July 16, 2018--Bromance In Helsinki

Here's what to expect today in Helsinki at the Trump-Putin summit--

Putin publicly will throw Trump a crumb or two. 

Just enough to make it appear that the president's strategy of "befriending" the Russian dictator in a one-on-one relationship is paying off.

Trump has already delivered for the Russian leader (even before he became president) and so, from his friend Vladimir Putin's perspective, he deserves his little reward.

Trump has shrugged off Putin's crimes in Crimea and the Ukraine; he has destabilized and thus weakened both NATO and the European Union (to Trump the EU is a "foe"); he has undermined the political standing of British prime minister, Theresa May (she mishandled Brexit because she didn't take his "advice"); and done all he could to undercut Europe's dominant economy and leader, Angela Merkel, claiming Germany is a "captive" of Russia; and Trump has ignored Putin's meddling in our presidential election and thus tampered with our democracy.

You and I even know why Trump has functioned as Putin's lackey--

Putin has the goods on him. 

Remember that infamous BuzzFeed dossier, the one that reports on Trump's private business dealings in Russia (some of them likely illegal) as well as those incendiary claims that Trump in 2013, while in Russia for the Miss Universe Pageant, cavorted with prostitutes and intentionally sullied the same hotel suite used by Michelle and Barack Obama. My guess is that Putin has a KGB video tape of those golden showers.

Thus, to help keep his boy propped up expect Putin to say he will personally investigate what's behind the recent indictment by the Mueller team of a dozen Russian intelligence operatives. Pretending to know nothing about it he will agree to look into the charge that they directly hacked Hillary Clinton's campaign and he will, with a straight face, promise to report what he finds directly to Trump. (Don't hold your breath waiting for the results of that investigation.) 

Also, expect Putin to say he will order his military to work more closely with America's special forces to coordinate the hunt in Syria for the remnants of ISIS (again, resist holding your breath); and, as a bonus for Trump being such an important member of the Putin team, the Russian president will agree to open bilateral discussions leading to a plan to reduce the number of strategic nuclear weapons. (Once more don't . . .)

Then, speaking of nuclear weapons, Putin will praise Trump for meeting with Kim Jong-un and will agree to use his non-existing influence to press Kim to actually denuclearize. My advice--again, don't hold your breath for any of this to happen. It's all about the pretending and photo-ops.

At the end of their private meeting, at a joint press conference, metaphorically speaking, expect nothing but hugs and air kisses. 

And after that, expect nothing. Except Putin's relentless campaign to weaken all aspects of American and Western European life. With Trump continuing to clear the way for him.

April 25, 2016--Dateline: The Rest of the World

While waiting for election returns from Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Maryland, and Prince's autopsy findings, a new Cold War is breaking out. This time not only with Russia but also China. And, who knows, maybe with Saudi Arabia.

Vladimir Putin's Russia is beginning to sound and look like the old Soviet Union with economic dislocation fueling an aggressive foreign policy to both reannimate dreams of a restored Imperial Russia and as a chauvinistic distraction for the Russian people who will soon likely be needing to line up for hours to buy a loaf of bread or a liter of vodka. But while in line they will have their nationalistic dreams to sustain them.

Circuses but no bread.

Rather than acting like a European partner, which we saw signs of for a decade or so, Putin is leading Russia's military buildup and deploying forces on numerous fronts in an attempt to secure what it sees as its sphere of influence and to provide opportunities to flex military muscle in order to poke the US and Western Europeans in the eye, partly as a response to the economic sanctions we and our European allies have imposed on Russia in retaliation for its expansionist moves in Ukraine.

And, while they're at it, they've taken to buzzing U.S. warships in open waters

Under Putin's leadership they have of course reannexed Crimea, threatened various parties in the Balkans, and have become actively involved in Syria, deploying an entirely new mix of smart weapons whose existence has caught Western observes by surprise.

What happened to all those clunky Soviet tanks and misfiring missiles? Clearly once again avoiding CIA detection, right under the noses of our various surveillance agencies, the Russians seemingly overnight on the ground and in the skies in Syria are putting on display a whole range of new, sophisticated 21st century weapons systems.

So much for recent efforts under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to "reset" relations with Putin and Russia. He and Obama can't even talk to each other. Even Stalin and Roosevelt got along better!

