David Warsh: 'The Putin Show' is scarier than you think

The confrontation with Russia is becoming more alarming. Kathrin Hille, reporting from Moscow for the Financial Times, describes how cellphone operators are offering free ringtones of patriotic war songs, intended to evoke the defense of Moscow in 1941.

"The government-led drive, named Hurray for Victory!, comes as Moscow enters the homestretch in an impassioned and increasingly shrill campaign to commemorate the end of the Second World War.''

Meanwhile, The New York Times, as part of the rollout of its redesigned magazine, commissioned Soviet-born Russian novelist Gary Shteyngart to hole up for seven days at the Four Seasons Hotel on 57^th Street in Manhattan with the main Russian television networks on three screens. In “‘Out of My Mouth Comes Unimpeachable Manly Truth:’ What I learned from watching a week of Russian TV ‘” Shteyngart concludes,

''When you watch the Putin Show, you live in a superpower. You are a rebel in Ukraine bravely leveling the once-state-of-the-art Donetsk airport with Russian-supplied weaponry. You are a Russian-speaking grandmother standing by her destroyed home in Lugansk shouting at the fascist Nazis, much as her mother probably did when the Germans invaded more than 70 years ago. You are a priest sprinkling blessings on a photogenic convoy of Russian humanitarian aid headed for the front line. To suffer and to survive: This must be the meaning of being Russian. It was in the past and will be forever. This is the fantasy being served up each night on Channel 1, on Rossiya 1, on NTV.''

And The Wall Street Journal has an essay by Andrew S. Weiss, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment, an aide in various capacities in the administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Weiss writes,

''[T]he Ukraine showdown is even scarier than you think: Mr. Putin is making it up as he goes along….  Almost single-handedly, [he] seems to be dragging much of the West into a New Cold War.  He’s winging it, and when things get difficult, he tends to double down.''

Weiss describes an “extreme personalization of power” following Putin’s return as president, in 2012. As the Ukraine crisis intensified in late 2013 and 2014, Putin narrowed his circle of advisers and placed them on a war-footing, valuing loyalty over worldliness.

Blindsided when events in Kiev spun out of control last February and Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych fled to Moscow, Weiss says, Putin had only himself to blame for having backed a leader who simply panicked when the going got tough.”  So, on the “spur-of-the-moment,” Putin annexed Crimea.

''Why on earth would Moscow want to take over a money pit like Crimea at a time of slowing economic growth and plunging oil prices?  On the fly, Kremlin propagandists came up with a mantra that they invoke to this day: the new authorities who replaced Mr. Yanukovych in Kiev were illegitimate because they had staged a coup d’état with Western backing,''

Putin followed his invasion – “the most audacious land-grab since World War II” – with a “sham popular referendum” and formal annexation. Then came more “damn-the-consequences, trial-and-error improvisation” to sow unrest in  southeastern Ukraine: seizures of government buildings by Russian-speaking separatists, led by Russian “facilitators.” And after the situation escalated to outright war, Putin sought a ceasefire, obtained it on advantageous terms, and then violated it with an unexpected surge of fighting around Donetsk and Lugansk.

''Mr. Putin’s highly personalized, profoundly erratic approach to government tmay be even more dangerous than most Western governments are comfortable admitting.  How can the Ukrainians or dogged western leaders such as {German Chancellor Angela} Merkel possibly search for a diplomatic solution if they are dealing with a leader who is making it all up on the fly?  … Kiev doesn’t know what Mr. Putin wants; even Mr. Putin doesn’t know what he wants.''

Notice anything funny about this narrative? Putin is always the impulsive actor, never the one who is acted upon.  He is never reacting to anything that NATO or the Americans do.

There is nothing here about NATO expansion. Nothing about the brief 2008 war with Georgia. Nothing about the continuing controversy about who fired the shots on Kiev’s  Maidan Square, nothing about the phone call by U.S.  Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, taped by the Russians at the height of the crisis; nothing about the Russian naval base at Sevastopol on the Black Sea.  Nothing about the sanctions imposed on the Russians since the crisis began. Nothing about the Ukrainian army offensives in the southeast. Nothing about the Ukrainian vote to join NATO that may have triggered the January offensive. Nothing to note that all this is happening on Russia’s doorstep.  Is it any wonder Putin is “doubling down”?

