While the GOP certainly has enough of their own beltway ideologues burning the midnight oil on this, I predict an onset of the meme of White House "appeasement" and analogies to US inaction in the 1968 Czechoslovakian invasion and the 2008 crisis in Georgia as well as the recent continuing Syrian crisis. But like the endless obsession with Benghazi, the reality is that the GOP cannot let go of their demonizing need for applying interwar analogies as we observe even in DK the lines being drawn for a replaying of Cold War and neo-con rhetoric. It's always about The Sudetenland.
Ukraine's military, now ordered to full combat readiness to repel a full Russian invasion, is considerably weaker than Russia's. London-based think tank the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) says it has some 129,950 military personnel. Russia mobilized up to 150,000 troops on Friday in its western military district in what it called a planned drill.
Ukrainian special forces or irregular units could mount hit-and-run attacks on Russian forces in the country. For now, however, they are seen holding back.
"My feeling is that if this remains just Crimea, the Ukrainians will let it go for now," says Dmitry Gorenburg, Russia analyst at the US government-funded Center for Naval Analyses, part of the larger not-for-profit CNA Corporation.
"But if Russia looks like it's going to take the rest of eastern Ukraine, they will fight even if it means they know they will lose."
Some analysts explicitly compare events in Crimea with Nazi Germany's 1938 annexation of Czechoslovakia's German-speaking Sudetenland, followed months later by the rest of the country and the next year by Poland, sparking the Second World War.
The important thing now, they argue, is to make sure Russia understands which lines - such as those around NATO Baltic members - really cannot be crossed. (Reuters)
Lest you think this meme is fictive, note this gem from the intertoobs: