Ted Cruz: Obama Needs To Stop 'Agonizing' Over International Law, Realize Putin Wants To Reassemble The Soviet Union -- By Matthew Boyle, Breitbart

In his most aggressive criticisms on the subject to day, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said President Obama should stop “agonizing over what our respective legal teams think” and wake up to the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin is on a quest to reassemble the Soviet Union.

“Today his sights are set on Ukraine, but if he continues undeterred tomorrow it could be Estonia, Latvia, Moldova, Romania, the Czech Republic, or Poland,” Cruz said, calling on Obama to reinstate a canceled missile defense system in Poland and begin withdrawing from the New START Treaty.

“With a few strokes of his pen, Vladimir Putin has in recent days both created the Republic of Crimea and annexed that new entity into the Russian Federation, thereby violating the territorial integrity of Ukraine,” Cruz said. “To hear Putin tell it in his address to the Duma, this action is not only perfectly legal, it also rights a historical wrong in which Russia was ‘robbed’ of its rightful claim to the Crimean peninsula in 1954.”

Cruz argued that Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine is just the beginning of a larger course of action by Putin: the reassembly of the Soviet Union.

“President Obama has disputed the legality of these actions, observing that ‘President Putin seems to have a different set of lawyers making a different set of interpretations, but I don’t think that’s fooling anyone,’” Cruz said. “The reality, however, is that Putin is not concerned with international law or historical justice. His sole focus is on correcting what he considers to be the ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century' by reassembling the Soviet Union. Ukraine is only a step in this process. That is the real challenge the United States has to face, which we cannot do when we are agonizing over what our respective legal teams think.”

In order to stop Putin, Cruz called on the Obama administration to strengthen—instead of continuing to weaken—America’s missile defense outfits in Europe. Cruz points to Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) as a “historical model we can consult for guidance in this crisis,” saying the U.S. should follow the strategy Reagan laid out 30 years ago.

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