have rallied a war party. Doing so perhaps might have contributed to restoring coherence to their troubled party. But as he had done in Syria in 2013, Obama refused the call to escalate.48 In Europe there was no support for military action. It was not that Ukraine would be denied weapons. But, as in Syria, the arms would be supplied through covert channels. The public front of the West’s reaction was economic sanctions. Putin’s line had always been that geoeconomics were geopolitics. In Ukraine, struggles over trade negotiations and customs treaties had escalated into an undeclared war. Now
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