Roundup: Opinions on Ukraine from US and Foreign Media | Voice of America - English
The crisis in Ukraine has captured global attention and is generating a wide spectrum of opinion on its causes and solutions.
"Name the names, freeze their accounts. But any real effect will require broader sanctions and for that we need . The ultimate sanction is to cut off Russian oligarchs, companies and banks from the Western financial system. "That’s the economic “nuclear option” that brought Iran to its knees and to the negotiating table. It would have a devastating effect on Putin’s economy.As of now, the Germans, French and British have balked. They have too much economic interest in the Moscow connection. "Which means we can do nothing decisive in the short or even medium term. But we can severely squeeze Russia in the long term. "How? For serious sanctions to become possible, Europe must first be weaned off Russian gas. Obama should order the Energy Department to expedite authorization for roughly 25 liquified natural gas export facilities. Demand all decisions within six weeks. "And express major U.S. support for a southern-route pipeline to export Caspian Sea gas to Europe without traversing Russia or Ukraine." Commentary by Jamie Metzl, former Capitol Hill and White House diplomatic staff, published in the Gulf Times of Qatar. "With China’s leaders now aggressively demonising Japan and pressing disputed territorial and maritime claims more assertively than ever before, the country is being thrust in a direction that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, with his penchant for historical revisionism and highlighting Japan’s nationalist past, may in some ways have already favoured: back to the nineteenth century. "Europe, too, embraced the postwar international system. "With security outsourced to America, European governments shifted their focus and expenditures to social welfare and set about building a twenty-first-century post-sovereign utopia that has blurred national divisions and replaced aggression and hostility with negotiation and compromise. "The EU’s twenty-first-century dream now confronts the nineteenth-century Czarist bear, flashing its atavistic claws on the Russia-Ukraine border. "And, just as Asean has been unable and unwilling to stand up to China over its encroachment in the South China Sea, the EU is already discovering the limits of its soft-power, consensus-driven approach to Russia. I"f a twenty-first-century post-sovereign system remains an unreachable dream in our Hobbesian world, and reverting to nineteenth-century norms by acquiescing to aggressive behaviour by Russia and China is unpalatable, defending the postwar international system may be the best option we have. "Ironically, a nineteenth-century response, featuring balance-of-power politics and the rearmament of Europe and Japan, may be part of what is required to do it." Opinion by U.S. Senator John McCain, Republican Senator from Arizona, published in the International Herald Tribune. "Three American presidents have sought to cooperate with Mr. Putin where our interests converge. "What should be clear now, and should have been clear the last time he tore apart a country, is that our interests do not converge much. He will always insist on being our rival. "The United States must look beyond Mr. Putin. His regime may appear imposing, but it is rotting inside. His Russia is not a great power on par with America. "It is a gas station run by a corrupt, autocratic regime. And eventually, Russians will come for Mr. Putin in the same way and for the same reasons that Ukrainians came for Viktor F. Yanukovych. "We must prepare for that day now. We should show the Russian people that we support their human rights by expanding the Magnitsky Act to impose more sanctions on those who abuse them. "We should stop allowing their country’s most corrupt officials to park ill-gotten proceeds in Western economies. We should prove that countries like Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova have a future in the Euro-Atlantic community, and Russia can, too." Commentary by Paul Pillar, Georgetown University professor and former CIA analyst, published in the Arab American News. "Some of the most enthusiastic proponents of active, U.S.-led promotion of democracy have more than once in recent months cheered what is one of the clearest possible negations of democracy: overthrow through nondemocratic means of a freely elected leader.