Foreign Policy tracks the uninterrupted collapse of Venezuela, which has been all but overshadowed by the crisis in Ukraine.  Venezuela is proof that even if no one hears a tree fall in the forest, the tree still hits the ground. But its proof of another less lofty adage: that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.  Socialists can keep failing forever without ever realizing that something is wrong.

For example Julia Buxton of the Guardian sees  Maduro’s problems as the result of insufficient agility.  But nothing is said about the model itself; except to suggest that Maduro’s opposition will make itself unpopular by refusing to ‘help’ or ‘cooperate’ with the Venezuelan strongman.

They were exacerbated by constant ministerial turnover and the government’s failure to engage with these issues as social and institutional problems, rather than facets of capitalism that would fade under Chávez’s model of 21st century socialism.

High inflation and shortages are the result of an overbearing state that is intended to frame the socialist economy. In the early 2000s price and exchange controls had logic in the context of private-sector lockouts, massive capital flight and the need to ensure access to high-price goods and services for the poor – Chávez’s core supporters. But the rationale for their retention has long expired.

As with Obamacare, the greatest sin of an ideologies’ victims is their unwillingness to patiently endure its supposed fixes. “Venezuela faces serious economic and security challenges. These need no exaggeration, and Maduro recognises that they can only be addressed through a national dialogue. An initial peace conference convened at the end of February was boycotted by the radicals and Capriles, but attended by lower-profile opposition figures. They, rather than Capriles, may prove to be the beneficiaries of the popular frustration with Maduro, who for now finds his position strengthened.

Whether it is Obama putting forward Debo Adegbile or Detroit insisting on its pensions or socialists doubling down on Socialism the problem is always framed in terms of: “yes it sucks so why not lend a hand and make it work?” The possibility it may fail is excluded a priori.

But in reality things fail all the time. And though everyone sees it coming there’s not a damn they do about it. The history of humanity is the history of unrepentance. Clayton Christensen argues that “great firms fail” — really excellent, innovative, world-beating teams — they often simply drift toward the sound of roaring water audible for miles yet despite decades of warning still go over the edge without a barrel.

This happens to countries and empires too. They can see the black line of the waterfall’s edge in the distance, but no one can steer away.

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A lot of stuff happening the world today. Lerner takes the 5th. The Congressional investigation ends in a shambles.

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Medea Benjamin was manhandled in Cairo today. “Help,” she Tweeted. “They Broke My Arm. Egypt Police”. They didn’t know who Medea Benjamin was or they didn’t care. Democracy Now reports:

U.S. peace activist Medea Benjamin was detained Monday at Cairo’s airport by Egyptian police without explanation. She says she was questioned, held overnight in an airport prison cell and then violently handcuffed by Egyptian officials, who dislocated her shoulder and broke her arm. She was then put on a plane and deported to Turkey, where she is now seeking medical treatment. We speak to her by telephone from the airport medical facility. Benjamin had intended to meet up with international delegates before traveling to Gaza for a women’s conference.

Whatever happened to that long ago line “you can’t do this to me. I’m an American”?  Maybe times have changed. The day after Putin decided to pull his troops back from Ukraine’s eastern border, “Russia said it had successfully test-fired an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) on Tuesday, with tensions running high over its military intervention in Ukraine’s Crimea region.” True it was a scheduled test. But in July last year the US canceled a similar ICBM test in order not to offend North Korea. America cared about the sensibilities of North Korea. Apparently Putin doesn’t give a hang about Barack Obama.

I was on talk radio today and a kind of sadness seemed to hang in the air;  a realization that something has gone missing — perhaps forever. It was overlaid by an angry shame that the president — whatever or how little you thought of him — could be shrunk to such a size, and by extension the country he represented.

It’s an atmospheric thing. Suddenly, without any warning, Washington no longer seems so much like the center of the universe. Those who inhabit it, who understand status even if they know nothing else, feel the demotion. Now it’s as if people got up this morning determined to understand why the world seems so much bigger and their offices so much smaller.  Paul Bonicelli at Foreign Policy tried to figure out where it all went wrong.

The pundits and experts have been scrambling to explain how their predictions of a non-interventionist Putin were so wrong. Is it because Putin is just extra-mean and aggressive and caught everyone by surprise? …

How is it that the president, a smart man, and his advisors, also smart, have been so wrong about Putin, the Iranian mullahs, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Syrian dictator, and others? Because they want to believe that the realist view where power and anarchy reign is wrong and that the idealist view of cooperation and international law is right. No amount of facts on the ground has dissuaded them of this belief until, one hopes, now.

Henry Kissinger famously notes that those powers that seek peace above all else are at the mercy of those powers that are willing to deny it to fulfill their interests.

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The crisis in the Ukraine, though it has abated for now, has made policymakers rediscover the power of energy production, which has a direct bearing on American strategic strength and leverage on Russia. The more energy America produces, the stronger it is.  And the less it has to rely on pure military power.

Republican lawmakers, while stopping short of calling for U.S. military action against Russia, say the Obama administration has another weapon at its disposal that could help Ukraine — natural gas.