The scariest thing of all is that it may be Putin who has been telling the fundamental truth all along:  NATO expansion in Georgia Ukraine is unacceptable to him and Russia is willing to go to war to rule it out. He’s been improvising, all right, but often in response to probes – Ukrainian, European, U.S.  For a fuller argument along these lines, see Gordon Hahn’s illuminating commentary on ''The American Education of Vladimir Putin, ''by Clifford Gaddy and Fiona Hill, which appears in The Atlantic for February.

Meanwhile, a friend, who knows the territory well, writes,

''I think it was Napoleon who said your adversary gets a vote in all battles. Putin is a complex, dangerous, possibly paranoid man. We in the West act in ways consciously or unconsciously that can affect his actions. Could he still be winging it? At times, he could.  I agree with Weiss that Yanukovich surprised, possibly astounded, Putin when he caved. I also think the oil price collapse and ruble meltdown caught him completely unaware. His finance people were not prepared and he fired them. Same for many of his agricultural  folks. Was that winging it or just having to react to tough times? We in the US did not have to fire Bernanke to right the ship in 2009.  There seems to be a purge mentality in Putin that comes from “Soviet man.”

Whoever started it, Putin is now thoroughly buttoned-up in a defensive posture. What’s more dangerous than a Russian bear?  A wounded Russian bear.

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David Warsh, a long-time economic historian and business columnist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com.

David Warsh: The 'pie-giver' and the 'liberal' vs. 'realist' view of Russia

Perhaps the single most intriguing mystery of the Ukrainian crisis has to do with how the Foreign Service officer who served as deputy national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney for two years, starting on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, became the Obama administration’s point person on Russia in 2014. Victoria Nuland took office as assistant secretary of  state for European and Eurasian affairs a year ago this week.

It was Nuland who in February was secretly taped, probably by the Russians, saying “F--- the E.U.” for dragging its feet in supporting Ukrainian demonstrators seeking to displace its democratically elected pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, two months after he rejected a trade agreement with the European Union in favor of one with Russia. She made a well-publicized trip to pass out food in the rebels’ encampment on Kiev’s Maidan Square in the days before Yanukovych fled to Moscow.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin said the other day, “Our Western partners, with the support of fairly radically inclined and nationalist-leaning groups, carried out a coup d'état [in Ukraine]. No matter what anyone says, we all understand what happened. There are no fools among us. We all saw the symbolic pies handed out on the Maidan,” Nuland is the pie-giver he had in mind.

Before she was nominated to her current job, Nuland was State Department spokesperson under Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton during the congressional firestorm over the attack on the diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya.

So how did the Obama administration manage to get her confirmed – on a voice vote with no debate?  The short answer is that she was stoutly defended by New York Times columnist David Brooks and warmly endorsed by two prominent Republican senators, Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, and John McCain, of Arizona.

Clearly Nuland stands on one side of a major fault-line in the shifting, often-confusing tectonic plates of U.S. politics.

A good deal of light was shed on that divide by John Mearsheimer, of the University of Chicago, in an essay earlier this month in Foreign Affairs.  In “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,” Mearsheimer described the U.S.  ambitions to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit via expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as the taproot of the crisis.  Only after Yanukovych fled Ukraine did Putin move to annex the Crimean peninsula, with its longstanding Russian naval base.

Mearsheimer writes:

Putin’s actions should be easy to comprehend. A huge expanse of flat land that Napoleonic France, imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany all crossed to strike at Russia itself, Ukraine serves as a buffer state of enormous strategic importance to Russia. No Russian leader would tolerate a military alliance that was Moscow’s mortal enemy until recently moving into Ukraine. Nor would any Russian leader stand idly by while the West helped install a government there that was determined to integrate Ukraine into the West.

Washington may not like Moscow’s position, but it should understand the logic behind it. This is Geopolitics 101: great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory. After all, the United States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, much less on its borders. Imagine the outrage in Washington if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico in it. Logic aside, Russian leaders have told their Western counterparts on many occasions that they consider NATO expansion into Georgia and Ukraine unacceptable, along with any effort to turn those countries against Russia -- a message that the 2008 Russian-Georgian war also made crystal clear.

