Uncharacteristically,
I find myself inclined to agree with
Keith's analysis posted on these pages in
a critical response to Tom Friedman's NY Times article on American policy
vis-a-vis Russia and Syria. (American Counterpoint 10/6/16) However, I imagine Keith and I have arrived
at this position via different routes. Here is my own narrative.
For those of us growing up in the in the aftermath of World War II, the Cold
War that soon followed was already omnipresent by the time we were old enough
to see and hear. The Soviet threat loomed
everywhere and penetrated our dreams. I
can remember as a child getting a chill in my spine every time I heard a siren
or curfew alarm in the town where I lived. Like everybody, I'd seen the
duck-and-cover films, and sirens meant that Soviet bombers might be arriving soon
to deliver a holocaust on our town. While
it has become fashionable in the years since to make light of these existential
fears from the 1950's, it is my opinion from today's vantage point that the
fears were quite rational even if over-dramatized.
Stalin's
Juggernaut
From its inception in 1918 the Soviet
Union was a malignant force that starting coming fully into its own after its
WWII victory. Joseph Stalin at that moment had the most powerful land armies in
the world, and his agents had already stolen the nuclear technology that would
give him the A-bomb by 1949. The Marxian ideology he promoted preached the
inevitability of worldwide "proletarian" victory over capitalism,
which was said to be approaching the final stages of a pre-determined crisis.
The Leninist overlay on this philosophy was that the process could be accelerated
by disciplined action on the part of a revolutionary "vanguard".
By
the time Stalin came to power, neither he nor many of his confederates actually
believed in this poppycock. What they did believe in was the
expansion of their own power, and they sustained the ideology because it provided useful cover
for their real intentions. Stalin's negotiating position was strong at the
War's end, and when he and his erstwhile allies partitioned Europe into spheres
of influence, he could pretend to be advancing the revolutionary vanguard and
imposing proletarian justice everywhere on his side of the dividing line. He
left little doubt that to him the line was temporary.
Guns
Of August Redux
At this stage of history, it is likely
that both Soviet and Western planners still believed a "limited" nuclear war was
possible. Such beliefs made the moment
nightmarishly dangerous because, as in the treacherous years leading up to
World War I, the belligerent who struck first was expected to gain the overwhelming
advantage. When Stalin died in 1953, his successors lacked both his lust for
power and his taste for gambling, but they nonetheless had confidence in their
position and expected to gain ground in the years ahead. Like him, they had
little respect for democratic politicians and believed it was only a matter of
time before history provided them the opening they needed to extend their
dominance over the rest of Europe and isolate the United States. They hoped to
do all this by political means, but saw military blustering and nuclear
brinksmanship as part of the game.
Probing
With The Bayonet
The relative vibrancy of western
economies during most of the 1950's and 60's
gave the Soviets some pause, because it called into question the theory
of capitalism's inevitable collapse. However, the economic malaise of the
1970's raised their hopes again, as did America's humiliating defeat in Vietnam,
abetted as it was by Soviet and Chinese support for their communist proxies. The
vacillating foreign policies of American presidents Ford and Carter
reinvigorated the notion that American power had peaked and that the real sweep
of history was still moving in favor of the Soviet Union. One of Lenin's most
famous injunctions to his followers was to "probe with the bayonet" and then either pull back or plunge
forward depending on whether steel or mush is encountered. Having internalized
this dictum, the Soviets greatly
expanded their military capability during the 1970's and began testing American
power all around the globe in various proxy wars and destabilizations. Posturing as they were as history's favored
agents, they sought to instill defeatism in their enemies with the feeling of
battling against the inevitable.
Calling
The Bluff
What few people seemed to grasp,
however, including the purblind Western intelligence agencies, was that the
Soviets had an under-developed economy. Furthermore,
they had stretched it about as far as it could go to support their expansive
military presence, and they were still to stretching. Their sclerotic system was
incapable of the technical innovation necessary to sustain modern military
capability. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher came to power in the
U.K., followed by Ronald Reagan in the U.S. a couple of years later. Both of
these politicians seemed to understand instinctively that the Soviets had it
exactly backwards and that they were in fact the ones being left behind by
history. Reagan defiantly vowed to end the dangerous charade once and for all
by spending the Soviet military past its breaking point.
