Just for a moment, I am going to reduce the complicated issue of U.S/European relations with Russia down to the basest and most analytically juvenile level possible: measuring peckers with a ruler.
Putin thought he came in with a huge measurement when he annexed Crimea and started making trouble in Eastern Ukraine.
Obama shrugged, and then this happened:
The ruble plummeted into a freefall, losing as much as 19 percent as panic swept across Russian financial markets after a surprise interest-rate increase failed to stem the run on the currency.
The ruble sank beyond 80 per dollar, a record low, before rebounding to 68 after Economy Minister Alexei Ulyukayev denied speculation that the government would turn to currency restrictions next to stop Russians from converting their money into dollars. Bonds and stocks also tumbled, with the RTS equity gauge dropping the most in six years.
“I am speechless,” Jean-David Haddad, an emerging-market strategist at OTCex Group in Paris, said in a message. “What a failure for the central bank. Russia would need to announce capital controls today. That is the last solution.”
Of course, what precipitated this was the gigantic drop in the cost of oil. This is hurting pretty much everyone in the world that you don’t (or shouldn’t) like.
There are downsides to everything, but something that kills Putin, bankrupts Iran’s mullahs, wipes out low-level fracking businesses, rips into the energy corporations’ stock values, divides OPEC, and gives a huge stimulus to average American consumers has so much upside that I’ll gladly take it.
The main downside beyond economic and political turmoil is that cheap oil makes it harder for alternative energies to compete.
But we can’t have everything, can we?
In any case, Putin’s pecker is looking awfully small.