Meanwhile, in Asia, also with thoughts about a restored Dynasty, President Xi Jinping of China, also in part to distract the Chinese people from a cooling economy and to deflect thoughts from rampant governmental and corporate corruption (which directly involves his own family), Xi has been investing heavily in modernizing and rapidly expanding China's military capacities and reach.

New fighter jets, aircraft carriers, and a modern submarine fleet are among recent acquisitions. In addition, as an extension of its imperial moves in the South China Sea, encroaching on what we impotently claim to be international waters, and pushing toward South Korean and Japanese waters, under Xi, China is creating a series of new islands which already include air strips and naval facilities. We talk and talk and threaten and threaten while China dredges and dredges and builds and builds.

Perhaps most ominous is Russia's and China's moves to modernize their nuclear weapons. Making warheads smaller and smaller so that they can be mounted on advanced intercontinental missiles with vastly increased capacities to avoid detection. In retaliation, the Obama administration, has quietly begun to do the same for our aging nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

Ironically, Barak Obama who came to office proclaiming that nuclear disarmament was his highest priority, and thus quickly received the Noble Peace Prize, is leaving office engaged in a restored full-tilt nuclear arms race with Russia and China.

And also while we have been obsessing about our presidential election and other entertainments, in response to the bold nuclear deal we struck with Iran, Saudi Arabia is talking quietly, in response to that, of developing its own nuclear weapons.

Sic transit . . .

June 16, 2015--The New Cold War

This report from the New York Times isn't from 1955 but appeared yesterday--

In a significant move to deter possible Russian aggression in Europe, the Pentagon is drawing up plans to store battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and other heavy weapons for as many as 5,000 American troops in several Baltic and Eastern European countries, official say.

What happened to détente? What happened with the Obama administration's claim that it had successfully pressed the "reset button" in our relations with Russia?

This sounds to me like all too familiar sabre-rattling.

But there's more.

A few days earlier the Pentagon announced that a Russian jet fighter buzzed a U.S. reconnaissance plane flying well outside Soviet borders over the Black Sea. It came within 10 feet of the American plane and maintained its provocative position for 10-15 minutes before breaking off. Overnight, the Russians announced they would match the U.S. buildup in Eastern Europe.

This to me sounds like back to the future and is very scary.

We know that Obama and Vladimir Putin despise each other and can't stand to be in the same room.

Nixon managed to meet and talk with Nikita Khrushchev, Roosevelt and Truman sucked it up and met and negotiated with Stalin, so why can't the current U.S. and Russian presidents do the same thing?

They would probably claim it's because they disagree about Crimea, which Russia annexed a year and a half ago. Obama sees Putin threatening more incursions in other culturally Russian parts of Ukraine; Putin sees it as an inevitable part of Russia's national destiny. We in America above all should understand his version of Manifest Destiny.

But none of this requires Cold-War-style confrontations. If Putin and Obama had a civil working relationships it all could be resolved with a few phone calls.

"Vlad, what's going on with you guys? I mean in Crimea." 

"Well, Barack, it's a traditional part of Russia, the people there are of Russian descent, speak Russian, and want to be a part of Russia. So why not let things take their course?" 

"I see your point. But what we need to do, Vlad, is sell the idea to our own people and make the case that you let the Crimeans vote about affiliating with Russia. Which they did and overwhelmingly wanted to. I'll work on Poroshenko to convince him it's no big deal. He owes me one. Everyone knows Crimea has been largely autonomous for decades so we should be able to put a fig leaf on the situation. How does that sound?" 

"I think I can make that happen. In the meantime, send my best to Michele." 

"And mine to . . . Sorry, I forgot her name. The gymnast?" 

"Alina, Alina Kabaeva. Will do. Talk to you soon. Call any time. You know I don't sleep."

So now that their relationship is ruptured, there will be no conversations of this kind and as a result we have economic and diplomatic sanctions flying in both direction, Russia has been kicked out of the G-8 (which is now again the G-7), and there are not-so-veiled threats of more to come, including additional close encounters in the sky and at sea. All we need is for one jet fighter pilot to make a mistake and launch a missile and who knows what would happen next.

This is the way adolescents behave, not the leaders of the world's two most powerful nations, both still with hundreds of intercontinental missiles at the ready and thousands of nuclear warheads.

