I’ve been hearing a lot lately about Vladimir Putin’s being behind the curve, history-wise. The reader who sent me that Ceylan Ozbudak article yesterday, for example, said in his email to me that “territorial gain is an atavistic idea”, as well as saying that “I really question how strong supposed ethnic/historical affiliations are at this point in history, at least in a place like Ukraine as opposed to tribal Africa”. (This is a liberal friend of exceptionally high intelligence, but with whom, as you might imagine, I have various disagreements when it comes to politics.)
Why, our own Secretary of State delivered himself of the opinion on Sunday that “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion”, and today our President uttered the words I’d been waiting for, the words that for every decent liberal are in any debate the ace of trumps, the unreturnable serve, and the capture of the Snitch: he told Mr. Putin that he was “on the wrong side of history”. (Tremble!)
The problem is, I rather doubt that Mr. Putin gives a rat’s ass about Mr. Obama’s concept of history, or about what lies on which side of it. He is, I think, aware instead that history is just what happens, and that what happens is more often the result of what powerful people do than what others may say. Was Alaric the Goth on the “wrong side of history”? Was Tamerlane, or Suleyman the Magnificent? I doubt you’d even have been able to make them understand the question.
History is not teleological. Utopians think it is. Vladimir Putin is no Utopian.
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In 1956, Russia invaded Hungary to crush a popular revolution. They did the same thing in Czechoslovakia in 1968. They later invaded Afghanistan and played a role in crushing the labor movement in Poland, while their proxies ruled East Germany and the other Soviet satellites as police states.
Fast forward to today. Mother Russia has gone from our primary geo-political foe to an etiolated shadow of its former self. It has long ago ceased being an existential threat, and is far less a concern than countries who actually do pose such threats, either from selling nuclear technology (Pakistan), having nukes under the control of a madman (North Korea), seeking nukes and having numerous proxies (Iran), groups which can use asymmetry and terrorism (radical Islam), or sheer economic might (China). Russia’s faltering economy is based on natural resources, and is levered to swings in commodity prices. Its government is a kleptocracy which is corrupt and inefficient. Hungary, Poland, and the former Czech Republic are all NATO members, along with eight other former Warsaw Pact nations.
Were Krushchev and Brezhnev on the wrong side of history? They certainly blew it: they turned a fearsome superpower into a paper tiger which is little more than a big army and a lot of oil. While there are a number of reasons why the Soviet Union imploded from its own weight in the 1980’s, its expansionist foreign policy and iron fist were primary causes. By failing to understand how the arc of history moves towards liberty and self-determination, and being unable to adapt to it, the old Soviet leaders ended up losers on the wrong side of history.
So, too, with Putin. It appears that he vastly overplayed his hand in the Ukraine, and is walking back after a sharp reaction from Obama, Merkel, and other Western leaders. Having already pissed away whatever goodwill he may have earned from the $60 billion he plunked into the Olympics, the strategic benefits from his sabre rattling are unclear. He is not going to annex the Ukraine, and he is unable to stop its constitutional government from calling new elections. Like his predecessors, his dreams of a greater Russia are being frustrated by the West, and he makes noise but ultimately does little more than facilitate its historical decline.
* * * *
The instant reaction from the right was predictable and predictably wrong. Putin was emboldened by Obama’s putative fecklessness, indecisiveness, and weakness. This would never have happened if Obama showed resolve. It’s just like the Sudetenland in 1938.
When Russia invaded Hungary and Czechoslovakia — a far more deadly and aggressive use of military power than anything we have seen since – we did little or nothing about it. Perhaps conservatives think that Eisenhower and LBJ were feckless, indecisive, and weak. However I doubt it.
George Bush showed resolve well past the point of recklessness, yet somehow Putin was also emboldened to effect similar military action in Georgia in 2008. Do you recall conservatives slamming Bush for weakness under nearly identical circumstances? I don’t.
After the ritual condemnation of Obama, there is no second sentence: we never hear what his critics would do differently. It’s easy to be a chest thumper when you’re not responsible for the consequences of your actions. Unless you think that a ground war with Russia over Ukraine is a desirable outcome, your options are limited to what Bush did in 2008 and what Obama is doing today: condemnation, sanctions, and diplomacy. The proper historical analogue is not Neville Chamberlain — it is Churchill, who famously said “to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”
* * * *
Perhaps the nuttiest criticism came from the reliably nutty Rudy Giuliani, who told Fox News that “”Putin decides what he wants to do, and he does it in half a day. Then everybody reacts. That’s what you call a leader. President Obama, he’s got to think about it. He’s got to go over it again. He’s got to talk to more people about it.”
Of course, that’s not what a leader does: it is what a dictator does (which, of course, is the first epithet conservatives would use if Obama committed troops within a few days’ time). Don’t tell Rudy that his love for impulsive action, and his dismissal of actually thinking about consequences before committing military force, led to unmitigated catastrophes by the previous President. His Putin envy tells you all you need to know regarding why conservatives, having formulated and effected the most disastrous foreign policy in American history when they held the levers of power during the Bush administration, ought not to get anywhere near them again.
