As Ed noted in reiterating even the Washington Post‘s incredulity this morning, whatever foreign-policy la-la-land President Obama and his advisers are living in isn’t anywhere close to one in which other leaders like Russia and China are currently acting out their aggression. The Obama administration might be over American exceptionalism as a leading force in the world, but that doesn’t mean that other countries are going to follow suit and just graciously bow out of the game.

Remember the speech he gave at the U.N. when he started his administration? He said no nation can or should dominate another. I mean, there’s not a 12-year-old in the world who believes that. And he said the alignment of nations rooted in the cleavages of the long ago Cold War make no sense in this interconnected world. As our Secretary of State said today, or yesterday, after all this, this is a 19th century action in a 21st century world. As if what he means his actions where governments pursue expansion, territory domination, no longer exist in this century, as if that hasn’t been a constant in all of human history since Hannibal. They imagine the world as a new interconnected world where climate change is the biggest threat and they are shocked that the Russians actually are interested in territory.

Ukraine is now claiming that there are 16,000 troops deployed in the Crimea region as of Monday afternoon. So, there’s that.