Furthermore....Wake-up call

You’ll recall how President Obama was caught with the audio on once, whispering reassurances to a Vladimir Putin puppet.

After the U.S. presidential election, said Obama, he would have more flexibility to accommodate the Kremlin’s concerns.

He whispered this in the ear of Putin puppet Dmitri Medvedev.

In response, Medvedev only gave a little nod. But the unspoken response may have flashed through his mind: “Thanks, chump.”

Fast forward to today. Now here Obama is making the European rounds trying to persuade Europe’s heads of state to unite in imposing tougher sanctions on Russia than ones Obama has imposed -- ones Putin has laughed off while consolidating his grip on the Crimean chunk of Ukraine.

Good luck with this sales pitch. Europe’s heads of state tend to view the word “tough” as a synonym for “reckless provocation.”

Heretofore, so has Obama. The Europeans are hesitant to take a tough stand even when the economic stakes are small. And they’re hardly small given Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and natural gas exports and Russian imports of European goods.

You’ll also recall how a snarky Obama administration had then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hit the “reset button” on relations with Russia, as if the problem with the authoritarian Putin’s regional agenda was a failure of the United States to be sufficiently sensitive to Putin’s ambition-driven “needs.”

Remember, too, that more recently Obama sniffed derisively at Mitt Romney for being hopelessly out of it and behind the times when the Republican presidential candidate pointed with concern to Putin’s ominous “geopolitical” agenda.

With no one favoring a military option -- and Putin being fully aware of this -- other options for containing Putinism are limited, especially in Ukraine, and always have been.

At least -- let it be hoped-- a major advancement in U.S. foreign policy is now reformulating itself with a belated realization on Obama’s part that not every regime’s intransigence and sinister designs can be attributed to a lack of U.S. sensitivity and nuance.

There are, as always, bad guys in the world, and as always they’ll take whatever they can get. Bluster alone is not the way to deal with them, true. But neither is hoping the bad guys are John Lennons waiting to be drawn out of their shells and will burst into a rendition of “Give Peace a Chance” if only they’re encouraged in a nice way.