zenpundit.com

Please see the introductory post here.

Blogfriend Dave Schuler lost no time in taking up Cheryl Rofer’s challenge. An excerpt from his post at The Glittering Eye:

“Nuclear Weapons Policy in the 21st Century”

“Let’s begin this discussion with a premise and some facts. First, the premise. Nations work actively and rationally to extend their power and influence and to avoid losing power or influence. That’s consistent with Napoleon’s dictum cited above: the two great levers are fear of loss and hope of gain. Now the facts.

Worldwide there are approximately 32,000 nuclear weapons (source: Nuclear Threat Initiative). Of these more than 30,000, roughly 95%, are in the possession of either the United States (roughly 10,000) or Russia (roughly 20,000). For the United States if all nuclear weapons everywhere were to magically vanish from the face of the earth very little would change. The U. S. would continue to be the wealthiest country in the world. It would continue to have the biggest GDP in the world. It would continue to have the strongest military in the world. It would continue to wield great social influence. It would continue to be the world’s sole superpower.

The situation is different for Russia. Without nuclear weapons Russia would continue to be an enormous, sprawling country with a populous heartland and a remote sparsely populated hinterland, not unlike Canada in that respect. It would have a GDP roughly that of Canada’s, too, although with a significantly larger population it would be a good deal poorer than Canada. It would have no warm water ports which substantially limits its ability to project ports.

Although its role as a regional power is inescapeable it would not be a world power.

Russia will never relinquish its nuclear arsenal. To do so would relegate it to third class status. “

Read the rest here.

I was surfing over at the always engaging, Left of center blog, The Newshoggers, when I saw a post by Cernig discussing a NYT op-ed by Martin Walker giving the lion’s share of the credit for the end of the Cold War to Mikhail Gorbachev, a position Cernig strongly endorsed, expounding upon the” Reagan won Mythtique”.  A key section from the Walker op-ed:

“According to both Schell and Rhodes, the cold war ended not because Reagan stood firm at Reykjavik but because Gorbachev and his supporters had already decided to stop waging it, or as Gorbachev’s adviser Giorgy Arbatov once put it to this reviewer in Moscow, “to take your enemy away.” Gorbachev understood that the arms race was ruining his country. And then he learned that the radiation fallout from Chernobyl was the equivalent of a single 12-megaton bomb.It was a wondrous accident of history that saw Gorbachev, the determined reformer of a sclerotic Soviet system, coincide with Reagan, the anti-Communist conservative who nonetheless dreamed of a world without nuclear weapons. After Reagan came the first president Bush, whose initial caution about Gorbachev gave way to such enthusiasm that he unilaterally scrapped America’s vast arsenal of land- and sea-based tactical nuclear weapons. Between them, the three men put an end to the first nuclear age.”

The first paragraph begs the question of “Why?” – particularly when Gorbachev’s recent predecessor as General-Secretary and longtime political godfather, Yuri Andropov, had such a drastically different reaction to nearly identical circumstances, despite being perhaps the best informed Soviet leader to ever rule the Kremlin. Walker ( leaning heavily on the writings of Jonathan Schell and Richard Rhodes) credits the Chernobyl disaster causing a Paul on the road to Damascus political conversion in the highest reaches of the Soviet nomenklatura. I find that such a thesis strains credulity, to put it mildly.

Walker would have us believe that a totalitarian system that weathered: approximately 20 to 25 million war dead in WWII, plus; another 20 to 30 million Soviet citizens who vanished into the Gulag under Stalin; that went to the brink of nuclear war with the U.S. under Khrushchev and with China under Brezhnev; that was, at the time, accepting tens of thousands of casualties annually in Afghanistan under Gorbachev; was suddenly undone morally and spiritually by a comparative handful of dead in an industrial accident at a nuclear plant and subsequent bad Western P.R. This is not history but wishful fantasy of an adolescent kind.

Let us be clear, Mikhail Gorbachev deserves significant credit for his share in bringing the Cold War to a sane and relatively soft landing.  He exercised intelligent restraint at a number of critical junctures where an ideologue would have provoked a civil war – something the coup plotters who toppled Gorbachev almost did. Gorbachev also understood that the Soviet system was fundamentally incompatible with the emergence of a globalized and highly technological information economy and that if his country did not adapt quickly, it would be left behind. At no time in power, however, did Gorbachev intend to destroy the Soviet Union or abandon “socialism” ( though what socialism was to be in the future, became increasingly vague in Gorbachev’s pronouncements) – these were the unintended consequences of trying to square a circle and make the USSR into a “normal” state via perestroika. A herculean task that exceeded even Gorbachev’s considerable political talents.

The facts are that Gorbachev and the USSR lost the Cold War and then sued for peace out of necessity, not from moral superiority or anti-nuclear altruism. It is a further truth that Ronald Reagan was substantially more correct than most of his contemporaries, Left and Right, on the proper American stance toward the Soviets; and that without his tough but flexible policies, the USSR might have limped along on life support for some time longer, as has North Korea.  Possibly, without the challenge of Reagan in the first place, the Soviet politburo might have opted for yet another ailing octogenarian to warm Lenin’s seat after Chernenko died and the “youthful” Gorbachev might have idled as a second tier leader for another decade.

