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The World According to Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson won’t stop: Putin has as much contempt for Obama as he did for Bush. Our policies remain the same: trying to encourage Russian reform without causing a war or neo-Soviet adventurism. Hanson is supposed to be describing the “perils of Obama’s foreign policy.” He doesn’t explain how it is perilous that U.S. […]

Victor Davis Hanson won’t stop:

Putin has as much contempt for Obama as he did for Bush. Our policies remain the same: trying to encourage Russian reform without causing a war or neo-Soviet adventurism.

Hanson is supposed to be describing the “perils of Obama’s foreign policy.” He doesn’t explain how it is perilous that U.S. policies towards Russia have remained unchanged, but that’s just as well since U.S. policies towards Russia have not remained unchanged. If there’s one thing that critics of Obama’s Russia policy can usually agree on, it is that policy has changed. Of course, they think the change has been for the worse, because they generally aren’t interested in good relations with Russia, but at least they have noticed a difference. If I had to guess, Putin probably had more contempt for Bush, since Bush was actively doing many things that annoyed Putin, whereas Obama has done fewer, but this is mostly irrelevant. Has there been a modest but real improvement in U.S.-Russian relations? Obviously, there has. Whether this will continue or not depends on several things, chief among which is whether there will be policy continuity on the U.S. side. I would add that there was more so-called “neo-Soviet adventurism” (if by this we mean the deployment of Russian military forces in CIS countries after the dissolution of the USSR) before Putin was in office than there has been since, but it isn’t really accurate to refer to any of it as “neo-Soviet.”

The rest of Hanson’s column is filled with random observations that don’t really make a lot of sense:

Obama likes Prime Minister Erdogan even more than he hates Prime Minister Netanyahu. But what he thinks the Israelis have done to the Palestinians pales in comparison to what he must know the Turks have done to the Kurds, Greeks, and Armenians. It is open to question whether Erdogan will be calmed by such affability or will find it useful should he wish to settle old scores with the Kurds, on Cyprus, or in the Aegean.

What scores does Hanson think Erdogan wants to settle on Cyprus and in the Aegean? The crimes against the Greek and Armenian populations of Anatolia were horrible and monstrous, but they were also ninety years ago or more*, and the worst of the state abuses of Turkey’s Kurdish population took place in the ’90s and earlier under the Kemalist governments for which many Westerners nostalgically pine. Erdogan heads a government that has made modest improvements in the government’s treatment of its Kurdish minority. No one would say the same about Netanyahu’s coalition government and the Palestinians. Besides, I’m not sure what standard Hanson is applying here. What an ally does within its own borders is certainly not a matter of indifference to the U.S., but it is different from what a client state does on occupied land.

As usual, the world that Hanson describes in his impressionistic surveys isn’t recognizable as the one that the rest of us inhabit.

* As a commenter points out below, the Turkish invasion of 1974 and expulsion of the Greek population of northern Cyprus are more recent.

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