Don't ever expect Russia to cut us an inch of slack

"At the Cold War's end, the United States was given one of the great opportunities of history: to embrace Russia, largest nation on earth, as partner, friend, ally. Our mutual interests meshed almost perfectly. There was no ideological, territorial, historic or economic quarrel between us, once communist ideology was interred." Patrick J. Buchanan

David Seaton's News Links
One of the strangest things that has happened to me since September 11th, 2001, is finding myself agreeing so often with paleo-conservative, Pat Buchanan. I don't agree with him on one single domestic policy issue that I can think of, but on foreign policy I find him strangely sound... and the quote above, totally.

The way the United States treated Russia at the collapse of the Soviet Union will haunt America for decades. It is without a doubt the stupidest, most frivolous, mistake in our history. It even dwarfs the invasion of Iraq for destructive idiocy. The answer to the question as to why and to whose benefit all this was done is another one for "future Chinese historians" to settle.

We are beginning to harvest the bitter crop sown then. Vladimir Putin went to Tehran to be photographed with Ahmadinejad in the middle of a US diplomatic offensive to isolate Iran… in order to isolate the United States.

It is important to realize that most countries rich in natural resources were formerly ruled by a collection of ex-colonial masters that now calls itself the European Union. It was their natural wealth that caused them to lose their independence in the first place. So it is difficult for them to see that the plans America has for democratizing them are any other than a modern version of the “mission civilisatrice” or “white man’s burden” of former days. Most countries that are rich in natural resources are much more afraid of the USA than they are of Iran.

When Americans defend their sovereignty, it is called "patriotism", when others do; it is called "nationalism". Around the world countries that have nothing more in common than the desire to maintain their sovereignty in the face of US destabilization are banding together: Witness the unlikely alliance of Iran and Venezuela. By standing up to America on the Iranian question, Russia shows resource rich, third world countries that it is protecting their sovereignty. In doing so Russia greatly enhances its own prestige in countries that own oil, natural gas and strategic minerals, commodities whose prices are rising steadily.

Putin’s Russia thus becomes the defender of nationalist sovereignty against internationalist subversion. This is a total role reversal of the cold war, where the Soviet Union tried to change other countries’ political systems by subversion or military action and the US was seen by nationalists as a barrier against Soviet subversion. It is noteworthy that the Latin American military officers that once vigorously persecuted “Marxist Internationalism” now have no problem supporting present day leftist governments that seek to maintain national sovereignty in the face of "Capitalist Internationalism". (read globalization)

I agree with my "guru", William Pfaff when he says, “the serious danger today to America is its pseudo-Marxist ideology of aggressive world security hegemony.” Putin, judoka that he is, is exploiting America's use of its power to rebuild Russia's own power and thus her sovereignty, a sovereignty that was itself seriously threatened by the United States during the Yeltsin period. DS

Patrick J. Buchanan: Who Restarted the Cold War?
Abstract: "Putin's Hostile Course," the lead editorial in The Washington Times of Oct. 18, began thus: "Russian President Vladimir Putin's invitation to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to visit Moscow is just the latest sign that, more than 16 years after the collapse of Soviet communism, Moscow is gravitating toward Cold War behavior.(...) "(A)t virtually every turn, Mr. Putin and the Russian leadership appear to be doing their best in ways large and small to marginalize and embarrass the United States and undercut U.S. foreign policy interests."(...) Missing from the prosecution's case, however, was the motive. Why has Putin's Russia turned hostile? Why is Putin mending fences with China, Iran and Syria? Why is Putin sending Bear bombers to the edge of American airspace? Why has Russia turned against America? For Putin's approval rating is three times that of George Bush. Who restarted the Cold War?(...) Russia let the Berlin Wall be torn down and its satellite states be voted or thrown out of power across Eastern Europe. Russia agreed to pull the Red Army all the way back inside its border. Russia agreed to let the Soviet Union dissolve into 15 nations. The Communist Party agreed to share power and let itself be voted out. Russia embraced freedom and American-style capitalism, and invited Americans in to show them how it was done. Russia did not use its veto in the Security Council to block the U.S. war to drive Saddam Hussein, an ally, out of Kuwait. When 9-11 struck, Putin gave his blessing to U.S. troops using former republics as bases for the U.S. invasion. What was Moscow's reward for its pro-America policy? The United States began moving NATO into Eastern Europe and then into former Soviet republics. Six ex-Warsaw Pact nations are now NATO allies, as are three ex-republics of the Soviet Union. NATO expansionists have not given up on bringing Ukraine, united to Russia for centuries, or Georgia, Stalin's birthplace, into NATO.(...) While Moscow removed its military bases from Cuba and all over the Third World, we have sought permanent military bases in Russia's backyard of Central Asia.(...) Under presidents Clinton and Bush, the United States financed a pipeline for Caspian Sea oil to transit Azerbaijan and Georgia to the Black Sea and Turkey, cutting Russia out of the action. With the end of the Cold War, the KGB was abolished and the Comintern disappeared. But the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House and other Cold War agencies, funded with tens of millions in tax-exempt and tax dollars, engineered the ouster of pro-Russian regimes in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia, and sought the ouster of the regime in Minsk. At the Cold War's end, the United States was given one of the great opportunities of history: to embrace Russia, largest nation on earth, as partner, friend, ally. Our mutual interests meshed almost perfectly. There was no ideological, territorial, historic or economic quarrel between us, once communist ideology was interred. We blew it. We moved NATO onto Russia's front porch, ignored her valid interests and concerns, and, with our "indispensable-nation" arrogance, treated her as a defeated power, as France treated Weimar Germany after Versailles. READ IT ALL