In 1990 the Soviets made the mistake
of permitting Saddam Hussein in Iraq, one of their client states, to invade
neighboring Kuwait, essentially an
American client state at the heart of the world's oil economy. President George
H.W. Bush, sensing both threat and opportunity here, decided not only to
bolster proxies in the region but to intervene directly with both firepower and
American soldiers. The payoff on this gamble was spectacular. In one of the
most lopsided military victories in history, Saddam's army,
equipped with the best their Russian sponsors could offer, was driven
home quickly and nearly destroyed with minimal American casualties. Smart bombs
and other dazzling high-tech gadgetry applied the necessary lethal force.
The Soviets were stunned. Having staked
everything they had on building what they wanted the world to see as indomitable
military force, even this was now exposed as a sham. They had proved helpless to
rescue a key strategic ally. Already aware of their fatal economic
deficiencies, hardliners within the Soviet Union now looked like empty suits,
and they had little left on which to base their power. Ten months after the end
of the Gulf War, Mikhail Gorbachev bowed to the inevitable and announced
the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The various Soviet republics gained their
independence, and the pre-revolutionary Russian flag was raised over the
Kremlin. The "worldwide proletarian revolution", mythic avatar as it
was for raw Soviet power, had been stopped dead in its tracks. In this extraordinary moment, everything of
which my generation of Americans had grown up in dread was gone overnight. For
us, the sun had emerged and was shining brightly. It was suddenly a unipolar
world and we were on top.
Squandering Opportunity
Unfortunately, American strategists proceeded to draw all the wrong conclusions from their victory. They saw a world yearning for peace, democracy and free enterprise and ready to flock gratefully to Americans who now could bestow these benefits, unhindered by serious opposition. Perhaps they had been influenced by too many cowboy movies in which honest shopkeepers regain control of their town after some heroic gunslinger has emerged to help them drive the black hats back out into the countryside. Americans seemed to believe now they could apply limited force anywhere and achieve miraculous results.
The illusion didn't last long. One
serious problem immediately started brewing in Russia itself, where the loutish
Boris Yeltsin after a brief period of heroic bombast proved himself incapable
of governing his traumatized nation. The figure who gradually emerged to take
control was former KGB officer Vladimir Putin. Putin had been a loyal servant
of the old regime, but he clearly had no interest in its self-destructive messianic
ideology. He was a careful student of power who wanted to restore Russia's
pride and its sphere of influence but who understood its limitations.
While he maintained the outward forms of democracy and capitalism, he sought a
controlled autocracy and exhibited contempt for America's many self-righteous illusions
about its own system and its place in the world. It seemed only a matter of
time before Russia and America would confront one another again.
The more immediate problem though was in the explosive passions emanating from the Muslim world now that the balance of world power lurched into its new configuration. Resentment against the West that had seethed there for centuries was suddenly liberated to find new and virulent forms. "Terrorism" became the enemy, but terrorism had no home. When Saudi billionaire-turned-Islamic-warrior Osama Bin Laden engineered his sensational attack on New York's World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, the world experienced another seismic shock. The one global hegemon left in the new unipolar world had just shown itself incapable of preventing an assault on its own homeland. Where was the enemy now, and who was safe anymore? There was, of course, a profound irony in play here that has to have amused Vladimir Putin, who knew full well that the Americans had funded Bin Laden during 1980's. The bearded Saudi had at that time been among the heroic "mujahedeen" battling, of all people, the hated Soviets during their ill-fated occupation of Afghanistan.
