Putin Ends The Left’s Daydream

By Steve Huntley

Alot of talk from Washington and Western European capitals about the Ukrainian crisis complained that Russia’s Vladimir Putin is some kind of throwback to the 20th or 19th century, as if he could be shamed into conforming to new 21st century norms of international conduct. 

The American left has been particularly enthralled with a new age, one world mythology since the election of President Barack Obama. Most of the globe’s problems, in this view, stemmed from the disruptive, embarrassing cowboy antics of George W. Bush. To the liberal mindset, Bush did make the United States something of a great Satan. 

Putin’s invasion of Crimea and the sham vote there to be annexed to Russia constituted the nail in the coffin in that wishful thinking. Gone is the notorious “reset” with Moscow, back is the Cold War-like reality of East-West confrontation. 

Critics of Obama charge the weakness he projects on the world stage made possible Putin’s bad behavior. More out-of-touch thinking: If only we had a stronger president, all would be well in Ukraine today. 

What the Ukrainian crisis proves is that nothing has changed in human nature or the affairs of nations in the 21st century. Evil-minded individuals ruling great nations will still abuse neighboring states, even to the brink of war. Strategic interests, expansionist dreams, national pride, the pull of clan, and suspicion and fear of the other will always influence world events. There will be a Putin in the next century, and a Crimea-like crisis in the one after that. 

Putin saw recent events in Kiev as the Ukraine drifting into the orbit of Western democracies. Given the historic and cultural ties between Ukraine and Russia, that was simply unacceptable to him and his vision of reversing what he sees as the calamity of the collapse of the Soviet Union by creating a greater Russia. 

The overthrow of the democratically elected, and pro-Russian, president in Kiev, combined with the 1999 precedent of America enabling Kosovo to break away from Serbia provided Putin a fig-leaf pretext to seize Crimea, where ethnic Russians are a majority and which was in fact a part of Russia until 1964. 

While Obama’s record of weakness didn’t lead to the Ukrainian crisis, it must be reversed to discourage any Putin ambitions beyond Crimea. No more drawing red lines Obama has no intention of enforcing. No more declarations like the one two years ago that Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad “must go.” No more breast-beating like saying the murderers of the U.S. ambassador in Libya will be brought to justice when the White House has no actual agenda to do it. No more leading from behind. 

Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, as de facto head of the European Union, have imposed sanctions on members of Putin’s inner circle and have more in their pocket if Putin carries out his threat to annex Crimea or do more in the vein of Sunday’s seizure of a gas facility in eastern Ukraine. 

The recognition of the old realities of the world will require serious policy decisions and reconsiderations in Washington and Europe. Obama’s choice, a sop to Russia, to abandon a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic obviously was a bad one. So was his decision, announced only weeks ago, to cut U.S. defense spending. So, too, is a French project, reported by National Review, to build two helicopter-carrying ships for Russia. Also out of date is the habit of our NATO allies to freeload on U.S. defense spending. 

The only good thing to be said for Putin is that he has shocked the West out of its new age daydream.

Not Your Father's Cold War

The actual nature of the threat posed by Russia is being obscured or distorted by the talk of a new Cold War.

By Jonah Goldberg

Will everyone please stop talking about a new Cold War?

However badly things work out between Russia and the United States and the West, a new Cold War isn't in the cards because Russia today isn't the Soviet Union. Sure, we are in a diplomatic and geostrategic conflict with Russia, which was the heart of the old Soviet Union. Also, Russia wants much of the real estate that belonged to the Soviet Union before it collapsed. And Vladimir Putin is a former KGB colonel who now waxes nostalgic for the good old days. That's about it. 

That's hardly nothing, but the Cold War was far more than a conflict with Russia. Everyone should agree on that. Communism, anti-communism and anti-anti-communism divided Americans for decades, particularly among academic and media elites. Right and left may still argue over the merits of those divisions, but no informed person disputes that the topic of communism — the real version and the imagined ideal — incited riots of intellectual and political disagreement in the West for a half century. 

Meanwhile, Putin's ideology holds little such allure to Americans or the populations of the European Union. With the exception of a few cranky apologists and flacks, it's hard to find anyone in the West openly defending Putin on the merits. And even those who come close are generally doing so in a backhanded way to criticize U.S. policies or the Obama administration. The dream of a "greater Russia" or a "Eurasian Union" simply does not put fire in the minds of men — non-Russian men, at least — the way the dream of global socialist revolution once did. And that's a good thing. 

What's less encouraging is that the actual nature of the threat posed by Russia is being obscured or distorted by the talk of a new Cold War. It's a bit like how for decades, every war was described as "another Vietnam" — at least until the Iraq war, which now seems to be the prism for every potential conflict. "We don't want another Iraq" is the go-to phrase to justify doing nothing. 

