The Politics of Red Lines: Putin's takeover of Crimea scares U.S. leaders because it challenges America's global dominance | Noam Chomsky

The Politics of Red Lines: Putin's takeover of Crimea scares U.S. leaders because it challenges America's global dominance | Noam Chomsky

The current Ukraine crisis is serious and threatening, so much so that
some commentators even compare it to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

Columnist Thanassis Cambanis summarizes the core issue succinctly in The
Boston Globe: "[President Vladimir V.] Putin's annexation of the Crimea
is a break in the order that America and its allies have come to rely
on since the end of the Cold War -- namely, one in which major powers
only intervene militarily when they have an international consensus on
their side, or failing that, when they're not crossing a rival power's
red lines."

This era's most extreme international crime, the United States-United
Kingdom invasion of Iraq, was therefore not a break in world order --
because, after failing to gain international support, the aggressors
didn't cross Russian or Chinese red lines.

In contrast, Putin's takeover of the Crimea and his ambitions in Ukraine cross American red lines.

Therefore "Obama is focused on isolating Putin's Russia by cutting off
its economic and political ties to the outside world, limiting its
expansionist ambitions in its own neighborhood and effectively making it
a pariah state," Peter Baker reports in The New York Times.

American red lines, in short, are firmly placed at Russia's borders.
Therefore Russian ambitions "in its own neighborhood" violate world
order and create crises.

The point generalizes. Other countries are sometimes allowed to have red
lines -- at their borders (where the United States' red lines are also
located). But not Iraq, for example. Or Iran, which the U.S. continually
threatens with attack ("no options are off the table").