George Was Wrong

(Cartoon by Mike Luckovich and published 3/5/14 in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.  Click on image to enlarge.)

So, what's the deal with Putin?  Is he crazy?  Taking a page from the Hitler playbook?  Masha Gessen, a Russian American who wrote a political biography of the Russian leader, says "no" to both questions in a column written for the Los Angeles Times.

From Masha Gessen's op-ed piece:

[Putin's] graduation to dictator took years. In that time, he dismantled Russia's electoral system, took over its media, saw many of his opponents killed, jailed or forced into exile, created one of the most ruthlessly corrupt government systems in history, made peaceful protest punishable by jail time, waged a long and brutal war on his own country's territory and a short one against a neighboring country, Georgia, a piece of which Russia bit off in 2008.

But it was only after he invaded Ukraine last month that Americans' image of him took another drastic turn. ...

...Putin was acting the way he always has, like a playground bully. It was the last thing an American audience expected. The dramaturgy of war would seem to dictate that Putin issue a rousing call to arms. But bullies do not aspire to lead through rhetoric; they dominate by intimidation. When confronted, they either lash out or they obfuscate.

Putin said the troops occupying Crimea weren't Russian, then promised to deploy the Russian military to protect civilians in Ukraine, then disowned deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich. ... This is a tried-and-true intimidation strategy: Bald-faced lies render opponents helpless. ...

The political culture Putin has created in Russia is based on the assumption that the world is rotten to the core. ...

...the Putin world view: He believes that all governments would like to jail their opponents and invade their neighbors, but most political leaders, most of the time, lack the courage to act on these desires. ...

This belief that everyone, without exception, acts solely out of base self-interest is what has led Putin to ratchet up the aggression, meanness and vulgarity of both his public statements and political actions over the years.  [Emphasis added.]

In my opinion, that's a pretty solid analysis, one that certainly explains Mr. Putin's behavior in the Ukraine and earlier in Georgia.

What occurs to me, and this is quite discomfiting, is that this analysis also tends to fit various other non-governmental leaders.  Certain of our oligarchs also share some of these characteristics and behavior patterns, which would certainly explain a lot about this country's recent history.

And now the question becomes, "What do we do with these bullies?"

Shall We Dance?

(Editorial cartoon by Kevin Siers and published 8/6/13 by the Charlotte Observer and featured at McClatchy DC.)

President Obama has cancelled his up-coming meeting with Vladimir Putin over Russia's granting of asylum to intrepid leaker Edward Snowden.  Does this mean we are at the start of a new Cold War?  Not hardly, according to the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times.

 If President Obama's decision to cancel a summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin signaled a refusal to engage with Russia on matters of mutual interest, we'd be concerned. Although Russia lacks the superpower status of the now-defunct Soviet Union, it retains a veto on the U.N. Security Council and could still play a constructive role in resolving the civil war in Syria. The two countries also have unresolved bilateral issues, including further reductions in nuclear stockpiles and Russian objections to the deployment of a NATO anti-missile system in Poland and Romania. 

Because it doesn't end other contacts between the U.S. and Russia, cynics will say that Obama's decision to cancel the summit is political Kabuki theater and that it won't change any minds in Moscow. Perhaps not, but the president is entitled to register his objections to Russian conduct by actions as well as words. And this action speaks louder than anything Obama might have said to Putin at a ceremonial summit meeting.   [Emphasis added]

I agree with the editorial writer to the extent that this is simply an act of symbolism, theater, if you will.  But the intended audience is not Putin or the Russian people.  Rather, the intended audience is actually the American people and its Congress.  The president has chosen to demonize Snowden further so he doesn't have to deal with the real issue:  domestic spying.

No surprise there.

There Be Monsters

(Editorial cartoon by Pat Oliphant 6/14/2012 and found here. Click on image to enlarge and then please return.)

Vladimir Putin has been getting plenty of ink and electrons since his return to direct power in Russia. He has cracked down on dissidents and now is showing his support for bad-guy Bashir Assad of Syria by shipping Russian military helicopters to the Syrian government to help put down dissidents there. Further, Putin has effectively hamstrung the UN by vetoing any measure which would isolate and weaken Assad enough to stop the massacres.

Pat Oliphant hasn't been the only cartoonist to portray Putin. Jim Morin has a nasty cartoon dated 6/18/12 and featured here. David Horsey has a more cerebral one published 6/14/2012 here.

The column appended to Horsey's cartoon makes explicit what I think is implicit in the other cartoons and in the coverage of Putin in general.

Putin is letting his Russian soul show through quite openly these days, particularly with his support of Syrian President Bashar Assad's brutal crackdown on opponents of his regime. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton complained this week that the Russians were sending helicopter gunships to Syria, a step that would "escalate the conflict quite dramatically."

The United Nations, the Europeans and the U.S. have been trying to build a united front against Assad, but the Russians -- with their Security Council veto -- are blocking any meaningful step in that direction. Their great idea is to bring Iran into the discussion, which is a bit like bringing in a fox to guard a henhouse.

All of this -- plus Russia's belligerent reaction to a proposed European missile defense system -- is reminiscent of the bad old days of the Cold War. Of course, there are differences; Russia is not the superpower the Soviet Union was and Putin, for all his ruthlessness, is not a pathological tyrant and mass murderer like Stalin. But certain patterns are the same. The Russians are still picking their friends among the world's most repressive regimes. They are still paranoid and certain the West is ready to gang up on them. And, like the communist apparatchiks before them, Putin and his team assume everyone is as diabolical, power-hungry and duplicitous as they are. [Emphasis added]

It is hard to fault Horsey's argument, especially since Putin's behavior since he declared for the presidency has pretty much matched the description put forward in the column. The argument does raise some questions in my mind, however, and one in particular: why did Putin return? He was safely ensconced in a position where he could still exert some power on his government.