Why does official Washington think any different? (It’s not just the Obama administration, but much of Congress as well.)  Mearsheimer delineates a “liberal” view of geopolitics that emerged at the end of the Cold War, as opposed to a more traditional “realist” stance.  He writes,

As the Cold War came to a close, Soviet leaders preferred that U.S. forces remain in Europe and NATO stay intact, an arrangement they thought would keep a reunified Germany pacified. But they and their Russian successors did not want NATO to grow any larger and assumed that Western diplomats understood their concerns. The Clinton administration evidently thought otherwise, and in the mid-1990s, it began pushing for NATO to expand.

The first round of NATO expansion took place in 1999, and brought the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland into the treaty. A second round in 2004 incorporated Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.  None but the tiny Baltic Republics shared a border with Russia. But in 2008, in a meeting in Bucharest, the Bush administration proposed adding Georgia and Ukraine.  France and Germany demurred, but the communique in the end flatly declared, “These countries will become members of NATO.”  This time Putin issued a clear rejoinder – a five-day war in 2008 which short-circuited Georgia’s application (though Georgia apparently continues to hope).

The program of enlargement originated with key members of the Clinton  administration, according to Mearsheimer. He writes:

They believed that the end of the Cold War had fundamentally transformed international politics and that a new, post-national order had replaced the realist logic that used to govern Europe. The United States was not only the “indispensable nation,” as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it; it was also a benign hegemon and thus unlikely to be viewed as a threat in Moscow. The aim, in essence, was to make the entire continent look like Western Europe.

In contrast, the realists who opposed expansion did so in the belief that Russia had voluntarily joined the world trading system and was no longer much of a threat to European peace. A declining great power with an aging population and a one-dimensional economy did not, they felt, need to be contained.

 Mearsheimer writes:

And they feared that enlargement would only give Moscow an incentive to cause trouble in Eastern Europe. The U.S. diplomat George Kennan articulated this perspective in a 1998 interview, shortly after the U.S. Senate approved the first round of NATO expansion. “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies,” he said. “I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anyone else.”

 

Policies devised in one administration have a way of hardening into boilerplate when embraced by the next. So thoroughly have liberals come to dominate discourse about European security that even the short war with Georgia has done little to bring realists back into the conversation. The February ouster of Yanukovych is either cited as the will of a sovereign people yearning to be free or, more frequently, simply ignored altogether.

  Mearsheimer writes:

 

The liberal worldview is now accepted dogma among U.S. officials. In March, for example, President Barack Obama delivered a speech about Ukraine in which he talked repeatedly about “the ideals” that motivate Western policy and how those ideals “have often been threatened by an older, more traditional view of power.” Secretary of State John Kerry’s response to the Crimea crisis reflected this same perspective: “You just don’t in the twenty-first century behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped-up pretext.”

Nuland was present at the creation of the liberal view. She served for two years in the Moscow embassy, starting in 1991; by 1993 she was chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott. She directed a study on NATO enlargement for the Council on Foreign Relations in 1996, and spent three more years at State as deputy director for Former Soviet Union Affairs.

After a couple of years  of Nuland being on the beach at the Council on Foreign Relations, President George W. Bush named her deputy ambassador to NATO, in 2001. She returned to Brussels in the top job after her service to Cheney. When Obama was elected, she cooled her heels as special envoy to the Talks on Conventional Forces in Europe for two years until Clinton elevated her to spokesperson. Secretary of State John Kerry promoted her last year.

It seems fair to say that Putin has trumped Obama at every turn in the maneuvering over Ukraine – including last week, when the Russian president concluded a truce with the humbled Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko while leaders of the NATO nations fumed ineffectively at their biennial summit, this year in Wales. Never mind the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; China; Israel. Even in Europe, the president’s foreign policy is in tatters.

Backing away from the liberal view is clearly going to be costly for some future presidential aspirant. The alternative is to maintain the expensive fiction of a new Cold War.

David Warsh is a longtime financial journalist and economic historian. He is proprietor of economicprincipals.com.

