"Ukraine Isn't Armageddon" was the bold banner headline splashed over the most incisive journalism I have read on Vladimir Putin and the Crimea crisis. It led the April edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, the sharp monthly out of Paris.

You won't find anything like this analysis in the mostly war-baiting U.S. media. Being left-leaning, the Paris paper was not remotely defending "Czar" Putin. And being French, Le Monde Diplomatique was determined to be (well, you know!) contrarian.

But in this instance, the French paper was persuasive. "Media treatment of recent events in Ukraine," read the analysis by Olivier Zajec of France's Institut de Strategie Comparee, "confirms that some in the West see international crises as Armageddons, conflicts between good and evil where the meaning of history is enacted, rather than as signs of differences of interest and perception between parties open to reason."