Where are the adults?

June 6, 2014--Progressive Dinner With Vladimir Putin

High school is breaking out among the G-7.

They are meeting in Europe right now without including G-8--Russia. Because of their annexation of Crimea they, actually, Vladimir Putin, are in the doghouse.

No better evidence of how ridiculous things can get have been all the maneuvers to keep Putin and Barack Obama from running into each other. This is because Putin in fact has been in Brussels but meeting less officially with European counterparts and he, as well as Obama, were in Paris yesterday and will be in Normandy today, the 70th anniversary of the D Day landings.

But the funkiest machinations were those involving dinner and souper (supper) on Thursday (in a movement I will unpack that distinction) in Paris, hosted by French president Francois Holland.

"Dinner," at an undisclosed Parisian restaurant, will include Obama but not Putin while souper, which will follow dinner, will include Putin but not Obama.

So for Monsieur Hollande and other members of the G-7 or G-8 it will be like a progressive dinner (where courses are served at different locations) with the dinner part, I suppose, consisting of small plates while souper will be more robust.

Or the other way around.

I am not privy to the menus but they could be something like the following--

Always the good host, Hollande, wanting Obama to feel at home after being largely ignored at the G-7 talks, at dinner will order up a Chicago-style deep-dish pizza and a a couple of Big Baby double-cheesebergers.

"What, no Moules Marinieres?" Obama will ask. "Back home I eat Bug Babies all the time."

Dinner conversation with him will center around how, after tapping her phone, he can get Angela Merkel to return his calls.

At the Putin souper cabbage borscht will be served after which there will be skewers of lamb shashlyk.

"What, no Blanquette de Veau?" Putin, pouting, will ask. "In Moscow all I eat is shashlyk."

Souper conversation with him will likely include putting the final touches on France's sale of 1.2 billion-euros' worth of helicopter carriers to Russia in, sort-of, violation of the sanctions the West has imposed on Russia because of its intervention in Ukraine.

But as they say in Paris, C'est la vie.

March 24, 2104--The Blinding Dawn of a New Russian Revolution

If we approach matters with Russia assuming Vladimir Putin and his advisors and supporters are motivated by rational self-interest, we will be sadly disappointed.

Rational self-interest, which assumes he and they care more about the Russian economy, the wellbeing of the Russian people, and their standing in the international community than in the emotions that patriotism and nationalism unleash.

It is rather these latter forces that are motivating and driving the agenda for Putin and his allies.

Anyone who knows anything about Russian history and literature knows about the surging psychological and xenophobic passions that have driven Russian imperial ambitions for centuries.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground alone should be on all Western policymakers' desks as they and our president try to understand what to think about, expect, and then do. Little of what they learn will make conventional sense and thus would provide essential insights.

In Notes, the unnamed narrator, a retried civil servant living in isolation, is so guided by subterranean, underground forces that he repeatedly acts, as Dostoyevsky puts it, against his own seeming self-interest.

He takes pleasure in pain and unhappiness, even when his liver throbs or he has a toothache. None of this, in a post-Enlightenment world, makes "sense." But, then again, to him it does and to the Russian people for whom he is an exemplar.

It is in this way that he and they validate their existence.

We have been seeing this kind of paranoiac behavior on display recently in Russia as it reappropriates Crimea and in Putin's behavior.

After the Crimeans voted to reaffiliate with Russia, Putin made an impassioned speech to the country's political elite in which he spoke about perceived slights from the West, how Russia had been humiliated following the collapse of the Soviet Union and in turn denounced the domination of the U.S. and Western Europe.

He said, "They cheated us again and again, made decisions behind our back, presented us with completed facts. That's the way it was with the expansion of NATO . . . They always told us the same thing, 'Well, this doesn't involve you.'"

According to the New York Times, at a public rally later that night, reaching deep into Russian and Soviet history to embrace the national soul, Putin anointed himself the guardian of the greater Russian people, including those living beyond current Russian borders. He spoke about restoring a part of the old Russian Empire that the collapse of the USSR had overthrown.

"Millions of Russians went to bed in one country and woke up abroad,"he intoned, "Overnight, they were minorities in the former Soviet republic, and the Russian people became the biggest divided nation in the world."

