelligence source said that Putin hadn’t decided to invade Ukraine until after he saw the American disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

When a country fails to protect and provide safe passage for its own citizens before the military leaves, its difficult to believe that nation is operating from a position of strength. When the United States leaves behind billions of dollars in weapons that potentially could be used in the future by terrorists or against our own soldiers, it is hard to believe that our leaders have a strategic thought in their heads. It is impossible to come to any other conclusion than that the leftist administration running our country cares at all for the lives and well being of our citizens or military personnel or give a wit about wasting tax payer money.

Even before the Afghanistan embarrassment, Putin was able to see the Biden administration telegraphing impotence from the start. In the first months of Biden’s presidency, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, didn’t seem at all interested in strengthening our armed forces, he pushed for wokeness. He prioritized fighting discrimination by race, sex, sexual orientation and transgenderism. His department was developing flight suits for pregnant female pilots and looking into changing hair style regulations.

Now if you were Vladimir Putin, and your chief world foe was a country that stressed combating white privilege and ensuring the rights of transgenders over preparing the military to fight wars and terrorists, would you think that was a strong nation? Would you be deterred from your expansionist goals by the threat of economic sanctions from such a weak, woke political administration? Why would you? When you took Crimea and conflict with the Ukraine was imminent, Obama sent blankets to the Ukraine to combat Russia. Why expect anything different now?

My wife was absolutely correct when she said that all of human history shows that weakness invites aggression. 

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2 Responses

  1. Well said Buz. While Joe Biden takes orders from the leftist behind the curtain, we suffer and the pliant media goes along. I have long believed most so-called journalists are basically lazy, willing to write what they are told or rewrite a press release from a source.

  2. Boy, where do I start. Putin invades Georgia in 2008, George W. Bush had already invaded two countries by then, did President Bush all of a sudden choose to show weakness? You wrote “When a country fails to protect and provide safe passage for its own citizens before the military leaves, its difficult to believe that nation is operating from a position of strength” yet fail to mention that all U.S. citizens were informed months before the withdrawal of forces that they needed to leave Afghanistan, the U.S. government was prepared to provide those people safe passage back to the U.S. Those people chose to stay.

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