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

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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

Coming up empty

"I'm very sad to say that for very many people in the world, the symbol of America today is not the Statue of Liberty, which is one of the first things I saw as a child when approaching the shores of the U.S, but (the U.S. detention facility at) Guantanamo (Cuba). That legacy will take time to undo." Zbigniew Brzezinski - VOA

David Seaton's News Links
This is the first time since the pre-Voltaire/Rousseau days that the world is without any utopia at all... Let that sink in for a moment. What an immense and incalculable loss!

The Soviet Union stopped being a model or path to utopia, long before the Berlin wall came down. Most observers date its fall from grace back to 1956, a year that marked Khruschev's exposure of Stalin's crimes against humanity and the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian revolution. Certainly by the "Prague Spring" of 1968 the Soviet Union had ceased to be any one's idea of a desirable future. Now it is America's turn to let humanity down.

For better or worse, what distinguishes the USA from such dull, but user friendly countries like Canada and Australia, is its explosive mixture of the puritan ethic with the French ideas of the enlightenment. You could make an allegorical monument to the intellectual foundation of the United States of America by erecting a huge sculptural group with John Calvin embracing Jean Jacques Rousseau over the cadaver of an American Indian, with a prostrate African slave embracing their feet... on a ground littered with tools.

If you amputate this intellectual legacy and stomp upon it as heavily as the Bush administration has done, you are committing a gross cultural crime and depriving humanity, including the Chinese and the Indians, of something that belongs to all of us... Just like Michelangelo's Pietá, Hiroshige's wood cuts or Bach's fugues... or clean air.

Having a prison which violates every norm of international law and every ancient tradition of English common law, precisely on a piece of land, Guantánamo, stolen from Cuba and then lecturing the Cubans as Bush has done on, I quote, "the importance for Cuba to be a free society, a society that respects human rights and human dignity, a society that honors the rule of law." is like taking a hammer and breaking off the marble noses of Jesus and the Virigin of La Pietá.

The problem with the USA at this moment is that, because of its power, it is still the belly button of the world... and everybody is staring at it, but America just can't seem to produce, can't cut the mustard... This decadence has worldwide repercussions, because Europe seems completely neutered intellectually by now and the rising powers like India and China don't seem to have any ideological content or any project for the future other than raising the levels of carbon dioxide.

I find it a clear symptom of this emptiness, how little music, how few good films, books, paintings and essays are coming out of either Europe or the States at this point.... Compare the situation today to the fertility of 1960s and 70s.

There is a famous bird, whose name I have forgotten, that flies in ever decreasing, concentric circles, till at last it disappears up its own rectum... Is this the "black hole" we are facing? DS

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