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Lieven’s Good Advice

There seems little doubt that the new administration will emphasize “democracy” in its relations with Russia and that these will suffer as a result. Presumably, this will include U.S. support for “democratic” opposition leader Garry Kasparov and his neo-fascist allies. Unless the present Russian administration comes under serious internal threat—which still appears unlikely, though not […]

There seems little doubt that the new administration will emphasize “democracy” in its relations with Russia and that these will suffer as a result. Presumably, this will include U.S. support for “democratic” opposition leader Garry Kasparov and his neo-fascist allies.

Unless the present Russian administration comes under serious internal threat—which still appears unlikely, though not impossible—this U.S. approach will be only an irritant. A much more serious threat to relations will be a continuation of the existing American policy of pushing for Ukrainian and Georgian NATO membership.

This is something which the Obama administration most emphatically should not do. As the events of August demonstrated, ill-considered U.S. meddling in this region can lead to actual wars, further destabilizing the world economy and imposing new financial burdens on the United States. Since Russian policy at the moment is overwhelmingly a reaction to what the West is doing, simply to put the whole NATO issue on hold (without abandoning it formally at this stage) would lead to a significant improvement in relations. ~Anatol Lieven

Obviously, I agree entirely with Lieven’s recommendations on Russia policy, even though I am probably even more certain that the Obama administration will ignore these and many of the other he makes in his excellent article. At the end he writes:

How much of this is likely? Eight years in Washington left me with considerable pessimism about the capability of the U.S. policy elites—Democrat as well as Republican—to carry out radical changes in policy if these required real civic courage and challenges to powerful domestic constituencies or dominant national myths [bold mine-DL]. On the other hand, if the worst economic crisis for seventy years isn’t the right moment for radical new thought, then there never will be a right time.

As I suggested below, it is partly because of the crisis that we are not going to see radical change in foreign policy, and I would add that even if such a change were possible Obama is not the one to provide it. Why no radical change? Forget about interest groups and entrenched power for a moment, and just consider Lieven’s remark about dominant national myths. There is strong resistance, rooted in some of these myths, to the idea that U.S. policy is in any way responsible for the actions of foreign states. Republicans thrive on attacking those who supposedly “blame America first,” and Democratic leaders are by and large just as unwilling to acknowledge this responsibility or engage in this sort of self-criticism. There is something of a national consensus among the leaders in the political class that outdoes the nationalist’s “my country, right or wrong” by saying, “my government’s foreign policy is always basically right.” This is related to Bacevich’s point about the elite’s tendency to misinterpret reality and inflate threats: they cannot or do not want to see the consequences of their policies, and they treat the predictable–and predicted–responses of foreign actors to these policies as the irrational expressions of fundamentally diseased and corrupt cultures that want to destroy us and therefore must be opposed at every turn.

The main claim that Lieven and I and others make that, in his words, “Russian policy at the moment is overwhelmingly a reaction to what the West is doing” is strongly disputed or simply ignored by a disturbingly large number of people in American government and media. To take one example, today Cathy Young bores us with yet another of her myopic columns disputing precisely this claim, the recognition of which is vital to correcting the errors of the last two decades. Inside government, it is more or less taken as a given that the Russians really have nothing to complain about. The administration maintains, however implausibly, that missile defense in Europe has nothing to do with Russia, NATO expansion has nothing to do with Russia, and on and on. These people are somehow unable or unwilling to comprehend that power projection and expansion of a military alliance to Russia’s doorstep will trigger and have triggered hostile reactions.

If Moscow cultivates or uses anti-American sentiment for its own purposes, which is actually beside the point, that sentiment exists and has been increased extraordinarily by what the U.S. government has done and what it proposes to do in post-Soviet space. One of the most dominant myths that prevails in America today is that anti-Americanism is merely an expression of envy and dissatisfaction in the failures of one’s own society (Young recites all of this as you would expect) and has nothing or next to nothing to do with the substance of policy and the aggressive interference that the policy often represents. One of the biggest obstacles to radical change in our Russia policy is this inability or unwillingness to understand this, just as our government seems unable or unwilling to understand why anti-Americanism in Turkey of all places is at record highs. It is much more reassuring to hear that this is just something that results from the actions of a foreign government, which allows us to overlook our role in generating these resentments and reactions.

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