The granny pod in the backyard

(Please comment via rwhitcomb51@gmail.com)

Real-estate trends say a lot about America’s wider economy and society — about citizens’ ambitions and insecurities and their evolving sense of place in our hurly-burly nation. So I read with great interest the Jan. 26 New York Times stories “The Gadfly of Greenwich Real Estate: Amid dozens of unsold mega-mansions, a real estate agent sees a glut of greed” and “Big Is Back (and Don’t Forget the Extras).”

The stories reminded me of how much more showy house ownership is now among the rich and near-rich than, say, 50 years ago. What mix of insecurity, exhibitionism, “irrational exuberance,” love of place, healthy confidence and speculation in all this? (Reminder: A real-estate boom caused the Crash of 2008.)

Billionaire Warren Buffett, by the way, lives in a modest house in Omaha.

But what really caught my eye was a Times story that ran back on May 1, 2012 headlined, “In the Backyard, Grandma’s New Apartment.” It’s about a mini-house called the MEDCottage — a prefab 12-by-24-foot, one-floor “bedroom-bathroom-kitchenette unit that can be set up as a free-standing structure.”

Given the aging of the population, we might be seeing far more of these dwellings than McMansions in the next couple of decades. They’re a fine idea, letting old people retain a sense of independence (albeit partly bogus) while not encumbering them with the duty of taking care of a “real” house.

But it’s doubtful that many residents of these tiny houses will build the powerful memories associated with childhood homes. For one thing, their ability to remember is fading.

Some of mine might be too, but my recollections of the house “I grew up in” on a hill near Massachusetts Bay remain powerful. The smell of the cedar closet, the dusty heat of the third floor in summer, the freezing drafts in the west-facing rooms in the winter, the troubling sound of glasses being clinked downstairs. My parents owned the house for about 20 years but because a young person’s sense of time passing is much slower than an adult’s — more of that below — it seems to me that I spent half my 66 years there. A childhood home has a powerful personality, creating a haunting and lifelong sense of place.

But now, jettisoning most of our stuff and moving into something like the MEDCottage has a growing attraction. I wonder if the buyers of our modest house would mind if we bought a corner of the (albeit small) backyard and put one of these tiny dwellings there to move into. We like the neighborhood.

***

The demonstrations in Ukraine against dictatorial and (with his family) kleptocratic President Viktor Yanukovych, pal and/or lackey of Russia’s quasi-fascist dictator Vladimir Putin, recall that given honest information, most people would choose to live in Western-style liberal democracies. While such potentates as Putin strive to ever expand their power and to quash their opposition, most Ukrainians look west for hope. The thuggery of a Putin or the Taliban can only suppress for a time people’s drive to live in the sort of society whose fullest expression is in nations dominated by Western ideals.

That’s because those ideals when implemented, however incompletely, address the deepest desires of people for dignity, for protection from arbitrary, larcenous and violent rule and for self- and civic improvement. The brute force of authoritarian regimes cannot work forever to block these desires.

Most Ukrainians want to be part of “Europe” (which really means Western and Central Europe) and not an autocratic empire — even one run by fellow Slavs.

***

We’ve had a tough winter in the Northeast so far this year. The jet stream has been screwed up, bringing us extended deep freezes, and Out West, including Alaska, record warmth.

When you’re a kid, snowstorm predictions bring joy; you don’t worry about going outside without a hat, nor about your dog not wearing a coat. (We thought that dogs were impervious to the extremes of nature.) But as you age, the inconveniences of snow and ice look more daunting; indeed, new snow can seem a layer of death. You feel the cold more and (rightly) anthropomorphize the dog’s feelings.

Still, as I wrote in my blog during last Saturday’s morning-long “January thaw,” how adults process time helps get them through winter. We know far better than the young how fast the seasons come and go. A happy reminder comes when you have the habit of walking the dog early in the morning and sometime in the middle of January you start to really notice it getting brighter earlier. Rejoice! Rejoice! However, with the caution and empathy of age, you make sure that you’re wearing a hat and the dog a coat.

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com and www.newenglanddiary.com) is a Providence-based writer and editor and a former editor of The Providence Journal's Commentary pages.