Official Washington is awash
with tough talk about Russia and the need to punish President Putin for his
role in Ukraine and Syria. But this bravado ignores Russia’s genuine national
interests, its “red lines,” and the risk that “tough-guy-ism” can lead to
nuclear war, as Alastair Crooke explains.
The
problem, as Professor Steve Cohen, the foremost Russia scholar in the
U.S., laments, is that it is this narrative which
has precluded America from ever concluding any real ability to find a mutually
acceptable modus vivendi with Russia – which it sorely needs,
if it is ever seriously to tackle the phenomenon of Wahhabist jihadism (or
resolve the Syrian conflict).
What is more, the “Cold War narrative”
simply does not reflect history, but rather the narrative effaces
history: It looses for us the ability to really understand the demonized “calous
tyrant” – be it (Russian) President Vladimir Putin or (Ba’athist) President
Bashar al-Assad – because we simply ignore the actual history of how that state
came to be what it is, and, our part in it becoming what it is.
Indeed the state, or its leaders, often are
not what we think they are – at all. Cohen explains: “The chance for a durable Washington-Moscow strategic
partnership was lost in the 1990 after the Soviet Union ended. Actually it
began to be lost earlier, because it was [President Ronald] Reagan and [Soviet
leader Mikhail] Gorbachev who gave us the opportunity for a strategic
partnership between 1985-89.
“And it
certainly ended under the Clinton Administration, and it didn’t end in Moscow.
It ended in Washington — it was squandered and lost in Washington. And it
was lost so badly that today, and for at least the last several years
(and I would argue since the Georgian war in 2008), we have literally been in a
new Cold War with Russia.
“Many people in politics and in the media
don’t want to call it this, because if they admit, ‘Yes, we are in a Cold
War,’ they would have to explain what they were doing during the past 20
years. So they instead say, ‘No, it is not a Cold War.’
“Here is my next point. This new Cold War has all of the
potential to be even more dangerous than the preceding 40-year Cold War, for several
reasons. First of all, think about it. The epicentre of the earlier
Cold War was in Berlin, not close to Russia. There was a vast buffer zone
between Russia and the West in Eastern Europe.
“Today, the epicentre is in Ukraine,
literally on Russia’s borders. It was the Ukrainian conflict that set this off,
and politically Ukraine remains a ticking time bomb. Today’s confrontation
is not only on Russia’s borders, but it’s in the heart of Russian-Ukrainian
‘Slavic civilization.’ This is a civil war as profound in some ways as was
America’s Civil War.”
Cohen continued: “My next point: and still worse – You will
remember that after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Washington and Moscow developed
certain rules-of-mutual conduct. They saw how dangerously close they had
come to a nuclear war, so they adopted “No-Nos,’ whether they were encoded in
treaties or in unofficial understandings. Each side knew where the other’s red
line was. Both sides tripped over them on occasion but immediately pulled
back because there was a mutual understanding that there were red lines.
“TODAY THERE ARE NO RED LINES. One of the things that Putin and
his predecessor President Medvedev keep saying to Washington is: You are
crossing our Red Lines! And Washington said, and continues to say, ‘You
don’t have any red lines. We have red lines and we can have all the bases
we want around your borders, but you can’t have bases in Canada or
Mexico. Your red lines don’t exist.’
This clearly illustrates that today there are no mutual rules
of conduct.
“Another important point: Today there
is absolutely no organized anti-Cold War or Pro-Detente political force or
movement in the United States at all –– not in our political parties, not in
the White House, not in the State Department, not in the mainstream media, not
in the universities or the think tanks. … None of this exists today. …
“My next point is a question: Who is
responsible for this new Cold War? I don’t ask this question because I
want to point a finger at anyone. The position of the current American
political media establishment is that this new Cold War is all Putin’s fault –
all of it, everything. We in America didn’t do anything wrong. At every
stage, we were virtuous and wise and Putin was aggressive and a bad man. And
therefore, what’s to rethink? Putin has to do all of the rethinking,
not us.”
These two narratives, the Cold War
narrative, and the neocons’ subsequent “spin” on it: i.e. Bill Kristol’s
formulation (in 2002) that precisely because of its Cold War “victory,” America
could, and must, become the “benevolent global hegemon,” guaranteeing and
sustaining the new American-authored global order – an “omelette that cannot be
made without breaking eggs” – converge and conflate in Syria, in the persons of
President Assad and President Putin.
President Obama is no neocon, but he is
constrained by the global hegemon legacy, which he must either sustain, or be
labeled as the arch facilitator of America’s decline. And the
President is also surrounded by R2P (“responsibility-to-protect”) proselytizers,
such as Samantha Power, who seem to have convinced the President that “the
tyrant” Assad’s ouster would puncture and collapse the Wahhabist jihadist
balloon, allowing “moderate” jihadists such as Ahrar al-Sham to finish off
the deflated fragments of the punctured ISIS balloon.
In practice, President Assad’s imposed ouster precisely will empower
ISIS, rather than implode it, and the consequences will ripple across the
Middle East – and beyond. President Obama privately may
understand the nature and dangers of the Wahhabist cultural revolution, but seems
to adhere to the conviction that everything will change if only President Assad
steps down. The
Gulf States said the same about Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq. He
has gone (for now), but what changed? ISIS got stronger.
Alastair
Crooke is a British diplomat who was a senior figure in British intelligence
and in European Union diplomacy. He is the founder and director of the
Conflicts Forum, which advocates for engagement between political Islam and the
West.