Seeking
A Stationary Target
After a moment of extreme cognitive
dissonance following the 9/11 attack, America roused itself and counterattacked
as best it could. It had to strike back somewhere. Bin Laden was proud of his
brutal achievement and American intelligence had no trouble identifying him as
the culprit behind the atrocity. The Americans gave the Islamicist government sheltering
him in Afghanistan a brief warning and then attacked in full fury. The
government fell quickly, but Bin Laden himself eluded capture and began his
soon-to-be-legendary odyssey through the mountains and caves of Afghanistan and
Pakistan. There was a new game afoot, and he seemed to be the omnipresent man
of the hour writing all the rules.
The Americans desperately needed a
stationary target if they were to demonstrate that the military hegemony they
had worked so hard to achieve still meant something. Following America's
victory in the Gulf War a decade earlier, Saddam Hussein had been hunkering
down back in his homeland. He was a bad actor virtually without friends in the
world now that the Soviets were gone. He had used chemical weapons against the
Iranians in the 1980s, as well as against tribal enemies on his own soil, and
virtually all the world's intelligence agencies suspected he still had
stockpiles of these weapons, in addition probably to the beginnings of a
nuclear program. Starting from this patchwork of historic fact and imaginative
supposition, the Americans cobbled together a brief for their theory that
Saddam, backed by the threat of
"weapons of mass destruction", was preparing to destabilize the Middle-East and
seize control of its oil resources. The alarmist theory sold, and preemptive
action was readied.
The "Second Gulf War" got
underway in March of 2003 and initially looked like it was going to be another
breezy high-tech success for the Americans. The military phase of the operation
indeed was exactly that, with Saddam's army collapsing quickly and his
government falling soon after. No weapons of mass destruction were discovered,
but it didn't matter because that really hadn't been the point of it all
anyway. However, what followed now was a
lesson for the Americans about the dangers of meddling as neophytes in environments
they didn't understand. With Saddam gone, ancient religious and other sectarian
feuds re-emerged from underground, and the Americans found themselves caught in
a multi-dimensional chess game with hidden players and ever-changing rules. This
violent snake-pit surely didn't look like Dodge, and no one wanted an American
marshal.
America's
Phantom-Limb Syndrome
The chaos that enveloped Iraq
following the American invasion slowly infected much of the region. America was not solely to blame for these perverse developments,
of course. The former imperial powers of Europe, in particular France and
Britain, had been suffering from Phantom Limb Syndromes of their own since
losing their respective empires in years past. Working together in ad-hoc
coalitions, the Western powers now battled terrorists and various authoritarian
strongmen as though swatting aimlessly at so many flies. However, every time a
strongman wavered or fell, ugly factions
rose to the surface just as they had in Iraq. Freedom-loving democrats were rarely
anywhere to be found, yet they always served
as the rhetorical justification for interventions.
The most dangerous quagmire emerged in
Syria, where the son of long-standing dictator Hafez al-Assad had inherited is
father's power and was fighting a hodgepodge of rebel factions arrayed against
him. Vladimir Putin, who knew obviously better than the Americans how to pick
his battles, had been keeping a cautious distance from most of the Middle-Eastern
conflicts but made it clear to everyone that Syria was different. Assad Sr. had
been a key client of the Soviet Union and there were important economic ties
between Assad's nation and Russia. Putin was still keeping his powder dry, but
everyone knew he would not accede meekly to the fall of the Assad regime.
Barack Obama, who came to power in the U.S. in 2008, had drawn his famous
"red line" around any nation employing chemical weapons in combat. He
quietly backed away from this empty pledge when Assad Jr. did exactly this in
2013. Obama was not going toe-to-toe
with Vladimir Putin in a place where Putin had put his stake in the ground.
Even closer to home for Putin, of
course, was the Ukraine. This region had
been the breadbasket of old Czarist Russia and the most important of the Soviet
republics outside of Russia itself. Stalin
had brutalized its peasant population, and its leaders eagerly embraced their
independence upon the eventual collapse of Stalin's empire. The republic was
naturally at the top of Putin's list of real estate he wanted back, yet the
Western powers - led by Germany this time but implicitly backed, as always, by American
military power - attempted to coax Ukraine into NATO. Seeming to have re-donned
his old KGB hat, Putin responded by installing a Russia-friendly president
in Kiev, only to see him deposed by "pro-democracy" forces backed by
the West in 2014.
