Bill Kristol Doesn’t Get Obama’s ‘Disdain’ for Cold War

by Evan McMurry | 3:30 pm, February 23rd, 2014 VIDEO

 

On This Week With George Stephanopoulos, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol wondered why President Barack Obama spoke of the “Cold War chessboard” with such derision, as the US figured nobly on that board for almost a half-century.
“It’s nice for President Obama to say [the situation in Ukraine] is not a ‘Cold War chessboard,’” Kristol said. “I don’t know why he says that with disdain. That was not an ignoble thing to play on that chessboard for forty-five years, and ended up winning that chessboard. Putin thinks it’s chess, he thinks he’s even playing a rougher game. And we have to be able to match it. All honor to the people for beginning the process, but if we and the Europeans cannot make ourselves as strong a force for democracy and rule of law as Putin is for the opposite, things may not go well.”
Tom Friedman, for what it’s worth, found the Cold War analogy absurd. “It’s not the Cold War,” he said. “The Cold War was a very specific thing. That was two nuclear-armed powers and competing ideologies, truly playing on a global chess board.”
Watch the clip below, via ABC News: