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Obama Urges Calm in Face of Two Crises - New York Times

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World |Obama Urges Calm in Face of Two Crises



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Obama on Russian Culpability in Ukraine



Obama on Russian Culpability in Ukraine



President Obama said at a news conference that while he would continue to pressure Russia, he did not foresee a “military confrontation between Russia and the United States.”


By Associated Press on August 28, 2014. Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times





WASHINGTON — President Obama confronted a pair of volatile international crises with restraint on Thursday as he said he was not close to authorizing airstrikes against Islamic extremists in Syria and played down the latest escalation of Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine.


With tensions rising in Europe and the Middle East, Mr. Obama emphasized that a military response would not resolve either situation and pledged to build international coalitions to grapple with them. Despite pressure from within his own government for more assertive action, he tried to avoid inflaming passions as he sought new approaches.



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Mr. Obama confirmed that he had asked Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel for options for military strikes in Syria to target the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which has established a virtual state straddling the border of those countries. But speaking with reporters before a meeting of his national security team, the president said no action in Syria was imminent because he had not even seen military plans.


“We don’t have a strategy yet,” he said. “I think what I’ve seen in some of the news reports suggests that folks are getting a little further ahead of where we’re at than we currently are.”


His comment instantly drew fire from critics and prompted aides to clarify that he was only talking about what to do in Syria. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, posted a series of Twitter messages and went on television to say that Mr. Obama did, in fact, have a strategy to combat ISIS in Iraq. He said it included military action, building an inclusive government, supporting Iraq’s armed forces and recruiting regional partners.


Mr. Obama seemed equally intent on managing expectations about what the United States may do in response to reports that Russia has sent forces into Ukraine . Although he said he expected to impose additional sanctions, he declined to call Russia’s latest moves an invasion, as Ukraine and others have, saying they were “not really a shift” but just “a little more overt” form of longstanding Russian violations of Ukrainian sovereignty.


“I consider the actions that we’ve seen in the last week a continuation of what’s been taking place for months now,” Mr. Obama said. “The separatists are backed, trained, armed, financed by Russia. Throughout this process, we’ve seen deep Russian involvement in everything that they’ve done.”


In both cases, Mr. Obama took a strikingly different tone than his own advisers have in recent days. The nation’s top military officer and the president’s deputy national security adviser both talked in sharper terms over the last week about the possibility of striking in Syria, while Mr. Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations expressed moral outrage on Thursday over Russia’s latest actions in Ukraine.


In a blistering statement to the United Nations Security Council just hours before the president spoke, the ambassador, Samantha Power, bluntly accused Russia of lying about its intervention. “The mask is coming off” Russia’s denials, Ms. Power said, calling its actions a “threat to all of our peace and security.”


“Russia has come before this Council to say everything except the truth,” she said. “It has manipulated. It has obfuscated. It has outright lied. So we have learned to measure Russia by its actions and not by its words. In the last 48 hours, Russia’s actions have spoken volumes.”


On both Syria and Ukraine, Mr. Obama’s administration is engaged in separate, if parallel, debates about how aggressive to be, with the president seemingly acting as a brake on the more robust actions some advisers seek.


Administration officials have been preparing for another round of sanctions against Russia in conjunction with European allies, but they are unsure whether the president will take them to the next level, affecting broader swaths of Russia’s financial and energy sectors at the risk of harming American and European economic interests.


Some officials have urged going beyond such economic measures and intervening more directly to tilt the odds on the battlefield in favor of Ukraine’s new pro-Western government. Not only do some administration officials want to speed up promises of limited aid to Ukraine’s military, but some are pressing to provide arms and intelligence that would help Ukraine counter the sophisticated equipment that the United States and Europe say Russia is providing to separatists, as well as to its own forces now crossing the border.


Similarly, officials are struggling with the question of how far to go in taking on ISIS in Syria, where the president has been deeply reluctant to intervene in a bloody civil war. Mr. Obama has already ordered at least one Special Operations raid in Syria — a failed effort to rescue American hostages held by ISIS — but it is unclear how willing he would be to authorize more. Officials are debating whether an air campaign would involve manned jets or just drones, and whether they would target massed forces or specific leaders.


These were questions Mr. Obama was not eager to address during his session with reporters on Thursday. Instead, he noted that even the airstrikes he had authorized in Iraq for the last few weeks were “limited” and said, “Syria is not simply a military issue; it’s also a political issue.”


Mr. Obama acknowledged, however, that Syria had given ISIS “a safe haven here in ungoverned spaces” and that to roll back the group, “we’re going to have to build a regional strategy.”


He used the occasion to chastise allies in the Middle East for playing both sides when it came to ISIS and said he was sending Secretary of State John Kerry to the region to assemble a coalition against the group. He also rejected the notion that attacking ISIS might help President Bashar al-Assad of Syria in the civil war there. “I don’t think this is a situation where we have to choose between Assad or the kinds of people who carry on the incredible violence that we’ve been seeing there,” he said.


The Russian escalation came even as Mr. Obama prepared to travel to Europe next week to meet with NATO allies and try to reassure the Baltic States that the United States would stand by them in case of aggression from Moscow. Mr. Obama spoke by telephone on Thursday with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to discuss their next moves and invited President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine to visit him in Washington next month.


While Mr. Obama has been reluctant to send substantial American forces to allies in Eastern Europe, NATO now plans to create a “spearhead” rapid deployment force and a “more visible” presence in the region.


But Mr. Obama ruled out direct involvement. “We are not taking military action to solve the Ukrainian problem,” he said. “What we’re doing is to mobilize the international community to apply pressure on Russia. But I think it is very important to recognize that a military solution to this problem is not going to be forthcoming.”



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