Time For Obama To Appeal To The Russian People

Dear fellow members of the Human Race.

I speak to you now from the heart.  People are people.  Some have good souls and some do not.  You know as well as do I that no nation is composed of all of one type or all of the other… Each of our nations have both good and bad people in them.  With every choice of direction taken, we must analyze if either of our nations are making a correct or incorrect step…. In fact across every life, each person must daily battle over whether what they are doing, the course of action they are pursuing, is indeed the correct one they should be upon….

This is coming to you from the heart.  Your nation’s course of action is puzzling to me, to my nation, and to your fellow members of the human race now scattered across the planet.  Your nation has come so far since the 1992,  You are a highly respected member of the international community.  You recently awed us by your mastery in hosting the entire world at your Olympics in Sochi.

With all that behind you today it is puzzling that your nation is embarking on a course of action that negates all that.  One that makes you appear to be less of a great power in this world.  Instead of greatness one would expect from  the pageantry of Sochi, the very nation that beget Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy,  we are getting the behavior of a warlord existing in a land in which there is no law and there is no order.

Among our species, there will always be disputes.  There will always be disagreements between nations for as long as there will be disagreements between individual people. But civilized people have forged a means that deal with such.  We have institutions that we respect and that we trust will not side with either one or another solely because of personal favoritism, but decide what they do, because they honestly think their decision will make the world a better place.  For one to take a course of action because one has a superiority of force, is not conducive to a better future for anyone.

For it will cause my side to react.  It will cause your government to  react to our reaction.  It will cause us to react to that new threat imposed on us by your reaction to what we did…. in all regards, further continence on the current path will be a step backwards for the world community, and for the entire species of man… It will be a return to the Cold War Days, where as one of your diplomats stated, “our tanks are again on your front lawn.”   I hope you can see that if your nation’s current threat of force is continued, and that if this old retired idea that taking sovereignty from other nations were again to become the norm of Russia’s international behavior, then our nation and allies will have no recourse but to implant ourselves on the soil of those nations bordering next to your great country, for only the sole purpose to keep each of them from becoming the next Crimea.

This will of course intensify an arms race for both our nations.  A race of resources that will have great negative economic consequences for your country, as well as ours.  We are prepared and capable of undergoing it again, and you the Russian people should not doubt, that based on a comparison of our two economies, all global experts predict our side will win, again.

I hereby ask you to challenge your ruler, who seems bent on pursuing this destructive action.  And one can make no mistake that it parallels a course our nation chose a decade ago when we wrongly under the guise of protecting our national interests, did something similar. However there are vast differences between our past, and this present.  We tried diplomacy first; we used the UN weapons’ inspectors; we took our case before our own people, then to the United Nations, and from both we got a consensus of support.  Unlike us, your nation just moved in.

To your nation’s credit, there has not yet been violence. You have acted far more civilized than did ours.  There is still time for your nation to chose to return to the previous status quo of two weeks ago, then make your case to the UN, the US, and the EU.  As is all diplomacy among civilized human beings, nothing will be dismissed out of hand.

You are a great nation. one that has come far.  I ask the Russian people to consider whether going backwards in time, returning again to a Cold War, is truly the best option available to your nation… Isn’t cooperation, as was seen in the Olympic games held on Russian soil, a far more productive, a far more fruitful enterprise of action, than exerting one’s will through military occupation?

The stakes are not high.  Yet your leaders hold them much higher and stress them far more important than most others think they seem to be.  We simply ask that your nation returns to your rightful bases; that the referendum is postponed and allowed to be done properly with adequate international observation solely to provide credibility to its results.  Our intelligence tells us the outcome is not in question; the numbers seem to be in your favor.  However by rushing the referendum and having it take place in occupied territory, certainly will cast a shadow over many decades to come, of whether or not those results were indeed legitimate.  As Russian people you should have no fear of legitimacy..  You have spawned many new nations since 1992, because those people chose through elections to be independent from Russia.  It would certainly be fair in the eyes of the international community, if a nation or part of one, wanted to come back in…

But there needs to be legitimacy.  It needs to be done in a certain way, under certain guiding principles, with the approval of the global community…   Being wrong in the international community’s eyes is a costly endeavor; one of wasted investment.  Again, many in the world community likewise disapproved of my nation, the United States’ military intervention into the Mideast now over a decade ago. Many Russian people were among them…   I ask you now, speaking from the heart, if it was wrong for us, and it was, why would it not be wrong for Russia to do exactly the same thing?

There are many commonalities between the Russian people and those of the United States of America.  We both have children, and grandchildren.  We both want what is best for them probably more than we care about ourselves…  The collision course our two nations are headed towards now, is not good for either of our progeny, no matter where they call home….

We have no quarrel with where Crimea itself wishes to end up.  My only concern is how that gets determined, and whether I have to expend expensive resources to make sure that no other nation with a border touching Russia, ever has to worry about the same thing happening to them…  Western Europe is thriving and prosperous today, because of actions that the US took 70 years ago.  Indeed our investment back then has paid off handsomely.  We are prepared to do it again if we must.  However our doing so, does not help your children or our children, have the better future which they could have, if our two nations were to always work within the structure and framework provided by, for and to the global community, in order to achieve our interests and build to better future…

I ask all Russian people to make their will known, that they as we suspect, would also prefer a peaceful world, a civilized world, a world whose future is based on the best intentions of mankind, to one day hand over to both our children…

There is still time for Russia to act magnanimously; if there is the Will. …By the grace of the God present in us all on either continent, we pray for the sake of the civilized future of both our nations, that deep within every Russian, that Will is still there….