[This lead editorial in today's The Independent is a joy to read. I hope it
is representative of the dominant global view of Mr. Compassionate Conservatism at this time.]
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Well, this what they're saying about him here in Russia.
Bad translation, though.
Nezavisimaya Gazeta March 27, 2001 THE USA OR THE USSR? America in the Soviet "expansion space" Prominent political consultant on relations between Russia and America Author: Gleb Pavlovsky [from WPS Monitoring Agency, www.wps.ru/e_index.html] THE UNITED STATES IS STARTING TO USE THE COLD WAR TECHNIQUES OF THE SOVIET UNION. AN AMERICAN SOVIET UNION IN ITS WORST FORM IS BEING CONSTRUCTED, AS GLOBAL AND IRRESPONSIBLE AS ITS COMMUNIST PROGENITOR. THE US IS JUST ACCUSTOMED TO SEEING THE WORLD IN A CERTAIN WAY, AND REFUSES TO CHANGE.
If America's activity were to be viewed as a message, it is only in Russia that such messages are received with such ambivalence. We perceive them as controversial and unsystematic. Now they are offensive, and now they are ideological. Later they are vaguely threatening or appear to be meant for the old enemy that was the Soviet Union even though nominally directed at Russia.
There is a certain trend in US foreign policy that has been of interest for me for quite a long time now. By Russians, it is perceived as sovietization of the American global activity. First indicated in how air strikes against Baghdad were covered in 1998, it moved into high gear during the Kosovo intervention in 1999. Sovietization of the foreign policy of the United States is more instrumental than deliberate. This undeliberate quotation from the ideas of the late Soviet Politburo is ascribed to the fact that precisely the Soviet Union and not the United States that first initiated an ideocratic globalization.
In other words, an American Soviet Union in its worst form is being constructed, as global and irresponsible as its communist progenitor.
The United States is inheriting Soviet globalism now. Russia is refusing to inherit it. Instead, it is revising its own national legacy. Russia itself quit the Soviet Union, without support from the United States (and actually despite resistance put up by Bush the elder) Russia recognized itself as a democratic state based on the rule of law, a European state. This is a fact. It means that Russia is not the Soviet Union. It is because of this that it refuses to discuss policies based on "the necessity to protect the world from restoration of the Soviet empire."
The United States missed the restoration of Russia - national, popular, or integrated. It missed it for the same reason the Politburo had missed unification of Europe.
It is clear nowadays that Russia will never be ruled from beyond, particularly by hints from the United States. This factor alone changes the global situation. The model is coming apart as soon as it ceased to be total. It stumbles over what Stalin's globalism stumbled over in Yugoslavia, and late Brezhnev's globalism in the Soviet Union itself, in Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan - over indestructibility of dissenter in any global balance. It turns out that reaction of the American greatness in this case does not differ from the reaction of Soviet impeccability - the regime has to be changed, the bastards have to be kicked out from the corridors of power no matter what the cost.
Can we be sure America, confused as it is by its "national interests" and "global responsibility" which it perceives from the purely ideological standpoint, will not put Russia on the list of rogue states one fine day? It will do us world of good to remember that the United States shifts foreign countries from the category of rogue states into that of partners and back for purely political reasons. It was so with the armament of Iraq, it was so with resisting Soviet policy in Afghanistan. (This was America's response, all the more irresponsible a policy which ended in the long run in the end of Afghani statehood.) We know it for what it is. It is creating a problem so as to heroically overcome it afterwards.
It is not a joke at all, however, when a rogue element of yesterday is instantly made a partner and America sics it on you. It was so with Kosovo Albanians. It is so with the American hypocritical policy with regard to Palestinians. Moreover, it is not as thought we were not witnessing something like that in the Caucasus and Central Asia.
When some national structure formulates its opinion in the form of international laws and acts on the international arena, deterioration of relations with it may mean that the country in question will be put on the list of rogue states. The UN will only play along. What guarantees can America offer to the world with regard to its own reliability? No guarantees. What does it mean for Russia? It means we should not fear a military strike from the United States. On the other hand, attempts of "technical assistance" we have never asked for are quite probable. What we should be wary of is a crisis of how America understands Russia which may result in a whole bunch of new complexes and suspicions.
