I used to joke that it was my objective to be smarter than anybody stronger than me, stronger than anybody smarter than me, and faster than anybody who’s both. A few years as a financially struggling carpenter, with insufficient footwear, exacerbated my birth-defect ankle such that I’ve had to switch out the last-resort of speed, in my equation, for a determination to snatch spiritual strength from defeat.

The point is: You have to have something, don’t you? You have to have some angle in every situation and learn from every encounter. In every war, you have to have some battlefield on which you can win and some way to get your opponent onto that battlefield. And if there’s a battlefield on which you don’t want ever to have to fight — a real battlefield, for example, on which people actually die in large numbers — you have to (1) have unambiguous superiority on that battlefield and (2) convey the sense that you might choose it if milder solutions don’t work out.

On matters of international concern, our mindless national media has done no greater (if inadvertent) good for our country in the past half century than when it conveyed a silly image of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush as reckless cowboys who’d march us into war. “Don’t think I’ll do it, Mr. Foreign Antagonist? Just ask the New York Times.”

Two quotes from an essay by Victor Davis Hanson, which I read by way of Instapundit, serve this point. The first is President Obama’s evidence of charade:

Putin, as the entire administration keeps reminding us, is premodern. He should be, but is not, shamed when John Kerry, Joe Biden, Susan Rice, and Barack Obama variously proclaim that he is a 19th century dinosaur, or has lost the good will of the enlightened West.

But a would-be tyrant will see, easily enough, that the likes of Barack Obama say such things about the likes of, well, me. When leading members of the president’s party are targeting private citizens who engage the representative-democracy system, and when citizens who push back against radical social change are labeled as retrograde barbarians (as happened when Arizona nearly expanded protections for religious rights), what’s left for accusations against a strongman who annexes large portions of neighboring countries?

“Leave Crimea alone, or else you’re no better than a florist who won’t decorate a lesbian wedding”?

The second quotation:

So what does our Eloi in Chief want from Putin the Morlock? He seeks to school Putin to be as sophisticated as we are, in the sense of analyzing the art of annexation and thus concluding that going Viking leads the world nowhere.

Any precocious teen who has ever challenged a teacher will know this one: To impart such lessons, it must be clear that the would-be teacher will unambiguously win on the undesirable battlefield, but chooses not to. The message must be that we’ve found a better way, but that our way has given us even more strength when foolish enemies make us do the things we don’t want to do. If you want a pop-culture reference, check the clip of Robin Williams threatening Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting.

The United States of America has made the world a more dangerous place by electing to its highest office a self-blinded poseur who never should have been put in a position to make decisions for which anybody would actually be forced to pay. Obama is a man of limited versatility who is conspicuously weak wherever he can’t control the game such that he can unilaterally change the rules.

As Hanson says, “even Chicago is not Russia.”