I think you’re missing the point here, Peter, if you think I was arguing for U.S. military action in Ukraine. It, and Georgia, are well within Russia’s sphere of influence. (Russia has controlled Crimea, save for a few years, since Catherine the Great.) It’s crackers to think we should be meddling there; it’s nothing to do with our national interests.
Of course, if you actually think the current administration has distinguished itself as regards its conduct of foreign policy, you are in a small and rapidly shrinking minority, but that’s another matter.
No, I was only commenting on the temporal solipsism and ideological smugness that’s so plainly evident in all this “wrong side of history” business. Nations come and go; civilizations rise and fall; liberty shines, then gives way to tyranny, then chaos. Lather, rinse, repeat.
And: “feckless”? Naah. This guy fecks up everything.
LibertyBelle had this up t’other day:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/12/09/this-one-map-helps-explain-ukraines-protests/
Right, with supporting votes in the Senate from… hmmm… Reid, Schumer, Kerry, Biden…
Of course, some might say that Vietnam, which cost nine times as many U.S. lives as Iraq and Afghanistan combined, and achieved nothing, was a bigger mistake. But de gustibus, etc…
Vietnam… let’s see… can’t recall, quite, just who got us in so deep in that one.
By the way Peter, I was reading elsewhere when I came across this:
Back in June, a story leaked that the Chairman of the Joint Staff, General Dempsey, schooled Secretary Kerry on what it would take to strike Syria. Kerry wanted action, and Dempsey said it would take a massive air campaign to destroy Syrian defenses. As Elliot Abrams argued at the time, this was, in effect, a military veto on further action, and in other circumstances might have led to an Oval Office showdown:
…
For our Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to argue that it is simply too dangerous for us to do anything, anything at all, strikes me as shocking. This is not a policy argument, and one might conclude that despite our great capabilities we should not do what Kerry is said to have recommended (though I agree with Kerry). But that’s not what Dempsey did; he added to his policy argument a ridiculous military argument that should have been shot down with alacrity. In a better administration, the SecDef would have told him to knock off the policy arguments disguised as military advice, or the National Security Advisor would.
http://warontherocks.com/2014/03/intervention-in-syria-and-the-myth-of-the-exit-strategy/
Bear in mind Peter, I happen to disagree with this author and I disagree with what SecState Kerry reputedly wanted. However if true (Kerry being the officially accepted Obama mouthpiece) it would appear Obama was more “war-war” and it was a General for “jaw-jaw.”
Trying to evade culpability for the fiasco in Iraq because some Senate Democrats voted for the resolution is the silliest thing I have heard in a very long time. (And I thought that personal responsibility was a big thing for conservatives. I must have been misinformed.)
The call to war was entirely from the Bush administration. There were no progressives urging a military conflict in Iraq.
The case for war was based on half-truths and deceptions, and those who voted aye did so in the belief that Iraq had recently sought uranium from Niger, that the labs in Colin Powell’s UN speech had biological weapons, that Condi Rice’s talk of aluminum tubes had some basis in fact, and so forth. Blaming Democrats for voting for the war authorization because they had been lied to by the Bush administration is like blaming the hitter for striking out when the pitcher is throwing spitballs.
There has long been a principle in American politics that partisanship stops at the water’s edge, and consensus is far preferable to dissention. Hence there is a high bar to clear before voting against a President who calls the country to war, and a conscientious Congressman who had misgivings but wasn’t really sure would vote aye.
When it came to a vote, Democrats voted soundly against it (a combined 111-147 in both houses of Congress) while Republicans votes nearly unanimously for it (253-7).
It’s Bush’s war, plain and simple. Bush and Cheney argued for the war, deceived Congress and the nation to start it, and then bungled it. It was broadly and enthusiastically supported by conservatives everywhere, from National Review to Fox News to the Wall Street Journal to people such as yourself who voted twice for Bush against vastly superior candidates. Trying to dodge responsibility for grievous errors in judgment, while painting the current President as a Kiev chicken, is an absurdity too gross to be insisted upon.
* * * *
Vietnam was a horrible disaster. No doubt about it. Unlike Iraq, however, there were principled reasons to commit troops. The communist government of North Vietnam, with support from China, attempted to overrun the South Vietnam government. If one accepted the domino theory, in which Chinese expansionism would continue until all of Southeast Asia was under communist rule, then a military response to maintain the balance of power was a defensible position. There is no equivalence between maintaining a geopolitical status quo and invading a country in search of imaginary weapons.
While the death toll was far greater in Vietnam, this is largely due to the difference between a war which was largely fought on the ground and one which was largely fought from the air (as well as advances in the military’s ability to transport and heal soldiers who are wounded on the battlefield).
Cute how the commentator takes Republicans and Fox News as conservatives, when they’re basically liberals under another name.
Yawn.
I’m certainly not about to re-debate the case for going to war in Iraq, other than to say that there was obviously a principled case to be made for it based on the best international intelligence available at the time — and that it is a vile calumny to suggest that it was all based on ‘lies’ that tricked poor, deceived Kerry, Biden, et al. into offering their support. The real disaster in Iraq was not our using military force to remove a dangerous madman, but our stupid and futile exercise in nation-building.
