Or, more accurately, our leadership is. Most Americans don’t think much about Russia at all. We went from anti Soviet, to pro Soviet, to anti Soviet again quite deftly from 1918 to 1949. Today I’d say the average American is both indifferent to and ignorant of Russia. But the elites care . . . a lot.
Consider the recent Russian presidential elections; they were by all accounts highly democratic and transparent. Indeed, webcams and observers were deployed across the huge Russian territory. Voters may not have always liked the choices, or lack thereof, but they share this with most democracies. Most important, there is no doubt Putin won with a mandate much bigger than Obama or before him Bush or any other American president in recent memory with more than 60% of the vote. Yet our media like to use phrases like “Russian democracy, such as it is” and other obnoxious criticisms, as if the Russian democracy were not 10 times more transparent and functional than its Soviet predecessor or the democracies of client states of Iraq or Afghanistan, where everyone votes for extreme Islamic parties.
We also think of their military as backwards and cruel in the extreme. But is it? Consider the treatment of war crimes in Chechnya; Russia, to its credit, has meted out severe sentences of ten years plus, whereas the American perpetrators of war crimes such as the Hamdania murder escaped in some cases with “time served” and remained in the service. Now, military justice is a tricky thing, and I have sympathy for soldiers in every country put in these “no win” counterinsurgency campaigns. But it does say something about Russia that its regard for the law of war is high enough that serious crimes are punished in a manner as harsh, or more harshly, than equivalent crimes by the American military.
American elites don’t like Russia in some cases because they are stuck in the past. If you’re a “sovietologist” at the CIA in 1989, you want to keep your job. So you must make Russia continually relevant by exagerrating its threat potential. In some cases, the critics seem to have old ethnic scores to settle. Or perhaps a little of both. Either way, Obama was correct in seeking a reset with Russia. But that reset should not be based in extravagant displays of American weakness. This is Obama’s preferred method–and he pursued it here with his no-strings-attached abandonment of European missile defense–but this approach is unnecessary and serves Obama’s broader, unpatriotic purposes in foreign policy. We have other allies in the region too, as well as our own self-respect to consider. We’d be much better off to scale back our military aid to Georgia and our foreign policy criticism of Russia’s anti-terrorism measures.
Most important, we should invite Russia to joint us in a new partnership based on our shared concerns: anti-terrorism, cordoning militant Islam, attacking piracy, and keeping China focused on commerce rather than military expansion. With a focus on these shared concerns, we can have a solid partnership built on the firm foundation of mutual self-interest. Instead, we have a policy of pointless antagonism coupled with the occasional demonstration of America’s indifference to its friends in the former Warsaw Pact. This is the worst of both worlds, and it threatens our own relations with Russia as well as the security of our allies.
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My favorite thing about the “reset” was the staggering incompetence shown by the “reset button” itself. Instead of “reset”, it said “overcharge”. It was the perfect example of how our supposed betters in Washington are actually just provincial-minded peons with lofty degrees. The reset button must have passed through numerous hands and been discussed by dozens of people, all of whom were in the frickin’ State Department – you know the government agency entrusted with our foreign affairs. And yet not one of these people seemed to realize that the Cyrillic alphabet is used in Russia, and not one of these people seemed to think it was a good idea to check with one of the Russian speakers in the department about how to spell the word. It would appear they just looked it up on google translate. And these are the people who mock their less educated Americans compatriots for their ignorance.
I think there is plenty to criticize about Putin, and this impression is reinforced every time I speak with an educated Russian. I don’t think he is our friend, and I am not sure how good of an ally he would make. But you are right that there is no apparent reason he should be our enemy. More importantly, we should judge Putin by the standard set by his predecessors, rather than a Western model of an ideal democratic leader. In comparison to Yeltsin, Brezhnev, Stalin, etc, he looks wonderful. He is not a true democrat, but neither is he a tyrant – he does allow the exercise of a limited amount of democracy and he does have the support of most people. He also, unlike most Western leaders, has a realistic understanding of the biggest challenges facing his country – demographic collapse, foreign encroachment, ethnic strife, and spiritual malaise. Whether he has had or can have any real success in dealing with these issues is another issue.
We should also look at where the non-Putin votes are going. Add together the Putin vote, the communist vote, and the radical nationalist vote, and you are left with about 10% support for the forces of secular democracy that we naively assume would take Putin’s place.
