Tuesday, May 06, 2014

PUTIN & WASHINGTON: A BATTLE OF VALUES

Jeffrey Gedman discusses Putin's goals and the West's failure to respond in an excellent column.  What caught my attention was his judgement that Washington doesn't know what to do. . .or maybe what even role America should play in these events. There seems to be a growing consensus that the US has "been outwitted."

But while Putin clearly knows what he wants, do we? History has taught us that in world affairs either a nation has an agenda or it becomes the victim of the agendas of others. The US has been preoccupied. Iraq, Afghanistan, the 2008 financial crisis, the Arab Spring, and the Asia pivot have all consumed our attention and resources. For nearly a decade and a half we’ve been missing in action from Central and Eastern Europe. Vladimir Putin has taken advantage of our absence. We’ve been outwitted.

Gedmin also gives some policy options to perhaps get Washington moving again, beginning with his call for a new "containment strategy."

Melik Kaylan also has a good column on Putin's "strategic conservatism."  He has goals bigger than Russia.

Yet as Pat Buchanan and others have noted, Putin’s Russia is back in the ideological hunt—offering an alternative set of ideas capable of competing internationally with those of the US. Americans are still in denial about it, for many reasons, perhaps the chief among them being that, Buchananites apart, US opinionmakers on both left and right have largely written off the kinds of people that Putin appeals to both in Russia and abroad. If the paleoconservative voice has been relatively marginalized in the US media, it has a huge equivalent constituency in most countries that take traditions seriously. As Buchanan goes on to say in his article, “the decisive struggle in the second half of the twentieth century was vertical, East vs. West,” but “the twenty-first century struggle may be horizontal, with conservatives and traditionalists in every country arrayed against the militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite.”

I first got wind of this new pan-Putinist ideology in Tbilisi, Georgia, while covering the national elections in the fall of 2012. Having reported from there during the Russian invasion of 2008 and after, I knew the population to be virulently anti-Moscow and largely pro-West. So I was astounded when the country elected an oligarch, Bidzina Ivanishvili, who had made his money in Moscow, who refused to criticize Putin, and who ran against a government headed by the volubly pro-American Mikheil Saakashvili. In the space of a few years, President Saakashvili had stamped out Georgia’s legendary corruption, driven out the mafias, notched up eight percent annual growth rates despite global banking failures and a Russian invasion, and had delivered efficiency, transparency, and foreign investment. Yet the other side won. I saw a most skillful, well-financed, pre-prepared opposition campaign with Moscow-based funds, one that deftly cooked up a prison abuse scandal with scary videos to smear the government. It convinced me that the KGB was rebooted, modernized, formidable, and once more able to redirect the destiny of its near abroad satellites as it had for years, even in democratic contests. Above all, I got a foretaste of the ideas Putin has expounded more openly and systematically since 2008.

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