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RUSSIAN ROULETTE

The major media have taken note of the poor state of Russian-American relations in the past week and the increasingly dark cast that Putin’s siloviki regime has taken at home and abroad. However, neither condition is exactly new. On the one hand, American policy toward Russia has been unimaginative, erratic, shortsighted and occasionally neglectful at least since the re-election of Boris Yeltsin; on the other hand, Vladimir Putin has been exercising a “soft” dictatorship for stabilitarianism and the reconstruction of state power since Russia’s liberals and democrats politically self-destructed in 2004.

That moment would have been a good time for the Bush administration to consider the results American and Western policy toward Russia but the administration, engrossed with Iraq, was content to continue to leave policy on autopilot, following the the lead of the EU and of the State Department experts who were running relations into the ground. In a nutshell, we have managed a trifecta of appearing to Moscow to be at once meddlesome and overbearing, ineffectual (in the face of Russian bullying of its “near abroad” neighbors) and uninterested in any kind of strategic partnership with Russia. This is not a recipe for diplomatic success.

In fairness to the Bush administration, our poor foreign policy record in regard to post-Soviet Russia stretches back through Clinton-Gore to the last years of Bush I. where Richard Nixon was virtually tearing his hair out in frustration. Moreover, American policy can only effect Russia on the margin. The locus of choice lies with Putin and his siloviki circle who have opted for creeping authoritarianism; but the U.S. might have made it a good deal easier for them to choose to move forward rather than to turn the clock back.

A few articles across the spectrum that are worth your time to read if you are interested in Russian-American affairs:

“Why Putin is determined to make Russia strong again” by Trevor Royle

“Russia Redux” by Vladimir Popov in The New Left Review ( hat tip to Lexington Green)

“Post-Weimar Russia? There Are Sad Signs.” by Dr. Andreas Ulmand at HNN

“CALLLING ALL CZARS”

Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan: November 16, 1581 by Il’ia Efimovich Repin . Probably not the kind of czar everyone has in mind.

The blogosphere is abuzz with the inability of the Bush administration to find an impressive figure to become “the War Czar” having suffered four rejections from high ranking retired military officers (this mirrors an inability to fill key posts in the intelligence community). There are strong reactions from Left, Right and Center, generally negative. I will ask a different question, however:

Why are Americans in love with the “Czar”metaphor?

First, we are a liberty-loving democracy without an autocratic tradition. We like inefficient government with lots of checks and balances, staggered electoral terms, judicial review and leaks to the media. Secondly, it is not as if the”Czars” ( henceforth spelled correctly as “Tsar”) have an impressive track record that we should be following, just read the Marquis de Custine sometime.

Tsar Paul was mad and several others were feebleminded; Catherine the Great was an usurper and poseur French intellectual-wannabe; Tsar Nicholas I and Alexander III were iron-fisted tyrants; and the last Tsar, Nicholas II ” the Unlucky” was a complete incompetent who ended up being slaughtered in a basement by third-rate Bolshevik revolutionaries who threw the body of Russia’s last Autocrat down a mineshaft. Because of Nicholas, Russians suffered seventy years of Communist totalitarianism, terror, famine and poverty. Hoo-boy! I want him running the war in Iraq! He did such a great job on the Eastern Front!

Even the “good Tsars” were no great shakes. Peter the Great was a far-seeing modernizer but his namesake capital, St. Petersburg rests upon unnumbered bones of the serfs who toiled in the swampy mire to build it. Russia’s equivalent to Abraham Lincoln, Alexander II “the Tsar-Liberator” freed the serfs but left them landless and impoverished, ended his life being blown up by an anarchist’s bomb. These two top the Tsar-list; it goes downhill from there.

And then of course, there is Ivan Grozny or “Ivan the Terrible”, the terrifying medieval Tsar whom Stalin idolized as a role model. It was Ivan who drove away the ferocious Tatar hordes, unleashed Russia’s first secret police, the Oprichnina, had his nobles torn apart by dogs and even killed his own son in a fit of blind rage. Tsar Ivan was feared by all of Russia’s neighbors and none dared stand against him.

Hmmm….maybe that’s exactly the kind of “czar” we need after all.

ON PUTIN AND HIS IMAGE ABROAD: THE RUSSIAN GEORGE W. BUSH ?

President Vladimir Putin of Russia is under increasingly critical western scrutiny these days. Drum roll please….:

“Post-Putin” By Steven Lee Myers –NYT Magazine

“The Putin Era in Historical Perspective” (PDF) –National Intelligence Council report

“Kremlin Inc. Why are Vladimir Putin’s opponents dying?” – Michael Specter, The New Yorker

“Who’s killing Putin’s enemies? -Part I” and “Part II” – Michael Specter, The Guardian Observer Magazine

“Seven Questions: Russia’s Cloaks and Daggers ” –Foreign Policy

“Europe wary after Putin tirade” – The Daily Telegraph

“Russia’s Managed Democracy” by Perry Anderson – London Review of Books

The Russians have expressed some concern on how Putin’s recent speech in Munich has been portrayed:

“One Cold War Was Enough” – Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov –Washington Post

They should be concerned.

Russia’s siloviki political system is a carrot and stick machine for quiet, minimalist, authoritarianism that seeks to keep the masses of the Russian public complacently supportive while neutralizing intelligentsia critics (unpopular with the masses anyway), neutering the free press and preventing the emergence of any serious (or semi-serious) power blocs or public figures who might challenge the interests of the regime.

