Moscow is no longer the capital of an
evil empire. Why is Washington stuck in a Cold War mindset?
Whenever
the subject of American foreign-policy catastrophes comes up, the word “Iraq”
immediately comes to mind. But George W. Bush’s ill-fated invasion of that
hapless land in reality did not do irreparable damage to the United States.
That is not to trivialize the costs, including trillions of dollars and the
deaths of thousands of Americans plus hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, but the
reality is that the U.S. homeland was not attacked and the economy has not
collapsed, making Iraq a war that should never have been fought but not a
defeat in historic terms.
One thinks of Russia less frequently when
U.S. policy failures are examined. In 1991, Russia was a superpower. Today it
is a convenience, a straw man fortuitously produced whenever someone in power
wants to justify weapons expenditures or the initiation of new military
interventions in faraway places. Much of the negative interaction between
Washington and Moscow is driven by the consensus among policymakers, the
Western media, and the inside-the-beltway crowd that Russia is again—or perhaps
is still and always will be—the enemy du jour. But frequently forgotten or ignored is the fact that
Moscow, even in its much-reduced state, continues to control the only military
resource on the planet that can destroy the United States, suggesting caution
should be in order when one goes about goading the bear.
Truly,
the unwillingness to takes steps after 1991 to assist Russia in its
post-communism transformation into a stable, prosperous, and secure state
modeled on the West is the most significant foreign-policy failure by both
Democratic and Republican administrations over the past 30 years. The
spoliation of Russia’s natural resources carried out by Western carpetbaggers
working with local grifters-turned-oligarchs under Boris Yeltsin, the expansion
of NATO to Russia’s doorstep initiated by Bill Clinton, and the interference in
Russia’s internal affairs by the U.S. government (including the Magnitsky Act)
have exploited Russian vulnerability and have produced a series of governments
in Moscow that have become increasingly paranoid and disinclined to cooperate
with what they see as a threatening Washington.
There
have also been unnecessary slights and insults along the way, including
sanctions on Russian officials and a refusal to attend the Sochi Olympics, to
cite only two examples. The drive by Washington democracy-promoters and global
hegemonists working together to push Ukraine into the Western economic and
political sphere was a major miscalculation, as they failed to realize—or did
not care—that what takes place in Kiev is to Moscow a vital interest. Heedless
of that reality, the Obama administration, which recently endorsed the somewhat
bizarre entry of Montenegro into
the NATO alliance, is already treating Georgia and Ukraine as if they
were de facto members. Hillary Clinton, who has likened Vladimir
Putin to Adolf Hitler, has pledged to bring about their full
membership in the alliance. It would not in any way make Americans more
secure—quite the contrary, as the United States is pledging itself under the
NATO Article 5 to defend both countries. Moscow for its part would be forced to
react to such expansion.
Nearly
everything Russia does is considered wrong or even threatening by the White
House, Congress, and the U.S. media. I was reminded of that predilection when I
read recent accounts of
Russian “harassment” of American diplomats overseas. The story described how,
in one instance, a U.S. embassy officer returning to the building late at night
was challenged by a Russian guard and a scuffle ensued. In other alleged
incidents the apartments of employees were searched, and it was even claimed
that a pet dog had been killed. Certainly the incidents are deplorable, but
they are not exactly unusual in the world where spies and spy-catchers
interact.
The
old KGB was—and its successor organization, the FSB, still is—adept at tricks
to unnerve suspected intelligence officers and render them less effective,
forcing them always to be looking out for surveillance even when it was not
there. From my time in CIA training in the late 1970s, I recall descriptions of
how an agency officer had parked his car on a Moscow street only to return to
find it gone. It turned up in a plowed field 100 miles away a few days later
with no tire tracks evident. It had been picked up and moved by helicopter. Or
an officer would return to his apartment and find all his books arranged in
alphabetical order, or dinner prepared and sitting on the table. The FBI would
do the same sort of thing to suspected KGB or GRU officers in the United
States, a warning that they were being observed and that the bureau knew what
they were up to. In the intelligence world it is business as usual, but in the
U.S. media, the latest round of spy vs. spy was depicted as another sign of
barbaric behavior on the part of the Russians.
The point here is that the Russians are not
exactly failing to notice what is going on and are drawing their own
conclusions about what they must do to defend themselves. None but Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland
and the Kagan family actually want a war, but Moscow is being backed into a corner, with more and more influential
Russian voices raised against détente with a Washington that seems to be intent
on humiliating Moscow at every turn as part of a new project for regime change.
Many Russian military leaders have come to believe that the continuous NATO
expansion means that the United States wants war, and both the generals and
Vladimir Putin are warning that
a resort to arms could easily go nuclear, as Moscow will use all weapons
available to defend itself. Putin is, incidentally, the voice for moderation,
as he still aspires to a positive relationship with the West, a position he reiterated in
his July 4 message to President Obama.
Russia’s
generals are not optimistic about what is coming their way. They are insecure
because they are aware of their own military inferiority and see nothing but
hostility from the West, including evidence that American generals have collaborated to
fabricate Russian threats in Europe to force a U.S. reaction.
The Russians understand that the buildup of forces on both sides of the border
that has resulted from the clashing interests is unstable and dangerously
unpredictable. The Russian military justifies its responses based on what it
has clearly and unambiguously observed and what it is hearing. But when the Western powers probe
Russian borders with their warships and surveillance aircraft, they claim that
it is aggression when Moscow scrambles a plane to monitor the activity.
NATO
has now decided to base four
multinational battalions of combat soldiers in Eastern Europe, along the
Russian border, the first troop deployment aimed at Moscow since the fall of
the Berlin Wall. Washington in its own prepackaged view describes itself as
behaving defensively, from the purest of motives, while Moscow is always in the
wrong, but Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov notes that it is not his
country that is moving soldiers up to a border to confront the West. Picture
for a moment a reverse scenario, with a Russian missile cruiser lounging just
outside the territorial limits off Boston or New York or a marine infantry
brigade based in Cuba, and imagine what the U.S. reaction might be.
Washington’s misguided policy
toward Russia under both Republican and Democratic presidents has the potential
to become the greatest international catastrophe of all time, with the risk of
ending human life on this planet as we know it. NATO expansionism and
the regular promotion of a false narrative that Russia is seeking to recreate
the Soviet Union together suggest to that country’s leaders that Washington is
an implacable foe. The bellicose posturing inadvertently strengthens the hands
of hardline nationalists in Russia, while weakening those who seek a formula
for accommodation with the West.
Only the much-maligned Donald Trump
sees the situation with some clarity. Speaking in Moscow last week, his
foreign-policy adviser Carter Page stated (in the
words of ABC News) that “the U.S. had been overly hostile
toward Russia and … the blame for the current tensions lay largely with the
American government.” He “echoed Trump’s own attacks on Washington’s foreign
policy consensus, suggesting that U.S. experts and officials’ assessment of
Russia was skewed by an anti-Russian bias and that they often ‘unnecessarily
perpetuated Cold War tendencies.’”
To
be sure, Russia is no innocent in the international one-upmanship game. But the nearly constant animosity directed against
Russia by the Obama administration and likely to continue under President
Clinton should be seen as madness, as the stakes in the game, a possible
nuclear war, are unthinkable.
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of
the Council for the National Interest.