He then joined the rally in singing nationalistic songs as tears flowed among the enormous Moscow crowd.

Even more disturbing was a second piece in the Times that reported about Putin's inner-circle of confidential advisors--individuals steeped in Russian imperial aspirations and mysticism.

Take Russian political scientist Aleksandr Dugin, who in the late 1990s called for "the blinding dawn of a new Russian Revolution, fascism--borderless as our lands, and red as our blood," for a flavor of those who have Putin's ear--

Aggressively anti-American he has called for a "conservative revolution" that combines socialist economic thinking with ultra-conservative cultural traditionalism. He is responsible for the movement to establish a Eurasian empire, "constructed on the fundamental principle of the common enemy," which he called "Atlanticism," a concoction of liberal values and U.S. hegemony.

Also in Putin's circle of private advisors is Vladimir Yakunin, president of Russian Railroads. He points to a "global financial oligarchy" and the "global domination that is being carried out by the U.S."

Last week, he offered plans for a Soviet-style megaproject to develop transportation infrastructure in Siberia, something he called "an economics of a spiritual type" that would insulate Russia from the West's alien values. He compared this vision to the adoption of Christianity in ancient Rus, the conquest of Siberia, the electrification of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet space program. As a bone to his friend Vladimir Putin, not as an after thought, he added the recent Sochi Olympics to that list of historic accomplishments.

Looked at through Western eyes, none of this makes much sense--the Soviet Union is no more, a government-directed version of a market economy has resulted in a large Russian middle class, tens of millions have been brought out of poverty, and the new Russia has been a powerful and respected player on the world stage. Why place these gains in jeopardy--the Russian economy is already showing signs of serious decline just over the past few weeks?

The answers may best be found in a collective longing for the Russian past and a form of self-abnegation that embraces behavior that appears to be against Russia's self-interest. We would be wise, however, to understand that what looks like that to us may very well be their own unique and characteristic form of self-interest. And dangerous at that.

March 10, 2014--Amerika

I've been rethinking what I wrote the other day about Vladimir Putin. When I speculated that he would back off from a full-scale crisis in Ukraine because the Russian economy is now fully globalized, billionaire kleptocrats within Russia are worried about the value of their ill-gotten assets, and Putin likes being a part of the post-modern civilized world and doesn't want to be tossed out of the G-8 club.

That was last week.

This week he seems to have no problem dispatching Russian troops to Crimea (albeit without the uniform patches that would identify them as Russian); racing ahead with a referendum there that would allow Crimea to secede from the rest of Ukraine; and he is not hesitating to push back against American sanctions pressure, even, in uncensored ways, calling us hypocrites for lecturing him and Russia about human rights violations and acting, by annexing Crimea, unconstitutionally and in violation of international law.

How constitutional is it, he is chiding President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, to move quickly to recognize the new government in Ukraine, a government that seized office two weeks ago by ousting the admittedly corrupt but legitimately elected president, Viktor Yanukovych? That does not sound constitutional, much less consistent.

And, as to international law, Putin is enjoying poking us by asking what's worse--Russia sending a few thousand troops to Crimea or the United States launching a full-scale "preemptive war" against Iraq? A war that not only led to the overthrow and execution of Saddam Hussein and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, but also to the military occupation of a sovereign nation for nearly a decade by the U.S. military

Putin also seems fed up being hectored by Obama and Kerry about democracy and human rights when, he points out, we continue to have and use our prison in Guantanamo Bay and in many states, abetted by our Supreme Court, efforts are vigorously underway to deny voting rights to people of color.

And, while he's at it, Putin has taken to pointing out that our vaunted free market economy is not as open or free as we claim. It is getting more difficult in the U.S. to move upward socioeconomically, gaps between rich and the rest of us are widening, and for many who have been most successful it is because the system is substantially rigged in their favor.

As unsavory as Putin may be, he has a point.

Not only has he had it with us, but, sadly, many others around the world are also tired of our holding ourselves up as the governmental and economic model to which everyone else should aspire.

Now that we are virtual paper tigers--unable, really, to impose our will anywhere--nations big and small are feeling no hesitation to expose our inconsistencies and internal contradictions.

We appear to be interested in directing Putin to an "off ramp," a way to back down without feeling humiliated. But it may be that we too need an off ramp of our own.