Los Angeles Times March 19, 2006
Why are we trying to reheat the Cold War?
By Anatol Lieven
HISTORIANS OF the future will look back with amazement at U.S. foreign policy at the turn of the millennium,especially with regard to Russia.
It's true, of course, that the Soviet Union once posed a severe threat to the United States and its allies — a global challenge that tied up American energies for 50 years and cost tens of thousands of American lives in anti-communist proxy wars. But that struggle ended in 1989 with a Western victory that was not only complete but miraculously peaceful. Since then, the U.S.-Russia relationship has been uneasy but usually cooperative. Not one American has been killed by Russia. And after 9/11, Russia immediately offered its sympathy and help.
So what possible explanation is there for the fact that today — at a moment when both the U.S. and Russia face the common enemy of Islamist terrorism — hard-liners within the Bush administration, and especially in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, are arguing for a new tough line against Moscow along the lines of a scaled-down Cold War?
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Undoubtedly, there are mysterious elements (and I mean psychologically mysterious) to this persistent US belligerence towards Russia but I think the obvious eludes Mr. Lieven (whose work, I should hasten to add, I admire) because he cherishes a somewhat romantic view of the Cold War as a struggle between freedom loving pragmatists – willing to do what was necessary to preserve liberty – and the Soviet challenge to all that.
When I think of the Cold War, the conflict between Rome and Carthage immediately comes to mind.
An imperfect metaphor, but serviceable. Rome's obsession with Carthage had everything to do with the Roman desire to enjoy an unchallenged field of imperial play and little to do with whatever justifications Cato et. al. may have served up. There are distant parallels with the US/USSR struggle.
The subconscious assumption is that the US' aims were productive and the USSR's destructive: that these states occupied mirror opposite universes of meaning (something my grandfather, who called Jim Crow in those pre-Gitmo days the 'American gulag system' would have strenuously objected to).
To someone who believes this – as Mr. Lieven seems to do – Washington's present rhetorical and geopolitical aggression against Moscow is odd, out of character and difficult to understand.
Viewed differently, as simply a continuation of a dominance focused foreign policy (the term “full spectrum dominance” Pentagon types use is not a mere flourish of machismo but a clear statement of a deeply ingrained way of thinking) the mystery disappears and the shape of things becomes clearer.
Washington's belligerence persists because the reasons that animated the Cold War didn't disappear with the Cold War's demise. Russia still poses a threat to American interests – as understood by the dominance school – merely by being a major power in position to challenge the US again at some undetermined date in the future.
This fact is hiding in plain sight; away from the eyes of those who continue to believe the Cold War to have been a 'twilight struggle' for freedom and not the continuation of timeworn patterns of great power conflict clothed in new ideological garments.
Back to Lieven's essay...I found this moment particularly puzzling:
Yet Washington still seems to not understand the consequences of its disastrous Russia policies of the 1990s. Hypocritical and extreme anti-Russian attitudes are not confined to old-style Cold Warriors such as Cheney but are widely held among the nation's foreign policy elite. They are on display in a report on the U.S.-Russia relationship just issued by a bipartisan task force of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 76 pages of hectoring criticism of Russia, there is not one suggestion that any U.S. action toward Russia has been in any way wrong or harmful.
Of course, Russia has been largely to blame for the decline of the relationship; but exclusively to blame, for everything? This is the kind witless propaganda expected from arrogant, ignorant, obedient Soviet apparatchiks during the Cold War — not from supposedly independent scholars in the world's greatest democracy.
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But how has Russia “been largely to blame for the decline of the relationship”? Mr. Lieven provides strong evidence of needless American bellicosity but then goes on to state that Moscow is “largely to blame”.
A difficult knot to undo.
.d.
--------- Sì, il blog. È soltanto un giocattolo. Ma, è un giocattolo serio.