I don't pretend to be a foreign policy expert, nor have I ever played one on TV, but I suspect this new/old scenario is playing out against the back drop of ten years hegemony by the US. Unrestrained by the Soviet bogey-man, the US has increased its influence in the Middle East and Africa and in central and eastern Europe. We have increased our military and intelligence presence all over the globe, and we feel perfectly comfortable sending in our drones to assassinate those we perceive as terrorists in places such as Yemen. And that's just the stuff which has been reported in the Western press.

If Putin's return to power was intended as a response to all of that US activity, then we may very well find ourselves back in a Cold War, one in which the stakes are high and the military budgets even higher. And then we really are screwed.

Other People's Government

Positive developments in the direction of letting go of the failed embargo on Cuba are really welcome. It is past time for the U.S. to haul in its military and 'intelligence' in the operations of other countries. The posture that President Obama has taken of learning, not skulking about being divisive, makes that possible to hope for.

As Diane noted earlier this week,The only ones who have gained under the embargo have been the emigre enclave in Florida and their bought and paid for politicians, giving them far more political power per capita than any group in the nation.

Our role as a self-proclaimed 'leader of the free world' was never good for this country. Now it is counterproductive. In the previous maladministration, our powers were so misused that any interference has become yet another expression of ignorant aggression. Michael Kinsley, writing in WaPo, has a few good observations about our misapprehensions that lasted for decades, a disservice to the country.

If you want to test a proposition about, say, the relationship between democracy and free trade, you can't just set up a bunch of countries to experiment with. You have to take what you find, and there will always be some exception or complication to defeat your pretensions to science.

For the past four decades, however, we have been conducting something pretty close to a scientific experiment on one of the most important practical questions the world has ever faced. This question has dominated American politics, off and on, for almost a century. We have conducted this experiment at no small cost and have ruthlessly ignored the results. The question is: What is the best way for free nations to defeat totalitarian regimes in general and communism in particular?

Communism was never a monolith. Even in its heyday it came in lots of flavors. There was Tito's Yugoslavia, which always kept a foot outside the Iron Curtain and turned out to be 150 or so countries united only in their loathing of one another. There was China, the subject of Americans' most paranoid Cold War fantasies and now the subject of paranoia of exactly the opposite sort. There was Albania, a black hole from which no information could escape. There was the romantic Latin flavor that was more about the revolution itself than about nationalizing the means of production.

And from 1917, when Russia went communist, to 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, the United States tried almost every conceivable variety of policies toward these various styles of communist nations. Sometimes we were hostile; sometimes we were friendly. We had summits, we had boycotts. We launched secret wars in Latin America, made secret visits to China, tore apart our own society through wars in Vietnam and Cambodia that can still break up a dinner party. (It's like arguing about the Civil War in 1905.)

To this day, there is one communist country toward which American policy has been unrelentingly hostile. One communist government with which we have never even attempted detente. One communist country that we invaded without even a fig leaf of an invitation from a legitimate government. One communist country where we have never tried the seductive power of capitalism and instead have maintained a total trade embargo. And now, 20 years after communism collapsed almost everyplace else, in this same country a communist government survives unreformed and unapologetic.

If any conclusion can be drawn with scientific certainty about any question in the field of political science (or maybe it belongs to "international relations," an even fuzzier academic subdivision), it surely is that the United States' Cuba policy has not worked.

Just as the war criminals in the White House over eight years of misrule insisted that they attacked Iraq because of WMDs, and al Qaeda was active there before their invasion, the increasingly ludicrous mandate was maintained - that direct shipping to Cuba would support an enemy government there. As our invasion in the Middle East invigorates dissidents there, our blind continuation of hostilities toward Castro's government does Castro no end of good in the eyes of his supporters. The beginnings of new world wisdom that President Obama is displaying gives hope that we can begin tunneling back out of the hole we've dug our country into.

Wisdom instead of belligerence would be a 180 degree turnaround that the U.S. badly needs.

It may be that our country can join with our neighbors to the south instead of endlessly trying to insert our puppet governments where their own choices should be respected.

Our Ms. Brooks: Back To The Future

Rosa Brooks shows how easy it is to time travel in her latest column.

First, after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, we graciously provided a little economic "shock therapy" designed to turn our "defeated" former enemy into a prospering capitalist democracy. Regrettably, we instead helped plunge Russia into an economic catastrophe. This annoyed the Russians. But we continued to help by treating Russian officials as washed-up has-beens and by expanding NATO to include most of Russia's former satellites.

In a transparent bid for attention, Russia flattened most of Chechnya. We ignored this. When authoritarian crackdowns and rising oil prices turned Russia into a repressive economic powerhouse, we still paid little attention. We pushed to include Georgia and Ukraine in NATO and proposed placing missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. When the Russians told us they saw this as a hostile act, we continued to ignore them.

Finally, the stars were in alignment. So when tiny Georgia rashly tried to seize control of separatist South Ossetia and the Russians responded with a massive military intervention, we understood that at last we had an opportunity to travel back in time -- to the Cold War.

Why, yes. And here we are. We've even added to the angst by inking the missile defense deal with Poland with a glorious "so there!" directed to Moscow. The timing, coming as it did while the tanks were still parked in Georgia with no signs of revving up for the trip home, was hardly accidental.

What's next? Well, Ms. Brooks' concluding sentence suggests an obvious course of action:

Let's build some more fallout shelters, too.

Indeed.