This was enough for Putin. Reverting brazenly to Cold War
form, he launched a destabilization campaign, complete with false-flag
paramilitary forces, that climaxed in Russia's annexation of the Crimea,
previously a Ukrainian province. He
left no doubt that another shoe would drop if the Ukrainian leadership continued
with its unauthorized flirtations. After the usual moralistic blustering,
Obama, Merkel and the other Western leaders shame-facedly acquiesced. Putin
knew perfectly well they would go no further on his very doorstep.
Dangerous
Posturing Even Further Afield
The most credible long-term threat to
America's slipping hegemony is, of course, The People's Republic of China, the
size of whose economy is now approaching that of America's. China's military
capability will be slower in catching up, but even with that, it seems only a
matter of time before something close to parity is achieved. Since Mao's death
40 years ago, China has largely eschewed braggadocio and has focused on pragmatic
power-building, including more recently the redeployment of its formidable economic
surpluses into strategic investments all around the world. However, its leaders
fully understand their growing position in the world and will not hesitate to
exercise aggressive power if and when they judge it expedient.
A foreshadow of our strategic future can been seen in the
dispute brewing right now in the South China Sea, where China is constructing
artificial islands designed to extend its influence over an area rich in energy
deposits and positioned near key shipping lanes. While President Obama is right
to raise concerns about this potentially dangerous development, he should look
at a map and make sure he understands whose shore it is against which the South
China Sea laps up. We're not going to war here with China any more than we are with
Russia in the Ukraine. Hollow bluffs against serious adversaries are more
likely to earn contempt than cooperation.
Negotiating
Within A New World Order
All of this is my rather long-winded
way of agreeing, at least partially, with my friend Keith's observation that we
should be trying harder to understand the issues of our adversaries. I, of
course, never agree wholehearted with Keith on much of anything - that's why we
maintain this blog - and my problem here
is with his unspoken nuance rather than the actual words. Understanding the
other guy's issues has for years been the standard prescription American
liberals have tried to apply to our nation's foreign policy, as though
adversaries will surely come around if only they can be made to see we
understand them. The attitude is patronizing because it implies that all we
really seek is for everyone to ascend to our level on the moral high ground. Trying
as it does to disguise our self-interest, the stance is dishonest in my
opinion.
Leaders
like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping respect power and they despise moral posturing. They
also know a bluff when they see one. The particular virulence of the Cold War
conflict stemmed from the fact that both sides were claiming the moral high
ground, with America always fighting to bestow freedom on the world and the
Soviets the benefits of socialism. With such universal principles at stake, virulence comes naturally in defending them. Underneath it all, both nations were
pursuing power politics. Our side won, but time has now moved on and we must
too.
In the new world order, the United
States still possesses the world's largest economy and most powerful military. These relative advantages are slipping,
however, because times are changing and other countries are evolving. Ingrained habits tend to persist even when
the environment that instilled them has transformed. The bipolar world of the Cold War is over, as
is the unipolar world that appeared fleetingly when it ended. In the new
multi-polar world, Amerca's old hegemonic habits are dangerous because they
risk antagonizing nations with which we must learn to co-exist.
What's in part needed is, as Keith
suggests, a willingness to understand their issues. Beyond this, however, what's
also needed is the willingness to define
without ambiguity our own priorities and to make sure potential adversaries
understand how far we will go in
defending them. So long as all this is mutually understood, productive negotiation is
possible.
We in fact have quite a bit in common
at this point with Russia, China, and to some extent even Iran, as well as with
our traditional European and Asian partners. All of us have an interest in
ensuring that the Muslim world can be peacefully integrated into the global
system and that rogue states and self-proclaimed "caliphates" are
contained. We also have a mutual
interest in controlling nuclear weapons, ensuring stability of the global
financial system, and sustaining international trade.
Surely there is enough common ground
here that it pays for all of us abandon hubris and learn to get along.