With all that said, I don’t think we should be over-invested in Putin. His support in the cities is flagging. His support in the countryside will also begin to diminish after rural residents start to take for granted the prosperity that for now is quite a new experience to them. Ordinary people will also increasingly resent the corrupt stranglehold his oligarchic allies have over the economy, just as they resented the previous batch of oligarchs that Putin tamed. Whether Putin can stay in power for too much longer is debatable – maybe he’ll be in charge for the rest of his life, maybe until the end of his next term.
With that in mind, and with the mercurial nature of Russian politics also in mind, I don’t think we should be put all our eggs in the Putin basket, nor should we shape our foreign policy around a strong alliance with Russia. But you are right that there are many natural areas of cooperation, so if we avoid needless antagonism and internal meddling we could probably get along well enough, to both nations’ benefits.
All good points. Incidentally, google translate properly translated the word. What a bunch of idiots.
Agreed that Putin is neither perfect nor warm and fuzzy, but that he’s a far cry from his predecessors and probably better on balance than a a weak and widely disrespected lackey like Yeltsin.
I did think it funny the western media got on Putin’s case in his crackdown on the corrupt oligarchs who have done much to ruin Russia. I wonder why the media would do that? Well, it takes two seconds to figure out.
I certainly don’t think we need to adopt the equiavlent of a pro-Putin policy like we adopted with Yeltsin. But we should try to build bridges where it makes sense to do so.
I don’t intend for this to be an anti-Semitic post or thread, but I think you need to look at the American view of Russia over the past 100 years through the lens of Russian-Jewish relations. American views of other nations are often times dictated by whatever immigrant has the most power in America to tell the story their way. In the contest between Russian Americans and Jewish Americans, the former are almost unheard of and the latter are well represented in media and academia so their views are going to be heard over others.
Historically the USA had been friendly with Russia. John Paul Jones, father of the US Navy, served in the Russian Navy after the Revolution. Russians were supportive of Lincoln and the Union.
However, as Jews in America became more prominent and the conflict between Jews and Russians rose, American Jews tried to intervene in Russian politics. Banker Jacob Schiff helped the Japanese finance their victory over Russia in 1905. He then helped finaced the Bolshevik Revolution. All of this was done to get back at the Tsar and the Russian Orthodox Church which were seen as oppressors of the Jews.
Early media reports in US newspapers supported the communist takeover. The NY Times even ignored the genocide taking place in the Ukraine. And as you mention we supported them in WW2. However, after Israel was created, Stalin turned on those Jews whom he felt more loyal to Israel than to the USSR.
During this time many Jews were denied the right to leave the USSR. So I think this fed into American Jews turning anti-Soviet or Anti-Russian again. In other words the honeymoon over the overthrow of the Tsar was over.
In the present day, Putin has been accused of anti-Semitism because he has gone after some Jewish oligarchs and he doesn’t toe the line on Iran and Syria. So he, and Russia, have remained a target for neocons, Jewish or not.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote a book about Russian-Jewish relations and if I recall was criticized here for being anti-Semitic. I never read his book because it is in Russian, but I bet if Russian Americans had the depth and breadth of media and academicians as Jews do, we might have seen a different interpretation of his work.
So I definitely think there is a whole lot of material that would show US-Russian relations have been defined by the Jewish-Russian conflict. Ironically, red-blooded Americans, whose predecessors liked Russia, became intensely anti-Russian because of communism which in large part was foisted upon Russia by Jews. In other words, had Russia never become a communist nation, most Americans would probably never have developed the level of animosity towards Russia that they did.
In a way Jewish Americans got to do to Russia what Irish Americans had always wanted to do to Great Britain.
Communism was the only real reason for Russian-American hostility. Now that Communism is gone, I personally see no real reason for hostility between our countries. I wouldn’t want Putin running my country, but then again, I don’t particularly want Obama running it either, so it’s about a wash. I say this as a guy who was the coldest of Cold Warriors back in the day (no regrets, either…) I can’t speak to the Jewish angle, but since Putin’s Russia and Israel are doing arms deals, if there is any residual Jewish hostility to Russia, they should get over it. If Netanyahu can forget the pogroms, so shopuld American Jews.