Returning the peninsula of Crimea to the control of the Ukrainian government is a high priority of the Ukrainian government. It is not quite as high a priority to the U.S. government. Forcing the Russian military forces back to the pre-February 2022 border lines would represent a huge achievement and represents a daunting challenge at the moment. Reversing the consequences of a bad decision from 2014 is another challenge for another day.

Russia annexed Crimea nine years ago, and the Obama administration, with Joe Biden as vice president, chose to denounce the Russian occupation and enact sanctions that no reasonable foreign policy analyst could believe would spur Vladimir Putin to reverse his decision and concede the occupied territory.

This morning, Politico lays out how first the Obama administration and then the Trump administration dawdled and dragged their collective feet when it came to enforcing sanctions and export controls against Russia, and indicting Russian oligarchs.

POLITICO applied generous standards for what cases count, finding 14 criminal cases from January 2014 through February 2022. But some of the cases were only tangentially — if at all — related to Ukraine, had roots in export control violations and other alleged crimes prior to the 2014 invasion and may have been pursued war or no war. In fact, when Hanick’s indictment was unveiled in March 2022, the department curiously touted it as “the first-ever criminal indictment charging a violation of U.S. sanctions arising from the 2014 Russian undermining of democratic processes and institutions in Ukraine.”

…POLITICO’s findings support critics who argue that Washington, and the West more broadly, was too lenient toward Russia for too long, especially when it came to Ukraine. Such critics, who include Russian dissidents and Ukrainian activists, say America in particular should have imposed — and enforced — tougher Ukraine-related sanctions and other penalties more often and faster in the wake of the initial 2014 invasion.

“There was a whole appeasement psychology for a long time,” said Bill Browder, a British financier who has tangled with Putin and long argued for a tougher U.S. approach to the Kremlin. “It’s obvious to anyone who was close to the situation that Putin was maybe 95 percent responsible for the invasion of Ukraine, but we were 5 percent responsible by not doing anything up to this point.”

We are learning hard lessons about the consequences of those decisions from a decade ago – high among them that bold announcements of sanctions don’t mean much without robust enforcement, and that slap-on-the-wrist consequences for territorial aggression will be interpreted by the aggressor as a green light to continue their territorial acquisitions by force.

You don’t have to look far to find foreign policy analysts who argue that the potential threat of this country or that country is exaggerated or overstated. Spin a globe and pick a country, and there’s a decent chance your finger will land on a country that is at least partially opposed to the U.S. and its interests, and willing to engage in some dangerous brinkmanship: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela – and we’re not all that certain how much we can trust governments like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Belarus, and even Turkey. It is understandable that those inside and outside of the federal government would prefer to believe that a lot of what we see and hear is low-consequence saber-rattling, the same old bellicose threats that are unlikely to become reality.

And who knows, maybe they are. Maybe the North Koreans just want another foreign aid package, and regimes like the ones in Syria, Venezuela, and Cuba have too many problems at home to represent a serious threat to American interests.

But there’s always the danger that U.S. policymakers talk themselves into seeing what they want to see. In 2012, President Barack Obama famously dismissed Mitt Romney’s characterization of Russia as “our number one geopolitical foe” by scoffing, “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.” (Oh, how everyone laughed!) By 2013, Obama needed to believe that his previous assessment was right, that Russia could not be a number one, or number two, or top-tier geopolitical foe.

The end result, as Benjamin Haddad and Alina Polyakova argued at the Brookings Institution, was an Obama administration policy that insisted Russia was losing influence and power, even as it was gaining strength and becoming a more serious threat:

The president resisted calls from Congress, foreign policy experts, and his own cabinet to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine that would have raised the costs on Russia and helped Kyiv defend itself against Russian military incursion into the Donbas. As Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg, he viewed any deterrent moves by the United States as fundamentally not credible, because Russia’s interests clearly trumped our own; it was clear to him they would go to war much more readily that the United States ever would, and thus they had escalatory dominance. Doing more simply made no sense to Obama.

This timid realpolitik was mixed up with a healthy dose of disdain. Obama dismissed Russia as a “regional power” that was acting out of weakness in Ukraine. “The fact that Russia felt it had to go in militarily and lay bare these violations of international law indicates less influence, not more,” Obama said at the G7 meeting in 2014. This line has not aged well.

In the long run, it is safer to err on the side of caution, and risk overestimating the threat from your adversaries than underestimating the threat the present.