Analysts, journalists, and lawmakers on Tuesday continued to unpack the geopolitical consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – both in general and specifically in the context of Middle East crises the White House is scrambling to contain – with evaluations building on assessments that the impending U.S.-Russia chill will badly complicate the Obama administration’s strategy of relying on Russia to help resolve diplomatic deadlocks with Syria and Iran.

The New York Times reported that President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discussed Ukraine in their Monday Oval Office meeting, while David Rieff – a foreign policy voice not known for sympathy toward robust U.S. interventionism – tersely evaluated public debate over the Crimean conflagration.

My own intuition is that the storm over Ukraine is actually mostly a displacement of the Iran debate. It seems inexplicable otherwise: a Russian takeover of the Crimea, where the Russian Black Sea fleet already was based and came and went as it pleased, changes nothing about the geo-strategic calculus in the region. What makes a bit more sense is that those who believe that Iran will never relinquish its nuclear weapons program and that, sooner or later, the U.S. must grasp the nettle and launch military strikes, look at American impotence in Ukraine and worry it’s a harbinger of the future.

Walter Russell Mead went further, declaring that “Putin’s Crimean adventure… shakes the foundations of the President’s world strategy.”

Washington’s flat-footed, deer-in-the-headlights incomprehension about Russia’s Crimean adventure undermines President Obama’s broader credibility in a deeply damaging way. If he could be this blind and misguided about Vladimir Putin, how smart is he about the Ayatollah Khamenei, a much more difficult figure to read?

Mead suggested that the White House’s near-total failure to predict Russia’s behavior – U.S. intelligence got its prediction of the Crimean invasion exactly backwards – will undermine Obama’s efforts to convince Middle East allies, most especially Israel, that Washington can be trusted in evaluating those allies’ security needs. The erosion in the president’s foreign policy credibility seems set to fuel renewed calls, supported by lopsided majorities of Americans, for stricter Congressional oversight over negotiations with Iran.

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