What is downright dismaying is how the West's surprising and bloodless victory in the Cold War left us ill-equipped for the world that has taken its place. For many, the understandable hope was that once the Cold War was behind us, a new era would be ahead of us. Neoconservatives envisioned a democratic pax Americana. Liberal internationalists preferred a new democratic order led by something called "the international community" that would meet over cheese plates and bottled water at the United Nations or The Hague. 

Many have called the decade between the fall of the Soviet Union and the attacks of 9/11 a "holiday from history." The truth is closer to the opposite. The Cold War years, while historic in a literal sense, were something of a great parentheses, a sharp departure from historical norms. Communism was a transnational ideology imposed on nationalist movements. That's why every supposedly communist movement eventually became nationalist once in power. Still, the rhetorical and psychological power of communist ideology, combined with the fear of nuclear war, made international relations seem like a sharp break with how foreign affairs worked before 1945 — or 1917. 

It turns out, the Berlin Wall wasn't blocking us from a new world order, it was holding back the tide of history. Western Europe was especially slow to realize this. Its politicians and intellectuals convinced themselves that they had created a continental "zone of peace" through diplomacy, when in reality they were taking U.S. protection for granted. They let their militaries atrophy to the point of being little more than ceremonial. 

The contrast with Russia and China (not to mention Iran and Saudi Arabia) is amazing. In Moscow and Beijing, they still believe foreign policy is about military and economic power, "spheres of influence" and political control. In Western Europe (and much of this administration), it's about moral authority, international norms and other kinds of "soft power." Soft power is great, but it's useless against people who only respect hard power. That lesson predates the Cold War by a few millenniums.

Return of the ’70s

But will a new ’80s follow our lousy time?

By Bill Murchinson

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” 

— Ecclesiastes 1:9

This is true even in politics. Maybe especially in politics, where the recycling of bad and good decisions reflects the recycling, according to democratic practice, of bad and good leaders.

As the Russians push their imperial agenda in the Ukraine, and Western leaders wring their hands, the ’70s come painfully to mind.

I bring up the ’70s — of god-awful memory — as much to nourish hope as to enlarge perspective on current events in the world and the nation along with it.

As the hearing-aid set — of which your servant is a certificate-holding member — will recall, the ’70s began with the U.S. in decline, at home and abroad. Inflation and fast-rising energy costs looked uncontrollable. The Nixon administration’s response was wage-price controls — an expedient never successful anywhere. A long, bloody, divisive and essentially futile war in Southeast Asia was winding down. It remained only to negotiate our exit costs. 

In this environment of American weakness and confusion, enemies pounced. The Iranians seized our embassy in Tehran. The Russians invaded Afghanistan.

The cycle of decline and fall was arrested, and then reversed, in the ’80s. Having seen what didn’t work in foreign policy — American guilt, American disengagement — America, during the Reagan presidency, re-engaged. And, having done so, won the Cold War. In economic terms, the government stepped back, cut tax rates, eased various regulations and returned to the free marketplace some of its old-time flexibility. Things began working again.

They worked, that is, until “the thing that hath been” cruised back by the crime scene to test the shortness of our memories. Sure enough, around the year 2008, circumstances found the U.S. largely immobilized by the experience of war and the mistakes that seem to go with freedom and prosperity.

Under the guiding hand of Barack Obama, the old policies came back — guilt, disengagement from responsibilities, pessimism as to American ideals and capabilities, resentment of economic success; a variety of mannerisms and anxieties that predict bad decision-making at the top.

Barack Obama, whose approval ratings fell last week to their lowest ever, is, seemingly, the new Jimmy Carter — a man with few ideas other than to embody the reverse of what he sees as having caused our problems. Obama, like Carter, prior to the Afghan invasions, thought he could do something about American bossiness by disengaging from confrontation with other nations. We’re not supposed to throw our weight around anymore. We’re to act in concert with “the international community,” whatever that is. We make noises, draw “red lines,” issue warnings.

As in the Carter days, the government thinks it knows more than the citizens when it comes to economics. A government takeover of health care, tighter regulation of coal-fired plants, more government spending (except for defense), neglect of problems with Medicare and Social Security — in this manner we create prosperity.

Except when we create less prosperity and more prolonged misery.

The ’70s of the last century look more and more like a dress rehearsal for the ’10s of the 21st century: the same love of ideology over experience, the same wrong answers. Barack Obama has an evident gift for seeming indecisive in the face of challenge, which makes him look like the same patsy the Russians and the Iranians took Jimmy Carter to be.

The same love of government control that Jimmy Carter displayed keeps the American economy on its backside when the need of the day is to coax the animal spirits of the marketplace back into action.

It’s saddening and discouraging to watch the ’70s gaily gallivanting among us. There’s more to say on that count, nonetheless. We cannot recall the badness of the ’70s without recalling the good that flowed from the discovery in the ’80s that things had to change. That’s the first step: disillusion, and then the itch for hope and change. Didn’t someone once tell us about that itch?