Our Russia Experts

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online – The Corner

 

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6 thoughts on “Our Russia Experts”

  1. Robert Millman

    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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.)

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

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