So what? The point, since you brought up the notion of the “most disastrous foreign policy in American history”, is that the death toll in Vietnam was thirteen and a half times the toll in Iraq. That Vietnam was deadlier for explicable reasons certainly doesn’t make it any less of a disaster.
I’ll say also: it’s amazing how even Vietnam becomes a good war when a liberal baby-boomer Democrat needs to make the silly case that ‘conservatives’ should never be allowed near the ‘levers of power’.
Ah well, you needn’t worry: as JG points out, there’s hardly a conservative anywhere in sight in Washington these days. Just Democrats and Republicans.
Putin’s move makes perfect geopolitical sense – Sevastopol certainly ranks as a legitimate national security concern for Russia and due to the large component of ethnic Russians in Crimea, the Russians can lay claim to a vested interest in the region. Unlike our political class’s simplistic yammering about “democracy”, which compels our reporters, the punditry class and this administration to automatically side with protestors, far and wide, taking to the streets to demand “freedom”, perhaps the Russians have real intelligence agents in Ukraine monitoring events. They didn’t like what they saw. Some of these groups that took to the streets across Ukraine aren’t exactly Jeffersonian democrats (hint: their Freedom group for one) and the Russians gauged that their interests were threatened. Putin acted – heck, he won the whole shebang before John Kerry finished droning on, “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion”…. back to the future once again, lol. Putin is brilliant and I sure wish we had a leader with half his guts and determination to secure American interests around the world. Putin is the one with a vision. Weakness is provocative, so expect others to fill the void where America’s influence used to hold sway. No one believes Obama will do more than toss out hollow threats and recriminations. A week ago, the Obama administration announced the dismantling of the finest military in the world and Putin heard that message, loud and clear.
жопа? It would be more idiomatic to say хуй.
” By failing to understand how the arc of history moves towards liberty and self-determination, and being unable to adapt to it, the old Soviet leaders ended up losers on the wrong side of history.”
What is this nonsense, other than question-begging?
There is no “arc of history” except in your mind.
I defy you to empirically prove, or even to inductively reason such a ridiculous thing.
Furthermore, if history moves toward greater liberty and self-determination then that means that at some point history arrives at total anarchy.
That’s a desirable goal for humanity? To comport themselves like base animals?
I’d rather live under Sharia.
There is that. Moreover, he wouldn’t know a fact if it fact him in the жопа.
[BTW, peppermint, хуй means “dick” not “ass”.]
It is not “vile calumny” to state that the Bush administration lied about Iraq to goad the nation into war. It is historical fact. Bush, Cheney, and Rice said things which were demonstrably false, and known to be false at the time: otherwise known as lying.
The “best international intelligence at the time” was available from Hans Blix and his inspectors, who were on the ground in Iraq and correctly denied the existence of WMD.
The Vietnam war was not a “good war,” but it was a justifiable war. There is a huge difference between entering a conflict to prevent China from potentially annexing all of Southeast Asia and launching a pre-emptive war on the pretext of finding weapons which did not exist (and which, thanks to Blix’s 700 inspections, were known not to exist).
The death toll is irrelevant. By your logic, the Civil War (620K dead) and World War II (405K dead) overwhelmed the death toll from Vietnam and Iraq combined.
These are highly debatable, and angrily tendentious, assertions. I won’t argue them with you here; life is too short.
As for the rest: remember that what we are talking about was “foreign-policy disasters”. Vietnam was one. Iraq was another.
Was World War II a “foreign-policy disaster”? The Civil War, meanwhile, can hardly even be called, except in the most pedantic sense (and from the Southern perspective), a matter of foreign policy at all.
D’oh.
I know that the discussion has moved towards rehashing the relative level of disaster that the Iraqi War was but I’d like to offer a liberal perspective on the phrase “wrong side of history.” As someone that as a child often said the phrase and had a similar perspective of history, that it marched steadily towards progress, I now realize what a mistaken perspective that was.
There is no arc of history. There is no utopian end point that we are inevitably heading towards. History does not pick sides. Instead history is nothing but the story of causation that moves one way or the other depending on the actions of men. The perspective of “wrong side of history” is insidious for multiple reasons. It tricks the person who has such a perspective on history as thinking that they are always on the “right side of history.” Similar to communist of the past who assumed that history was inevitably marching towards a communist utopia, liberals seem to often interpret every event in the light that it will lead to a progressive future. This removes the motivation to actually fight for such a future.
The phrase adds nothing to any debate it is included in and has much more to say about the person saying the phrase than anything else. If you hear such a phrase, know that you are dealing with a supremely arrogant person who assumes that their position is so obviously right that the future will inevitably vindicate them. Malcolm and I agree on very little but on the uselessness of said phrase I couldn’t agree more.
While Obama wags his finger, Putin will continue to send boots to Crimea to push his strategic interests at the end of a gun.
Thank you, Strangelove. Very well said. Glad we agree about this.