Russia: what goes around, comes around

David Seaton's News Links

For me Bill Clinton is just a fly version of George W. Bush. Russia is even more important than Iraq and Bill Clinton played the saxophone while Russia burned. Probably the two most important things Clinton could have done and didn't do were, provide universal medical insurance for the American people and handle Russia and the needless suffering of its people differently. He failed in both tasks. Russia and by extension the former Soviet Union is one of history's great peoples. They have endless resources, both human and natural. They are brave, talented, tenacious and creative. People like that will never be down very long. The way Clinton handled them and encouraged the "shock therapy" that impoverished and embittered millions of Russians was frivolous, cruel and stupid and we will have to pay a high price for it. If any of the compassion and effort at easing the suffering of defeated Nazi Germany had been applied to the Russian case, at this moment we might even be looking at a true, "New World Order". DS

The breakup of the Soviet Union ended Russia's march to democracy - Stephen Cohen - Guardian
Abstract: The most consequential event of the second half of the 20th century took place 15 years ago at a secluded hunting lodge in the Belovezh Forest near Minsk. On December 8 1991, heads of three of the Soviet Union's 15 republics, led by Russia's Boris Yeltsin, met there to sign documents abolishing that 74-year-old state. For most western commentators the Soviet breakup was an unambiguously positive turning point in Russian and world history. As it quickly became the defining moment in a new American triumphalist narrative, the hope that Mikhail Gorbachev's pro-Soviet democratic and market reforms of 1985-91 would succeed was forgotten. Soviet history was now presented as "Russia's seven decades as a rigid and ruthless police state". American academics reacted similarly, most reverting to pre-Gorbachev axioms that the system had always been unreformable and doomed. The opposing view that there had been other possibilities in Soviet history, "roads not taken", was dismissed as a "dubious", if not disloyal, notion. Gorbachev's reforms, despite having so remarkably dismantled the Communist party dictatorship, had been "a chimera", and the Soviet Union therefore died from a "lack of alternatives". Most specialists no longer asked, even in the light of the human tragedies that followed in the 1990s, if a reforming Soviet Union might have been the best hope for the post-communist future of Russia. Nor have mainstream commentators asked if its survival would have been better for world affairs. On the contrary, they concluded that everything Soviet had to be discarded by "the razing of the entire edifice of political and economic relations". Such certitudes are now, of course, the only politically correct ones in US (and most European) policy, media and academic circles. A large majority of Russians, on the other hand, as they have regularly made clear in opinion surveys, regret the end of the Soviet Union, not because they pine for "communism" but because they lost a secure way of life. They do not share the nearly unanimous western view that the Soviet Union's "collapse" was "inevitable" because of inherent fatal defects. They believe instead, and for good reason, that three "subjective" factors broke it up: the way Gorbachev carried out his political and economic reforms; a power struggle in which Yeltsin overthrew the Soviet state in order to get rid of its president, Gorbachev; and property-seizing Soviet bureaucratic elites, the nomenklatura, who were more interested in "privatising" the state's enormous wealth in 1991 than in defending it. Most Russians, including even the imprisoned oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, therefore still see December 1991 as a "tragedy". In addition, a growing number of Russian intellectuals have come to believe that something essential was lost - a historic opportunity to democratise and modernise Russia by methods more gradualist, consensual and less traumatic, and thus more fruitful and less costly, than those adopted after 1991. One common post-Soviet myth, promoted by Yeltsin's supporters, is that the dissolution was "peaceful". In reality, ethnic civil wars erupted in central Asia and Transcaucasia, killing hundreds of thousands and brutally displacing even more, a process still under way. It is hard to imagine a political act more extreme than abolishing what was still, for all its crises, a nuclear superpower state of 286 million citizens. And yet Yeltsin did it, as even his sympathisers acknowledged, in a way that was "neither legitimate nor democratic". Having ended the Soviet state in a way that lacked legal or popular legitimacy - in a referendum nine months before, 76% had voted to preserve the union - the Yeltsin ruling group soon became fearful of real democracy. And indeed Yeltsin's armed overthrow of the Russian parliament soon followed.(...) So why did so many western commentators hail the breakup of the Soviet Union as a "breakthrough" to democracy? Their reaction was based mainly on anti-communist ideology and hopeful myths.(...) Since the late 1980s (the most influential pro-Yeltsin intellectuals) had insisted that free-market economics and large-scale private property would have to be imposed on Russian society by an "iron hand" regime using "anti-democratic measures". Like the property-seeking elites, they saw Russia's newly elected legislatures as an obstacle. Admirers of Chile's Augusto Pinochet, they said of Yeltsin: "Let him be a dictator!" Not surprisingly, they cheered (along with the US government and mainstream media) when he used tanks to destroy Russia's popularly elected parliament in 1993. READ IT ALL

