Memo to the left:  I don't want to go to war with Russia over Ukraine or Crimea either. 

I don't know of a single serious conservative who is calling on President Obama to seek a war resolution.   So can we stop the nonsense that our options are nuclear war or doing nothing! 

What are some of us looking for?  The answer is leadership or projecting our superpower status, as Charles Krauthammer wrote on Friday:

"Why did we deny Ukraine weapons?

Because in the Barack Obama-John Kerry worldview, arming the victim might be taken as a provocation. This kind of mind-bending illogic has marked the administration’s response to the whole Crimea affair.    

Why, after all, did Obama delay responding to Putin’s infiltration, military occupation and seizure of Crimea in the first place?

In order to provide Putin with a path to de-escalation, “an offramp,” the preferred White House phrase.  

An offramp?

Did they really think that Putin was losing, that his invasion of Crimea was a disaster from which he needed some face-saving way out?

And that the principal object of American diplomacy was to craft for Putin an exit strategy?  

It’s delusional enough to think that Putin — in seizing Crimea, threatening eastern Ukraine, destabilizing Kiev, shaking NATO, terrifying America’s East European allies and making the West look utterly helpless — was actually losing.

But to imagine that Putin saw it that way as well and was waiting for American diplomacy to save him from a monumental blunder is totally divorced from reality.  

After Obama’s Russian “reset,” missile-defense retreat and Syria comedown, Putin had already developed an undisguised disdain for his U.S. counterpart.

Yet even he must have been amazed by this newest American flight of fantasy. Putin reclaims a 200-year-old Russian patrimony with hardly a shot and to wild applause at home — Putin’s 72 percent domestic popularity is 30 points higher than Obama’s — and America’s leaders think he needs rescue?""

That's right.  We projected weakness and the bad guys thought that we were weak.  What a concept!

We don't have to go to war with Russia nor is anyone calling for that.  However, I am convinced that Putin's move is just the first of a few around the world. 

Watch for China, North Korea and Iran to test President Obama.  

Also, would President Maduro be cracking heads in Venezuela if he thought that President Obama would take a public stand against it? 

Would Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela be talking about Russian military bases if they thought that President Obama believed in The Monroe Doctrine?

Remember Mr Biden's famous words about Mr Obama being tested?   It was from the 2008 campaign:

""It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."  

"I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate," Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. "And he's gonna need help. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you - not financially to help him - we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right.""

Biden was wrong about the date but he was right about the test.

Yes, President Obama is being tested.  I just hope that someone in "the inner circle" has the courage to tell the President that he is failing the test so far. 

P. S. You can hear CANTO TALK here & follow me on Twitter @ scantojr.