by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online – The Corner
One of the more depressing things in watching Vladimir Putin is the manner in which Russian “experts” at home have for years now all but cheered him on. In the latest Nation magazine, Stephen Cohen has written one of the most embarrassing apologies of Putin’s imperialistic misadventures imaginable. A Russian state public-relations official could not have offered a shakier contextualization of Russian expansionism.
In the last few years someone named Mark Adomanis (who identifies himself as “I specialize in Russian economics and demographics”) has perhaps offered the most unfortunate apologies for Putin’s Russia and the serially excused reset as proof of a strong Obama foreign policy (“Perhaps I am a deeply unserious person, but I think it is not only possible to ‘seriously’ argue that 2012 Russia is more reasonable towards the United States but that it is quite easy to do so”.) He routinely chastised skeptics (me in particular in often ad hominem style) for suggesting that reset with Russia would only empower Putin’s authoritarianism, weaken our Eastern European allies, and project a dangerous sense of U.S. indecision and vulnerability. At the time (2012) Adomanis ridiculed any suggestion that reset was counterproductive. In a 2012 piece that unfortunately bragged “One does not need to be a proselytizer for “the reset” to note that American-Russian relations are better now than they were when Obama first took office,” he argued,
I’m very familiar with conservative critiques of Obama’s Russia policy, and the most frequent criticism is that improved relations with Russia weren’t worth the cost: coddling up to a thug like Putin was simply too high a price to pay for the relatively paltry returns. But Hanson is making a far more radical argument. He’s arguing both that our attempts to improve relations with Russia angered our NATO allies like Poland and the Baltics and that attempts to improve relations with Russia actually worsened relations with Russia. I suppose it’s possible to imagine a foreign policy initiative that is so horrifically planned and executed that it worsens relations with everyone, but while I have been critical of the reset since its inception it seems very hard to argue that it has backfired so catastrophically.
In reality, Obama’s foreign policy vis-a-vis Russia has failed not due to its cowering weakness and accommodation, but due to its significant overlap with the previous administration’s bullheaded and illogical insistence on pursuing ballistic missile defense in Eastern Europe. That’s a criticism I would love to hear made, but it’s one that Hanson is incapable of making because it would require that he recognize Obama as a persistent and forceful advocate of American power. (emphasis added)
I do plead guilty that I could not and do not yet quite sense the supposedly forceful Obama advocacy of American power, and also to arguing for the last few years “that attempts to improve relations with Russia actually worsened relations with Russia.” But I think most shared that conclusion; it seemed obvious from that the way that Secretary Clinton promoted reset that it would lead to worsening relations by undercutting Russians who had legitimate complaints about Putin’s thuggery and thereby would only further encourage his absolutism, by our acquiescence green-lighting more Russian adventurism that could only in the future destabilize the former Soviet republics and lead to increased tensions with the U.S. and Europe, and by inflating Putin’s stature that was not otherwise earned by the Russian economy, political system, military, or morality and that might in other regions run counter to U.S. interests.
Mr. Hanson–Stephen Cohen would have been perfectly content with a Stalin like regime in Russia in perpetuity. He suffers from that incurable left wing condition–longing for strong, dominant leadership abroad and weakness in the United States. He is the worst of the worst and is usually best ignored.
Putin makes no bones about his desire to rebuild an empire. He will continue to exploit any weakness he senses amongst his enemies and allies for that matter. Once again Russia will become a destabilizing force in a world where the U.S. has lost its moral perch. Obama is the outcome of years of moral decline in the U.S. The therapeutic society as VDH so accurately describes has led us to someone like Obama. Apparently his fides were never good enough to be transparent with (e.g., his college transcripts) but he never had to worry because everyone projected their own desires on to his “hipness”. Our young people today do not have the same sense of America that 20th century americans grew up with. There are many reasons for that but the most devastating is our lost sense of exceptionalism which was rooted in moral conviction that America was indeed in God’s grace.
Soon after the USSR’s implosion David Remnick, now editor of the New Yorker, wrote a fascinating piece for the New York Review of Books on why the collapse came as a surprise to American “experts.” He concluded not that they were apologists for the regime, but that they just didn’t know very much about it, despite their best efforts. The period’s academic journals, through the usual more professorially contorted process, eventually came to a similar consensus. I suspect the overall situation has not changed.
So, will Mark Adomani… give honor where honor is due? Will he publicly say VDH was right and he was wrong… in order that Mark Adomani be more correct in the future… because not doing so causes the reverse.
Time is a slow motion truth detection machine, is it not?
It takes a lot of expensive reality-distortion-machine-work… to deny truth evidenced over time, but hey — that’s the progressive world view, is it not?
The Tragic World View, by comparison, is very cost effective. Simply recognize truth over time, and let that truth be believed (i.e. Islamo-Nazi hatred of Jews… usually ends up in bad manifestations. Thuggery in Eastern Europe must be disapproved, not coddled… that kind of thing.)
What about the bullheaded and illogical insistence that the Ukraine turn over its ballistic missiles for secure borders with Russia? Would Russia remain thuggish in its desires to see a destabilized Ukraine if we gave those weapons back? If this chap is still unsure as to whether Putin is a thug or not, what would his reaction be to a president of the U.S. that ordered his police to publicly whip a girl band? I didn’t see an argument there that convinced me of the merits of coddling thugs, though he says he’s familiar with all that. Abandoning ballistic missile defense in Eastern Europe would make us BFFs, then? Naturally, all this leads to the admission of “Obama as a persistent and forceful advocate of American power” — a power vacuum.
And lets not forget this exchange during the final Presidential debate – Oct 2012 -” Gov. Romney, I’m glad that you recognize that al-Qaida is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not al-Qaida. You said Russia … the 1980s, they’re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years,” Obama said.
He went on to further demean Romney with comments about boats that can submerge and others launch aircraft.