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What Would Winston Churchill Do?

Apr 11, 2014 03:00 am | Robert C. O'Brien

Robert C. O'Brien

Russia's naked grab of Crimea, its continuing intimidation of Kiev and Putin's proffered justification—that he is merely protecting ethnic Russians—parallel a much darker time in European history. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made this point last month: "Now if this sounds familiar, it's what Hitler did back in the '30s. All the Germans that were ... the ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they're not being treated right. I must go and protect my people, and that's what's gotten everybody so nervous."
In the Pacific, China has not undertaken military action as dramatic as the Russian invasion of Crimea but it has staked a claim to almost the entirety of the South China Sea with its "nine-dash line." In the process, China's Navy and Coast Guard has expelled the Philippines from the Scarborough Shoal, a reef just under 150 miles from the Philippines but almost 550 miles from Hainan Island, the nearest Chinese port. Responding to U.S. and regional concerns raised about China's position on the South China Sea, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi proclaimed in July 2010, “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact."
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