There is a tendency in this country to see Washington's cunning plots in everything. This is a relic of the Cold War, an optimistic relic. It will be much more dangerous if we start seeing stupidity instead of plots. Because consequences of stupidity are even more serious.
An American patriot was told Thomas Mann the following: rely on American common sense in a dire hour. Mann replied that dire hour was precisely the time of hesitations and doubts. Strategic immaturity of Washington is a fact. Can Russia rely on a country whose administration always misunderstands Moscow, builds its policy on this erroneous basis, and later apologizes for it?
There is no such a thing as a global American plot. There is the amazing American inability to understand something. But this is not its domestic policy. The US is not evil. It just dimly perceives the world the way it is accustomed to doing. Like a student learning a poem by heart - word by word, with his or her eyes closed for better concentration. This world ought to be comfortable for a certain way of perception and understanding, and therefore for the structure of investment with minimal risks at this level of perception and understanding.
The US is not an enemy of regimes that are not democratic. It is an enemy of the regimes it does not understand, the regimes whose parameters it does not control, and does not therefore knows what to do about them in conflicts. The globally-minded United States is an enemy of overly-independent regimes. Stalin's tactic in such cases called for preventive conflicts. These conflicts forced the potential threat to materialize and enforced a better discipline in his own camp. The United States is following suit.
With prospects like that, no state can be secure. Actually, nobody should. Every state should constantly ask itself if it has done everything properly, if it perhaps has offended the Big Brother... This psychology is the objective of all policies of harassment from Stalin's purges to McCarthyism. In the international arena, it may result in the same sort of thing - purges with the use of military resources. As a result, we are moving towards a new variation of an unsafe world - a proscriptionist globalism. A globalism of scaring others, a globalism of deliberate sanctions, a police globalism.
As far as Russia is concerned, the question is fairly simple. Unless this possibility is ruled out, military policy should take the US philosophy of security with a grain of salt. After all, the United States is just a big island, and we are a continental nation. Understanding islanders' logic is sometimes difficult for us. And vice versa. Russia cannot rely on American common sense. It needs some protection from fools regardless or whether they live on an island or a continent. And fools with an ideology are particularly dangerous.
It is the United States and not Russia who is the inheritor off the expansionist policy of the Soviet Union. Russia will not attend global party conferences with reports of loyalty. Inevitably doomed are attempts to talk to Russia as though it were a Soviet Union in disguise, as well as attempts to force American psychological traumas and xenophobic projections on Russia. It only reiterates the somewhat irrational nature of American political reaction. Bent on controlling everything and everyone, the United States is looking for the same motive in Russia's actions. This mysterious American soul! This time it is Russia that should help the United States get rid of the syndrome of post-Soviet globalism. At the same time, we should not exaggerate the role and importance of the US shifting to and fro.
US dominance is a reality which grates on the nerves of those who long for the Soviet Union. It prevents these people from seeing pointlessness of this dominance as a resource. A fact is not an ideology.
We live in a world dominated by Americans. Let us take it with humor and that is that. We have to be cleverer than Americans, and that is that. Moreover, it is not very difficult.
Thirty years ago KGB dominance over individuals was more impressive than US dominance over the Old World nowadays.
The Kremlin State Department provoked us then just the way the Washington Lubyanka is provoking - a dissenter was forced into getting a gun or a bomb. It was needed in order to do away with the dissenter in question for good. But rouges chose a different option. Back then, a person who decided to fight the global ideocracy could rely only on the Soviet Constitution, a typewriter, and some student from Italy fond of Dostoyevsky and the man himself as such. This days our confidence is based on the reinforcing European community and on restored and integrating Russia. Even though the US-European alliance remains an important element of the global system, neither Russia nor the European Union in the long run will accept sovietization of the new world order.
The United States should have chosen a better moment to play the Soviet Union. (Translated by A. Ignatkin)