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Shortly after he took office, President Bush visited Vladimir Putin and reported that he found him a trustworthy friend. As if we needed another lesson on the subject, the Russian invasion of the Republic of Georgia has further demonstrated the folly of using gut instinct to formulate national security policy.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was accompanied by a euphoria not seen since the end of the Second World War. In Europe and the United States, the lifting of the Iron Curtain was reckoned to be the first event of a new world order, one in which democracy would flower in profusion and erstwhile adversaries would work in concert to assist the downtrodden and insure world peace. This was the understandable optimism that is characteristic of any idealistic endeavor, and almost all benign human enterprises---including new businesses and marriages---are suffused with such notions.
Idealism and naivete, however, are the natural prey of reality. Except for now having vast new wealth from oil and other natural resources, Russia hasn't changed in a millennium. Whether ruled by the tsars, the communists or the oil oligarchs, Russia has had a closed political environment, and it should have come as no surprise that Medvedev has Putin's old job because Putin selected him to have it.
In the period just before and during the Second World War, the Stalin's government killed more of his own citizens---more than twenty million, by many accounts---than the Axis did. A principal characteristic of the Russian political psyche is paranoia, and our failure to understand that, even after decades of experience, demonstrates conclusively that the principal underpinning of American and European policy is hope rather than experience.
Every American administration has had its foreign policy failures, and the inability or refusal to understand the nature of Russia and its politics has translated directly into a miscalculation that will make national security even more difficult than it already is.
For decades NATO was the principal line of defense against the Soviet bloc, and it is not impossible to see how our recruiting former Russian vassal states into the organization would make a paranoid Russia concerned that we are an expansionist threat. Moving decisively in Afghanistan did not concern Moscow, but cleaning house in Iraq did. And publicly declaring support for a Georgian government that was clearly moving militarily against Russian-affiliated separatists handed Putin an excuse to do what the Kremlin has always done best: beat its neighbors into submission.
Flush with success in Georgia and rich with oil revenue, Russia's response to limp, empty and unenforceable demands from the United States is unlikely to be restraint. There are other secessionist groups in the region that would welcome Russia's assistance, and Putin has a hankering to teach Ukraine a lesson, too. And all the complaints we can heave at him will do little more than convince him that we are all hat and no cattle. The situation reminds one of a remark made by Stalin in May of 1935, when it was suggested that, to mollify the Pope, Stalin should stop repressing Russian Catholics.
"The Pope?" he was reported to have said. "How many divisions has he got?"
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Thanks. As much as an extremist as I am---and as we all tend to be on some subjects, especially as we get older---I find it useful to cut to basics, something we all learned as brand new soldiers.
