President Vladimir Putin is once again humiliating the United States, thanks to the weakness of President Barack Obama's foreign policy, says John Fund, a national affairs columnist for National Review Online.
"Clearly Vladimir Putin is going to pay a very high short-term price for this military intervention [in Ukraine]. The Russian stock market fell 11 percent on Monday, the ruble fell dramatically . . . so it's clearly going to cost him," Fund told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.
"[But] Putin obviously thinks he can get away with this . . . Look at Syria, where he played Barack Obama like a fiddle, played the West like a fiddle. There was a red line. Assad, Putin's ally in Syria, crossed the red line and nothing happened. The president was humiliated, the United States was humiliated.
"Putin has again snookered Barack Obama. Unless Barack Obama can assemble . . . a coalition of the willing to isolate Russia economically, to damage its economy to show that this kind of behavior is unacceptable . . . it will show once again that the United States is a paper tiger," Fund said Tuesday.
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Fund says the United States should skip this year's G8 summit of world powers set for Sochi in June.
"A no-brainer is we don't attend the G8 meeting," he said, adding that Russia doesn't belong in the G8.
"It’s not a fully industrialized country. It's only there as a favor, a friendship after its currency collapsed in 1997. It should be expelled unless it withdraws from Crimea."
Fund also said Russia's membership in the World Trade Organization should be re-evaluated.
"If you can't handle Russia, which is frankly not an extremely powerful economy and is in a very weak geopolitical position, guess what message that sends to the Chinese?" Fund added.
"The Chinese navy is developing rapidly, they're building up their military strength . . . If you were a Chinese military leader and you looked at Barack Obama flailing and realized he was going to be present for another two-and-a-half years . . . you'd probably say, you know, the risks of actually doing something and being stopped for it are really low right now . . . maybe we should take some risks."
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