Top-ranking Republicans on Tuesday urged the administration to cut the red tape that has held up the approval process for natural gas exports to key U.S. allies. They argue that by helping Ukraine and European allies end their dependence on Russian energy, the U.S. could ultimately loosen Vladimir Putin’s grip on the region.

This is obvious — anyone could see it. Even I could see it. On March 1, I wrote, “removing American troops in Afghanistan from their dependency on Russian supply routes; drilling for energy, securing the borders; rebuilding the Armed Forces and stopping the hemorrhaging of the American substance to pay for political boondoggles are a good place to start. They will have a greater effect than démarches to the UN and they do not require firing a single shot.”

Why was this policy not readied earlier? Well for one thing the option was out of the administration’s political reach. The tradeoff for acquiring a potent weapon against potentially hostile actors was offending domestic environmental constituencies. And Russians don’t vote. Clean Technica explains Obama’s bind:

We were just noting a couple of big developments in the movement to curb natural gas fracking in US communities when along comes Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) with a push in the opposite direction: export more natural gas in order to bolster international sanctions against Russia for its aggression in Ukraine.

In other words, more fracking!

Obama up until just now was slamming the brakes on fracking. Now a comes a proposal to fight Russia with natural gas. This unfortunately means more fracking — a political nonstarter in the Obama administration. Deprived of such levers, they preferred to rely on “smart diplomacy” which basically assumes that foreign leaders were now suffused with enlightened “21st century thinking”. Unfortunately this does not appear to be the case with Putin.

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The Obama administration has been criticized for being unprepared for the crisis in the Ukraine. Recently a former top NATO officer argued it was best not to be caught unprepared again. Stripes reports that “the alliance’s former top officer recommended that NATO take a series of steps, including drawing up contingency plans based on a full Russian invasion of Ukraine.”

 In an essay published Saturday on the Foreign Policy website, retired Adm. James Stavridis said NATO should also put its response force on a higher state of alert.

“Many will consider any level of NATO involvement provocative and potentially inflammatory,” wrote Stavridis, who retired last year as NATO’s supreme allied commander. “Unfortunately, the stakes are high and the Russians are moving. Sitting idle, without at least looking at options, is a mistake for NATO and would itself constitute a signal to Putin — one that he would welcome.”

But others argued that contingency planning or anticipatory deployments were themselves provocative and could send the wrong message.  The best way to stay safe, perhaps, is to remain unprepared.

Other experts, however, said the U.S. should refrain from any actions that could be seen as a military escalation.

“I strongly oppose any military responses, even indirect, to the current situation,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a defense expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “It’s simply not worth the risk, and not necessary.”

Some commentators felt the safest course is to leave things in the hands of president Obama since to cast doubts on his leadership now would be to play into the hands of Vladimir Putin. CNN’s Sally Kohn made precisely this point on her show Crossfire:

On Crossfire Monday, host Sally Kohn took on Republicans for “hurting America’s standing in the world” by “systematically undermining” President Barack Obama’s policy on the crisis in Ukraine. She found a sparring partner in the American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka, who defended the conservative criticism of the president. …

Republicans are practically cheering for Vladimir Putin today,” Kohn said at the top of the show’s second segment. “He’s given them a new excuse to bash President Obama.” She went on to describe how Republicans are all over the media arguing that Putin would not be trying to invade Ukraine if Obama was not such a “weak leader.”

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The capitals of Europe have gone from complacency to a near panic in the last 72 hours, not simply over the crisis in the Ukraine but in the growing awareness that for at least the last half decade they’ve been standing on a trapdoor.

At least president Obama, the leader of the Free World, has.

The arms control agreements with Moscow; the “deal” with Syria; Obama’s negotiations to disarm Iran of nuclear weapons; the Russian-controlled northern distribution network through which NATO forces in Afghanistan are supplied — every one of these — once counted as glittering achievements, the crown jewels of the administration, now reappears in a new and sinister light.

Marco Rubio instantly knew what the Ukraine meant:

Majority Leader Harry Reid should immediately halt his effort to force a Senate vote on Rose Gottemoeller next week to be under secretary of state for arms control and international security. As I, Sens. John Cornyn and Jim Risch said yesterday, we shouldn’t even be thinking about arms-control negotiations with Russia anytime soon. And especially not negotiations led by a State Department official, such as Ms. Gottemoeller, who has tried to play down and potentially kept information from Congress and our allies about Russian violations of arms-control agreements.

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One of the dangers and attractions of writing is the temptation of free association. The headlines about the Crimea naturally lead the mind to Tennyson’s poem about the immortal Charge of the Light Brigade, which was if you remember, was entirely a mistake. “Lord Raglan, overall commander of the British forces, had intended to send the Light Brigade to pursue and harry a retreating Russian artillery battery, a task well suited to light cavalry. Due to miscommunication in the chain of command, the Light Brigade was instead sent on a frontal assault against a different artillery battery, one well-prepared with excellent fields of defensive fire.”