Normally, Russian hamfisted behavior at home and abroad raises more hackles than this but at the moment, much of the world’s intellectuals and political literati are obssessed with George W. Bush. The Bush administration soaks up a great deal of negative rhetoric and political energy both here at home and overseas. But as Bush’s term wears on and certainly by the time he leaves office, this enormous global resentment and capacity for selective outrage will begin casting about for new “villains”. This is not to say Putin’s regime is a good one or that Russia can be regarded as a democracy; it can’t. These are real issues to be addressed and not swept under the rug. But if you become highly exercised over Vladimir Putin, while being conspicuously silent over Robert Mugabe or Dar Fur, your moral calculus is in disarray

Putin will clearly be in that bulls-eye at that time and there will be a media stampede to push the already poor state of U.S.-Russian and EU-Russian relations over a cliff.

Hat tips to Dr. Diane Labrosse of H-Diplo and Stan Reber of the SWC

FISKING VLADIMIR PUTIN

Russian President Vladimir Putin rattled the diplomatic set with a pugnacious and critical speech about American foreign policy that was a clever mixture of blunt realpolitik, obvious gestures for domestic consumption, a play for the sympathy of the anti-American Left in Europe and the anti-Bush Left in America. It was also a not so subtle form of pressure on the Bush administration to treat Russia as a great power partner in world affairs, especially the Middle East.

Russia of course, while not an enemy of the United States, would like all of the goodies that come with being an American strategic partner without having to ante up anything of substantive import in return. While not much praise can be given to the unimaginative, backburner, American policy toward Russia since the Soviet collapse in 1991, the Bush administration has at least been smart enough to not reward empty talk from the Kremlin until Putin puts something concrete on the table. Something the Russian leader has steadfastly refused to do on Iraq, Iran or much of anything else.

Addressing Putin’s specific remarks:

“The United States has overstepped its national borders in every way,” he said in an address at an annual international security conference here. “Nobody feels secure anymore, because nobody can take safety behind the stone wall of international law.”

I have also read this statement more literally translated as ” hide behind international law”, which to my reading of Putin, is more in tune with his ex-KGB cynical realism and “Great Russia” nationalism. The statement above reads more like the Foreign Ministry approved text.

On one level, Putin speaks for many foreign leaders who are unhappy with American intervention in Iraq and other places overseas even as American power hems in their own regional ambitions. The Bush administration has failed to use diplomacy, particularly public diplomacy, well or offer realistic carrots to win over the mercurial fence-sitters who do not give a fig for Iraq of Islamist terrorism but care deeply about other subjects. Using hard power successfully requires making the connections beforehand that minimize counterbalancing “blowback” and this chore the Bush administration has been unwilling or unable to do.

On another, deeper, level this is a very illuminating and an honest realpolitik assessment, while being cleverly worded to appeal to Bush critics and International Law professor types who believe that the world actually turns on the moral implications of their abstruse interpretations of treaty conventions. What Putin is really acknowledging is that the previous, Cold War era, ability to carry out policies that were serious threats to the vital interests of other states, especially America, because of ” plausible deniability” created by fig leaf nods to international law, is now much riskier.

The plausible deniability for which Putin longs, served a critical purpose -to avoid escalating a minor regional conflict into a superpower confrontation, so the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were forced to look the other way on many instances of terrorism, subversion, espionage and nuclear proliferation involving each other’s clients. We had to grin and bear it or strike back at the Soviet bloc with equal indirection, sometimes in a wholly unrelated sphere. This dynamic suited the Soviets well which is why they also fiercely resisted Nixon-Kissinger “linkage” at the bargaining table. Lacking the nuclear tripwire, the need for Washington to pretend hostile actions are anything but hostile was going to fade regardless of who was president, but 9/11 and Bush administration ideological convictions vastly accelerated the process.

“we don’t want Iran to feel cornered.”

Translation: “We need Iranian cash. We can’t afford to be seen backing down to Washington and continue to be regarded as a viable alternative arms supllier to the United States. We are against you attacking Iran, even though, frankly, we Russians don’t like Iranians or Ahmadinejad very much but find Iran useful as a counterweight to American power in the region, and this overrides longer term concerns.”

“It is a world of one master, one sovereign … it has nothing to do with democracy,” he said. “This is nourishing the wish of countries to get nuclear weapons.”

This is laughable to anyone with rudimentary knowledge of the history of nuclear weapons but it is good propaganda for justifying Russia’s assistance to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Nor does possession of a small nuclear arsenal help much against the United States, if Pervez Musharraf is to be believed. It will help you against your neighbors in your own nation-state weight class though.

How serious is Putin ? Recall that politically, Putin takes the wind out of extremist parties, Right or Left, by preventing them from waving the flags of Nationalism and Neo-Sovietism by doing so himself ” responsibly”. His governing class, the Siloviki, were entirely insincire Communists in Soviet times, KGB pragmatists who saw the world from the prism of power, carrots, sticks and dirty tricks. The Siloviki hold all the power in Russia and political opposition is effectively neutered and could, if they had chosen to do so, enact far more aggressive anti-Western policies. They and Putin have not because it isn’t in their personal interest or Russia’s to get into serious conflicts with the U.S. or the E.U.

ADDENDUM:

First, thank you to Real Clear Politics for linking to this post. Much appreciated!

A few Putin links:

Thomas P.M. Barnett

RedState