AMERICA: BACK IN THE USSR? A specter is haunting the US. By Andrei K. Sitov Andrei Sitov is the Washington Bureau Chief for ITAR-TASS News Agency of Russia. The views exressed in the article are his own.
For the past 20 years I've been covering the US first as a Soviet and then as a Russian reporter. Since the end of the Cold War my country has been trying to become more like America. Meanwhile the US, especially after 9/11, increasingly resembles the old Soviet Union. Please consider:
- The US acts as if it believes it knows what's best not only for the Americans but for the rest of the world and shows a willingness to force this belief down other people's throats. For a while - until the terrorist attacks - its "elite" even toyed with the ridiculous notion of an "end of history". This is an idea common to all totalitarian regimes (some scholars say it is rooted in the Armageddon prophecy in the Bible). At least Fukuyama's version did not envision a blood bath.
- The US continues to define its national greatness through military strength - as witnessed by the new National Security strategy. The Soviet Union always used to do that; Dr. Rice told me she thought it would be a grave mistake for Russia to act in a similar manner. To me it seems to be an example of "do as I say, not as I do".
- The US shows a dislike for international agreements across the board - from arms control to the International Criminal Court and from Kyoto protocols to tobacco trade. The Soviet Union also seemed to comply only with those international obligations that it liked. To be fair, as Secretary Powell pointed out to me, Americans don't break agreements - they either don't sign them or withdraw from them.
- The US now liberates other nations without being asked. The Pentagon advisor Mr. Perle told me that "there are more important things than national sovereignty". Of course the late Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had a "doctrine of limited sovereignty" named after him. Mr. Perle also said the US always leaves the lands it occupies. I shared that opinion with a Mexican colleague; he begged to differ.
- The US has a curious relationship with its allies. It often carries their water for them - and gets resentment and ridicule in return. The Soviet satellites used to pay lip service to their "unbreakable alliance" with the USSR and sneer behind our backs. They also had a higher standard of living. The transatlantic partners of the Americans say the US is indispensable (Secretary Albright was actually vain enough to repeat it publicly; when I challenged her, she said "other countries call us that"). In the meantime the Europeans at least once in the last decade managed to get the US actually go to war for them - in former Yugoslavia. They also believe they live in a much better and more civilized way than the Americans do. Personally I think the Americans (like the Soviets in the past) have only themselves to blame for this situation. They get what they asked for and shouldn't complain about it.
- The US conducts a large-scale propaganda effort that may not always be entirely truthful. It uses purely totalitarian slogans such as "Who's not with us is against us". The government effort is directly coordinated by the White House though a special office that sends out "Daily Messages" with key talking points (in Soviet days this was a standard operation procedure for the Kremlin; it is still used in some post-Soviet states). The latest press conference of President George W. Bush was by his own admission orchestrated (this was written before the press conference on July 30th which was also carefully staged - AS); the White House was never really challenged on it. The press seems to have accepted new rules of the game which generally conform to the so called "patriotic consensus". The coverage of the war in Iraq by "embedded" journalists (even we at ITAR-TASS had one at an air carrier) was a perfect example. The reporters were filing directly from the front lines. Yet it seems nothing that the government wouldn't want to be known made it to TV screens and newspaper pages. At least one myth - the Jessica Lynch story in the original propagandistic version - flourished for a surprisingly long time. There's at least one genuine taboo in American journalism: admitting that the 9/11 highjackers were personally brave and committed to their murderous cause.
- The US now has a new "super agency" - the Department of Homeland Security - whose name is best translated into Russian as an equivalent of the old KGB. It also has some of the KGB functions. A color-coded system of alerts adds to the feeling of permanent anxiety, the expectation of new threats from external and internal enemies. Internal security has been tightened dramatically. Borders are being sealed off; the rules of immigration and international travel are hardened. Spying and informing on your neighbors - a staple of any totalitarian regime - is encouraged. A government-run "total information awareness" system has been created. It's reportedly designed to hold the amount of data - much of it on private citizens - equal to all the Internet pages over the past 5 years.
- The US government seeks and receives additional powers to interfere into people's lives both through new laws and a more restrictive application of old ones. It runs a detention camp at a legal no-man's land in Guantanamo, Cuba. The foreign detainees including some Russians have no legal status and allegedly can be held indefinitely. Some of the detainees are now nearing a trial by military tribunals potentially facing death penalty.
- As a result of all of the above the doctrine of containment created to confront the Soviet Union is now increasingly applied by the outside world to the US - in practical policy if not in name. On numerous occasions people from the third world and even Europe told me they wished the USSR was back - not for its own sake but as a counterbalance to America. I believe the Soviet Union collapsed largely because it was not telling the truth about itself either to its own population or to the world. The Russians do not like to think of themselves as losers in the Cold War (after all they peacefully rejected communism and won their freedom). But generally speaking, from a moral standpoint, losing may actually be preferable to winning. If you lose, you have to ask yourself why it happened and face your own shortcomings, weaknesses and lies. Meanwhile the illusions, propaganda and lies of the winning side are usually justified and reinforced. Besides, current American policies seem to give comfort to a number of less than democratic nations around the world including some former Soviet states. Americans may not recognize their own country in my description. I know for a fact that many Russians also refuse to believe it. After all America embodies the best values and ideals that we wanted to make our own when we started our post-communist transition. That is exactly why I'm worried about the seeming "Sovietization" of America. If not yet a reality, it's a dangerous trend, a spooky "specter". And I think the Americans would be well advised to recognize the threat and take it seriously. They have everything they need to defeat it while safeguarding their legitimate security interests and to win back the confidence and admiration of their friends and partners around the world.
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