Today’s movie makers would probably turn the incident into a sardonic commentary on the futility of human existence. But in an era when mortality was universally accepted, the manner of their acceptance of fate’s jest was something magnificent. So we remember the six hundred, frozen in time, in vigor and bravery:

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
“Charge for the guns!” he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

We meet them again years later, when their glory had considerably dimmed, in Rudyard Kipling’s poem, nearly as famous, The Last of the Light Brigade, showing the remnant starving in an old soldier’s home, reduced to mendicancy.

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CNN is reporting that Ukraine has called up its reserves.  ”The Ukrainian National Security Council ordered the mobilization as Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared to dismiss warnings from world leaders to avoid military intervention in Crimea, a senior Ukrainian official, Andriy Parubiy, said. The news came as evidence mounted that pro-Russian forces were already in Crimea, an autonomous region of eastern Ukraine with strong loyalty to neighboring Russia.”

Senior Ukrainian leadership continues to express hope the crisis can be resolved diplomatically.  Nevertheless the pucker factor is increasing. For Obama as for Putin, Murphy rides again.

The potential for disaster was underscored by a Reuters story which reported Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk as saying Russian military action “would be the beginning of war and the end of any relations between Ukraine and Russia.”  That may be bluff. But feeding it is uncertainty about how far Russia may go.  Mary Mycio at Slate argues that geographic necessity may simply compel Putin to grab more than the Crimea.

To see why, just open a map. That narrow strip of land tethering northern Crimea to the Ukrainian mainland, called the Perokop Isthmus, is the peninsula’s lifeline. What’s left out of most Western analyses of Putin’s brazen military intervention is the Crimea’s complete economic dependence on the mainland, which provides nearly all of its electricity and water and about 70 percent of its food….

Most of the Crimea is basically a desert, with less annual rainfall than Los Angeles. It is impossible to sustain its 2 million people—including agriculture and the substantial tourist industry—without Ukrainian water. Current supplies aren’t even enough. In Sevastopol, home of the Black Sea Fleet, households get water only on certain days. In fact, on Feb. 19, when snipers were shooting protesters on the streets of Kiev, Sevastopol applied for $34 million in Western aid (note the irony) to improve its water and sewer systems.

The Crimea’s dependence on Ukraine for nearly all of it electricity makes it equally vulnerable to nonviolent retaliation. One suggestion making the rounds of the Ukrainian Internet is that the mainland, with warning, shut off the power for 15 minutes. It may not normalize the situation, but it could give Moscow pause. Of course, Russia could retaliate by cutting off Ukrainian gas supplies, but that would mean cutting off much of Europe as well. Besides, Ukrainians proved this winter that they aren’t afraid of the cold, and spring is coming.

Which is to say Putin will need a resource and buffer zone if he wants to slice up his neighbor. This, plus the changing demography of Crimea, occasioned by the return of the Tatars, who are connected with international Islam, guarantees that Putin will be making a downpayment on a subscription to trouble. “Not only are they [the Tatars] extremely well organized, they are Muslims with friends. Representatives from Russia’s Tatarstan region are already supporting them. Turkey, which controlled the Crimea for much longer than Russia ever did and has close ties with the Crimean Tatars, is watching. So are Chechen rebels. The Crimea could explode into bloodshed.”

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The bad news is that Vladimir Putin is invading the Ukraine. The good news is that he got the Russian parliament — whatever you may think of it — to approve his actions.  The procedural difference is telling.  Putin has not forgotten the word War, with its terrible finality and destructiveness, nor disremembered Victory. For him it is remains an awful event, serious enough to be attended by smokes and ceremonies only to be undertaken at great risk in the expectation of even greater plunder.

It has not yet become that abstract legalism that Western leaders imagine; a “kinetic military activity” to be undertaken by executive order to exercise some “responsibility to protect”; a lawfare activity, a species of police action where some nameless international lawyer deputizes the US military as a posse. That dream is shattered; replaced by the nightmare vision of the past risen from its coffin. As J. Christian Adams noted in his latest column,  if nothing else Putin woke the world up.  Barack Obama went to Sochi to see “the new face of Russia” and it is staring back through the thin window pane, as old and terrible as all mankind.

We have not reached the End of History where the only meaningful choices are between red or white wine. The risk is rather that we might become History.

Marco Rubio just wrote a piece suggesting eight steps that might be followed to contain Putin.  ”This is a critical moment in world history”, he writes. But his outline lacks a critical ninth step. The United States must rebuild a rational national security policy mechanism from all major political strands to reimpose a sanity and political unity that has been missing for some time.

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[This post has been updated to reflect Putin's announcement that he's preparing to intervene in the Ukraine]

Here are four videos with an overlapping cast of characters. You remember their names, but probably not the story. Nobody knows the story yet. What action they are portraying on stage remains a puzzle. They may not even know it themselves. What drama does it represent? Is it a comedy of errors? Or a tragedy?

In the video above, President Obama warns Russia about the consequences of destabilizing the Ukraine. The president’s remarks contain two undeniable facts. One, that he’s been trying to lasso Vladimir Putin into a joint resolution of the Ukrainian problem. Two, that so far he’s had no luck. Something has bolted the barn and that something must be coaxed back into the corral.

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