"Accusing Russia of failing to live up to its commitments, President Barack Obama warned Moscow on Thursday that the United States has another round of economic sanctions 'teed up'--even as he acknowledged those penalties may do little to influence Vladimir Putin's handling of the crisis in Ukraine," the Associated Press reports from Tokyo.

"Teed up"? What was it that somebody said about Putin playing chess while Obama plays golf?

Obama's comments in Tokyo call to mind a story in Sunday's New York Times byPeter Baker, which carried the curious headline "In Cold War Echo, Obama Strategy Writes Off Putin":

Mr. Obama has concluded that even if there is a resolution to the current standoff over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, he will never have a constructive relationship with Mr. Putin, aides said. As a result, Mr. Obama will spend his final two and a half years in office trying to minimize the disruption Mr. Putin can cause, preserve whatever marginal cooperation can be saved and otherwise ignore the master of the Kremlin in favor of other foreign policy areas where progress remains possible.

"That is the strategy we ought to be pursuing," said Ivo H. Daalder, formerly Mr. Obama's ambassador to NATO and now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. "If you just stand there, be confident and raise the cost gradually and increasingly to Russia, that doesn't solve your Crimea problem and it probably doesn't solve your eastern Ukraine problem. But it may solve your Russia problem."

Baker presents this as the administration's "retrofitting for a new age the approach to Moscow that was first set out by the diplomat George F. Kennan in 1947 and that dominated American strategy through the fall of the Soviet Union." But containment did not entail ignoring the rulers of the Soviet Union, much less doing so out of pique because they refused to nurture "a constructive relationship" with the U.S. president.

National Journal's Ron Fournier draws a different, far less flattering analogy:

President Obama came to office nursing dreams "of forging a new partnership" with a stubborn rival. When times got tough, he abandoned the relationship and adopted dusty zero-sum gain [sic] policies of his predecessors. To allies and rivals alike, he looks naïve, weak, and disconnected. . . .

The turnaround on Russia is no more remarkable than the pivot Obama took after the 2008 election, when he abandoned his post-partisan brand at the first sight of Republican intransigence and forced the Affordable Care Act through Congress without GOP backing. Once poisoned, the well went dry: The candidate who had the "audacity to hope" for a new kind of politics surrendered to the toxic culture he promised to change. Obama wrote off Republicans. He said House Speaker John Boehner can't or won't bargain on the budget, then wrapped the white flag of surrender around the debt, gun control, tax reform, immigration, and other issues. Obama stopped looking for compromises, and then expressed outrage when he couldn't find them.

This column likely disagrees with Fournier on the underlying substance of many of the issues he cites; our view is that enacting a bipartisan compromise is frequently worse than doing nothing. But Fournier's analogy seems right to us. Obama's standoffish attitude toward Putin does indeed seem similar to the approach he has taken to Republicans.

Conservatives have sometimes wished--jokingly or not--that Obama were as aggressive toward America's antagonists as he is toward his own. With Putin, that wish appears to have come true. Maybe Baker is right and this is part of a grand strategy for containing Russia. But we suspect that's wishful thinking too.

The president's comments in Tokyo certainly don't inspire confidence. "I understand that additional sanctions may not change Mr. Putin's calculus," he said at a press conference with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. "How well they change his calculus in part depends on not only us applying sanctions but also the cooperation of other countries."

Obama added that "there was some possibility that Russia could take the wiser course after the meeting in Geneva," referring to a diplomatic powwow a week ago where Moscow's representatives signed an agreement to leave government buildings in eastern Ukraine and allow international monitors to enter. "So far at least, we have seen them not abide by the spirit or the letter of the agreement. . . . There's always the possibility that Russia tomorrow or the next day takes a different course. . . . Do I think they're going to do that? So far the evidence doesn't make me hopeful."

This sounds very much like Obama's approach to domestic politics since 2011, when the Republicans took the House. The president is lamenting his own ineffectuality and blaming it on others' unwillingness to do things his way--which only reinforces the sense that he is ineffectual.

The New Republic's Leon Wieseltier sums up the character of Obama's foreign-policy leadership this way:

The tiresome futurism of Obama, his dogmatic views about what this ritualistically ballyhooed century will be like and what it will not be like, are only a part of what lowers his vision. The bigger problem is that the president feels inconvenienced by history. It refuses to follow his program for it. It regularly exasperates him and regularly disappoints him. It flows when he wants it to ebb and it ebbs when he wants it flow. Like Mr. Incredible, the president is flummoxed that the world won't stay saved, or agree to be saved at all. After all, he came to save it. And so the world has only itself to blame if Obama is sick of it and going home.

On the domestic scene, too, perhaps no trait defines Obama's political character more than his disdain for those who oppose, or are skeptical of, his ideological worldview.

Is there at least something to be said from a national-security standpoint for Obama's treating Putin as harshly as he treats Republicans? We doubt it. It's not as if the president is siccing the IRS on the Russians. And even at that, the GOP has prospered during Obama's presidency to a far greater degree than the Democrats would have expected at its outset.

After the Democrats' sweeping victory in 2008--which not only put Obama in the White House but substantially expanded his party's congressional majorities--who'd have thought the Republicans would take back the House just two years later? The GOP was able to do so in large part because the Democrats overreached in enacting ObamaCare because they overinterpreted the 2006 and 2008 election results as a permanent ideological victory.

It's as if they thought they'd won the Cold War.

Why Do Bad Things Always Happen to Him? 
"President Obama arrived [in Tokyo] on Wednesday evening to begin a four-country tour of Asia, after first stopping in Washington State to survey the devastation left there by last month's deadly mudslide. It was a fitting start, given that everywhere on this trip, he will witness the lingering fallout of disasters, natural and human-made. . . . White House officials, who have come with a busy agenda of economic and security issues, worry that the leaders--particularly President Park Geun-hye of South Korea, for whom the ferry tragedy is still unfolding--will be preoccupied when they meet with Mr. Obama. 'The South Korea visit could really be overshadowed by the ferry,' said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter."--Mark Landler, New York Times, April 24

The Unshakable Climate Consensus 
"While it is impossible to link any single event to long-term changes in the global climate, scientists say the future will likely hold more such dangers in high-altitude regions, Fox News reported. There is nothing to prove the icefall [at Mount Everest] was behaving unusually on Friday. But scientists say mountaineers should assume that everything is now in flux. What makes the situation so risky, scientists say, is the uncertainty itself. While scientists are sure things are changing, they're not entirely sure how. Much of the evidence is anecdotal, and there isn't enough data or decades of scientific observation to draw solid conclusions."--Asian News International (India), April 24

Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate 
"Because of an editing error, an article on Wednesday about the likelihood that the nomination of Hillary Rodham Clinton for president would block the paths for other women running for the White House, and for those who would like to be vice president, referred incompletely to the possibility that Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand might be chosen as a running mate. Aside from the debate over a two-woman ticket, Ms. Gillibrand and Mrs. Clinton are both from New York, and the Constitution effectively prohibits the election of a president and a vice president who are from the same state. In addition, the article misstated the significance of having two women running on a presidential ticket. It would be the first such ticket for a major party, not the first time two women have run together. (Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala were running mates on the Green Party ticket in 2012.)"--New York Times, April 24