Power struggles unravel Democrats' unity - Los Angeles Times

David Seaton's News Links

In domestic disputes and "crimes of passion" the offended person often picks up the first object at hand and hits the offender over the head with it; however improbable that object might be. Frying pans, ashtrays, icepicks, chairs you name it. In this case the American people, enraged by Bush's infidelities in Iraq, have hit him "upside the head" with the only blunt object they could lay their hands on... the Democratic Party. The great question is: is the Democratic Party still "the right tool for the job"? After Clinton(s), does it still stand for anything? DS

Abstract: Democrats returned to Capitol Hill on Monday to prepare for a transfer of power in Congress, but their postelection emphasis on unity quickly dissolved into power struggles and jockeying over the spoils of victory. Much of the squabbling stemmed from the decision over the weekend by presumed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to endorse a longtime loyalist to be her second-in-command. In backing Iraq war critic Rep. John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania for the post, Pelosi, of San Francisco, turned her back on another Democrat who is in line for the job and is favored by many of her party's more moderate members. In her first high-profile move after the election, Pelosi signaled that she can be expected to prize personal loyalty as she oversees the fractious party.(...) As the crop of freshly elected Democrats — including many younger ones who campaigned to the right of the party line — came to Capitol Hill for orientation Monday, they encountered a leadership dominated by mostly liberal, old-school Democrats. Cardoza, a leader of the conservative coalition in the House known as the Blue Dogs, warned that Democratic cohesion would suffer if the liberals in line to head many of the chamber's key committees don't take party moderates into account. "We have to try to build a consensus, and it's not going to be an automatic, top-down way, or we'll have conflict on the floor," Cardoza said.(...) Emotions and tensions are running high in the battle between Hoyer and Murtha. As in most congressional leadership elections, the outcome hinges largely on personal relationships, not ideology. But divisions over the war in Iraq are playing a part. Murtha, known as a strong supporter of the military, emerged as a hero of the left when he became a leading critic of the conflict a year ago; Hoyer has been more hawkish. READ ALL

Labour drafts in Howard Dean for 'our midterms' - Guardian

David Seaton's News Links
Howard Dean is in my opinion the only truly interesting major politician in the USA today. He really understands how the new forms of communication (like this blog) are changing politics. He has found the solution for taking the Democratic party away from the consultants, lobbies, celebrities and big check writers that have stewarded the decline of the party of FDR. The midterm victory will make it easier for him... I hope he gets another crack at the presidency. DS


Abstract: Labour has enlisted one of the engineers of this week's Democratic victory in the US midterm elections in an attempt to boost its flagging fortunes before the local elections in May. Howard Dean, the former presidential candidate and one of the men credited with masterminding the trouncing of the Republicans, will visit the UK next month to brief party officials about his pioneering campaigning techniques. "The Welsh, Scottish and local elections next year are our midterms," said Hazel Blears, Labour's chair. "It has to be done differently for us to carry on being successful ... We're looking at how [the Democrats] have upped their game." Labour is particularly interested in the Democrats' style of targeting grassroots voters through low-key meetings in homes. "We want to look at their experience in campaigning, getting out the vote, holding house meetings where people can come together ... You don't want to transplant American politics, but there's a lot we can share," said Ms Blears. Many political observers will regard the drafting in of Mr Dean as bizarre, given that the Democratic victory was largely founded on voters' anger about the war in Iraq - the very subject which has alienated many Labour supporters and on which Mr Dean has been so outspoken. But Ms Blears believes Labour can benefit from the tactics used so effectively by the chairman of the Democratic national committee. "Part of [their new success] is politics, but it's also about organisation," she said. She also said Labour could benefit from the so-called "viral" tactics Mr Dean helped pioneer. "Politics is increasingly local and decentralised ... People go to people they trust for word-of-mouth recommendations. It's about like-minded people talking, with concentric circles of campaigning, rather than about a political message from the centre." READ ALL