No, Ronald Reagan did not win the Cold War by himself but he contributed to that victory and all attempts to spin Mikhail Gorbachev, a tough-minded and daring apparatchik who wanted to save the Soviet Union, into the grand savior of humanity are just that – empty spin.

SOLZHENITSYN AND HIS BATTLE FOR RUSSIA’S SOUL

Der Spiegel recently had an interview with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ( hat tip to M. Gemmill). At 88, Solzhenitsyn has lost neither his mental acuity nor his uncompromising vision of Russia that made him the most feared of dissidents by Soviet leaders, until his expulsion from the USSR in 1974, four years after being awarded the Nobel Prize. Some excerpts of Solzhenitsyn’s answers from the interview:

“The prize in 1990 was proposed not by Gorbachev, but by the Council of Ministers of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, then a part of the USSR. The prize was to be for “The Gulag Archipelago.” I declined the proposal, since I could not accept an award for a book written in the blood of millions.

…I have grown used to the fact that, throughout the world, public repentance is the most unacceptable option for the modern politician.

….Vladimir Putin — yes, he was an officer of the intelligence services, but he was not a KGB investigator, nor was he the head of a camp in the gulag. As for service in foreign intelligence, that is not a negative in any country — sometimes it even draws praise.

….Only an extraordinary person can turn opportunity into reality. Lenin and Trotsky were exceptionally nimble and vigorous politicians who managed in a short period of time to use the weakness of Kerensky’s government. But allow me to correct you: the “October Revolution” is a myth generated by the winners, the Bolsheviks, and swallowed whole by progressive circles in the West.

….However, when you say “there is nearly no opposition,” you probably mean the democratic parties of the 1990s. But if you take an unbiased look at the situation: there was a rapid decline of living standards in the 1990s, which affected three quarters of Russian families, and all under the “democratic banner.” Small wonder, then, that the population does not rally to this banner anymore. And now the leaders of these parties cannot even agree on how to share portfolios in an illusory shadow government.”

Solzhenitsyn has never been a voice of liberalism or even Russian nationalism in the traditional pan-Slavic, imperial and chauvinistic sense the term is usually meant. Rather he has propagated Russophilism, even to the extent of using archaic Russian words without modern foreign antecedents, when possible, in his writings. Solzhenitsyn’s emphasis on the unique cultural and spiritual traditions of old Russia is one that excludes other peoples – including those like Jews and Ukrainians- who have been deeply intertwined with or innately part of Russian history.

Part of Solzhenitsyn’s thunderous moral denunciation of the monstrosities of the Soviet system were because of the ruin of the old Russian patrimony under the profoundly alien doctrines of Communism, a Western import. I would not be surprised if Solzhenitsyn traced the origin of Russia’s sad history to Peter the Great as much as to Vladimir Lenin.

ALL HAIL ZENPUNDIT I., EMPEROR OF GREENLAND

A New Power Is Rising

In the spirit of Russia’s recent and entirely specious claim to the sea floor of the Arctic Ocean , I would like to formally announce my claim to the imperial crown of Greenland as well as subsidiary overlordship over Baffin Island. Once the grateful natives and polar wildlife acclaim my benevolent, absentee, rule of the Greenlandic Empire, I will get about the business of issuing postage stamps, selling foreign ship registries and writing a few, slightly shady, bank secrecy laws.

Sure, Denmark already has de jure sovereignty over Greenland and they still have some kind of quaint, Scandivanian, bicycle-riding, monarchy rattling around Copenhagen and, technically, my blog is not yet considered a sovereign power, but what the hell ? The rule book has been thrown out! I don’t even think you need to be a nation-state anymore – call it a virtual, fourth generation, imperium. Plus, the chances of a punitive military expedition from Denmark reaching the Chicago area are relatively low. It’s not even that great that they’d make it to Greenland.

On a more serious note, the Russian claim to the Arctic may be complete nonsense in legal terms but the strategic energy policy behind the outrageous territorial grab it is not. It makes good sense for Russia to attempt maximize it’s future share of a tightening global oil and gas market as a way of boosting it’s geopolitical and economic influence. Without making too much of it in terms of noise, Washington needs to firmly rebuff Russia’s claim because any success will set off a scramble of imitators and splendid little wars across the globe between third and fourth tier powers. Or worse, larger powers like China with extensive but quiet claims of their own might begin to press them with greater vigor.

The world has enough headaches without re-starting the 19th century.

KOMSOMOL WITHOUT THE COMMUNISM

Recruiting for the next “rent-a-riot” to disrupt anti-Putin demonstrations. Man, are they just going through the motions here. Sad.

Hat tip to Dr. Von.