The key issue is not who is in charge but what. Russia's problem is constitutional. There is no division of powers. The judges, the police, and the legislature all work for the same people, and there is essentially no trial by jury. As a result, anyone can be arrested and accused of anything, and conviction is almost guaranteed.
The Yanukovych regime is a mafia, which regularly threatens, imprisons, murders, or disappears political opponents as well as those whose possessions it covets.
The U.S. trade embargo on Cuba is almost completely ineffective, as many other countries, including the European Union, do not honor it.
The goods of the world market are available for Cuba to purchase, but all the foreign exchange is monopolized by the regime, which uses it for its own power and pleasure.
The use of hunger as a weapon of political control is a crime against humanity.
Putin is sometimes described as a revanchist, seeking to recreate the Soviet Union. That is a useful shorthand, but it is not really accurate.
Without Ukraine, Dugin's fascist Eurasian Union project is impossible, and sooner or later, Russia itself will have to join the West and become free, leaving only a few despised and doomed islands of tyranny around the globe.
The Putin regime's income comes from oil and gas exports. If we could crash the price of these commodities, we could bankrupt the regime.
The federal government should end its policies of economic warfare against the United States and allow our nation to develop all its energy resources to the fullest, both for domestic use and for export.
The blockade against American natural-gas exports needs to be lifted, and the war on coal needs to be ended, so that, instead of being wasted to replace perfectly good coal-generated electricity, our natural-gas exports can be expanded even further.
Government attempts to ban fracking should be aborted. The government should lift the burdensome regulations that have made the construction of nuclear power plants excessively expensive, thereby freeing up even more natural gas for direct use or for methanol manufacture.
Our European allies need to be able to buy our fuel, or they will fall to enemy domination.
Like the producers of crops, airplanes, and books, producers of natural gas provide goods to meet the size of their available market. The larger the market, the more they can produce, and the more revenue they can obtain to cover their fixed costs and invest in future development.
The federal government was created to defend the United States, not to wage war upon it.
