If Russian strongman Vladimir Putin wants to redraw the map of Russia to protect ethnic minorities, with tongue-in-cheek, perhaps it’s time that those revisions go both ways. Siberia is resource-rich and population-poor, but home to a growing Chinese minority, or at least a mixed Russian-Chinese minority. The reason is simple (and this isn’t tongue-in-cheek): Many Russian women are marrying Chinese men simply because they drink less and don’t beat them as much. Regardless, what happens in Crimea or, perhaps next, Kharkov, won’t stay in Crimea or Kharkov.

Precedent matters. Had the West not acted with such impotence in the wake of the Russian invasion and occupation of parts of Georgia, perhaps Putin would have thought twice before rehashing the same playbook in Ukraine. Certainly, the Baltic States have reason for concern given Latvia and Estonia’s Russian minorities; Lithuania’s is considerably smaller. So too does Moldova, where Russians almost equal the Moldovan population in the Transnistrian region.

Early in the Crimea crisis, Putin claimed Chinese support for Russian actions. Rather than two aspiring powers cooperating to checkmate American dominance, however, China may have played Putin by endorsing a doctrine that ultimately might justify a resurgent China’s territorial ambition.

It is too bad that the Obama doctrine continues to be one of empty redlines that the United States neither has the power nor the will to enforce, and U.S. public diplomacy emphasizes tweeting for the sake of tweeting, with absolutely no evidence that officials using twitter adds an iota of credibility or effectiveness to American diplomacy. Perhaps it is time to play hardball and suggest publicly and often that the United States respects the rights of minorities within the borders of Russia to independence or to join neighboring states if those minorities so choose.