Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write.
Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975).
After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility.
From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University.
Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels.
Before entering my harsh words about of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s op-ed essay “I am proud of American diplomacy” published in the The New York Times on 29 December, I owe it to readers to acknowledge that from the moment Tillerson was nominated for the post, I was an enthusiastic supporter, seeing in him one of the very few candidates for high office placed before the Senate by Donald Trump who appeared to have the intellectual, psychological and experiential preparation to take office fully prepared for his mission.
Bearing in mind Donald Trump’s heavy emphasis on foreign policy during his campaign and his brave denunciation of the regime change and democracy promotion policies that had gotten the United States into a never-ending string of foreign military adventures from the mid 1990s, there was good reason to hope that Tillerson’s mission would be to change policy direction from the path of war to a path of accommodation with the world at large and to cut his department’s headcount in keeping with the more modest ambitions of the new foreign policy. Cutting personnel would have two elements: delayering those specialized units that had special responsibility for democracy promotion and humanitarian actions and winnowing out the ideological zealots who had infiltrated all of the State Department under the direction of Dick Cheney in the period following 9/11.
At the start of his confirmation hearings in the Senate, Rex Tillerson read from a prepared speech in which he made reference to the formative elements in his education, his later career in business and his charitable work with Boy Scouts of America. Foremost among these was the guiding principle of seeking the truth and following it wherever it would lead him. Against the background of a President renowned for contempt for facts, this seemed to be a powerful and very relevant plus in favor of the incoming Secretary of State.
For most of the past nine months, Tillerson’s work at State was in the shadows. He avoided the press. We heard only about his disputes with his boss in connection with what he felt was inappropriate meddling by Trump’s relatives and associates in selection of his subordinates. Then we heard Tillerson’s remark that Trump is a “moron” after they had a falling out in a cabinet meeting at which Trump reportedly asked what is the value of our nuclear arsenal if we never use it. We heard about large scale retirements of senior staff in policy making at State’s seventh floor, and about the dozens of unfilled ambassadorial posts. In sum, what we heard about Tillerson seemed to confirm that he was meeting our expectations from his swearing in.
However, from the very start we were perplexed at the sharp contradictions between what seemed to be the reasonable tone of Tillerson and the verbal excesses of our U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, who continued directly the anti-Russian invective that was the trademark of her predecessor under President Obama, Samantha Power. Then there were the contradictions between Tillerson’s initiatives, as for example, his suggestion of opening talks with North Korea without preconditions and the brutal dismissal of such notions by Trump. The result was a vision of the administration as uncoordinated, even chaotic.
To be sure, there were also worrying signs of inconsistencies within Tillerson’s own scope of action and speech that we preferred to ignore. The first jolt came in the context of Trump’s cruise missile attack on the Sheirat air base in Syria on 7 April. Within hours of the event, there was Tillerson repeating the entirely unproven allegation of a Syrian government chemical attack on civilians in Idlib province that cried out for such a riposte from America. There was Tillerson turning a deaf ear to Russian calls for a full and impartial investigation of the incident. One could conclude that Tillerson’s search for truth to guide policy had died early in his tenure.
Then in the autumn, we heard from Tillerson that the United States will never acknowledge Crimea as part of the Russian Federation, and that sanctions against Russia will stay in place so long as there is no full implementation of the Minsk Accords, which means forever.
Now, with his new essay in The New York Times, Rex Tillerson has shown us that there are no contradictions, that he has become a mouthpiece of Trump and of the aggressive, shall we say obnoxious America Firsters, who have been standing on the front of the stage ever since Trump took office. What seemed like impartiality at his swearing in was nothing more than an empty head, which has since taking office been steadily filled with the vicious prejudices of the staff he was supposed to turn around or dismiss.
Fine comb reading of the op-ed
From start to finish, Tillerson’s op-ed piece repeats allegations as facts, repeats and builds on outright lies fabricated in Washington, and makes false claims about the achievements of US foreign policy on his watch.
His opening claim that the United States State Department has made encouraging progress “in pushing for global peace and stability” would be laughable if it were not tragic, given the tensions that the country has stoked in Syria, in Ukraine, in North Korea by the intemperate language and deeds of his President and colleagues, now of Tillerson himself.
With respect to North Korea, the most dangerous issue currently facing U.S. foreign policy, Tillerson points to the success of his department in achieving imposition of ever tougher sanctions with the unanimous agreement of the UN Security Council. He ignores the military provocation posed by U.S. joint exercises and dispatch of a nuclear armed naval force to Korean waters, all of which arguably made the missile and nuclear tests of Pyongyang more brazen than ever.
Tillerson claims success in relations with China by defending U.S. interests against that country’s unfair trading practices and “troubling military activities in the South China Sea and elsewhere.” However, that is a totally empty boast.
Equally empty and still more offensive to an informed audience is his claim that by its delegation of authority to American military commanders in the field, the Trump administration has led its Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS to victory, having recaptured “virtually all of previously held Islamic State territory in Iraq and Syria.” Not a word here about the Russians and their vastly more effective leadership within the Syrian military theater acting together with the army of Bashar Assad, the Iranians and Hezbollah, in cooperation with Iraq and Turkey. To add insult to injury, Tillerson claims that his diplomats “were following up with humanitarian aid and assistance.” This is a claim without any demonstrated substance, whereas the Russian assistance in food, mine-clearing and restarting infrastructure is shown daily on television.
Tillerson’s remarks about Russia make one wonder aloud where are his brains. He says “we have no illusions about the regime we are dealing with.” This is a page straight out of Samantha Power’s playbook. What follows is the familiar Washington litany. Russia is “resurgent,” it has “invaded its neighbors Georgia and Ukraine.” For good measure, Russia has “undermined the sovereignty of Western nations,” a reference to “meddling in our election and others.” And once again, “there cannot be business as usual with Russia” till the Minsk agreements are strictly adhered to.
As for Syria, Tillerson has flip-flopped to where we were before he ever took office: the Geneva talks on the country’s future must “produce a Syria that is free of Bashar al-Assad and his family.” In the context of the Sochi talks soon to begin under patronage of Iran, Turkey and Russia at which all minorities and stakeholders in the future Syrian constitution are represented, Tillerson’s remarks are absurd.
Tillerson also puts the full weight of his office behind the Iran-bashing policies of his boss. He is busy building alliances in the region against Iran and planning to “punish Iran for its violations of…commitments.”
Finally, the Secretary of State mentions the restructuring of his department which he has overseen this past year. The objective, he tells us is “streamlining our human resources and information technology systems…., better aligning personnel and resources with America’s strategic priorities.” To anyone with an ear attuned to corporate double-talk, this utterly false description of the HR wreckage in his department will sound very familiar.
The only consolation in the entire op-ed is Tillerson’s optimism “about the power of diplomacy to resolve conflicts and advance American interests.” What grounds he has for such optimism in the context of the deceipt and lies that riddle his presentation are a mystery to me.
How could this be? Tillerson does not need the State Department post to cap his career, which already had so many laurels from his chairmanship of Exxon. No, something else is operative, and I venture it is the same as what explains the inconsistent and frequently changing policy positions of his boss: namely that in his own way, Tillerson is also a “moron.”
Let me be very explicit here. IQ is not the issue. There are very few folks who will perform poorly on intelligence tests among Trump and his administration. But stupidity is as stupidity does. And the reason for the commonality, say, between Trump and Tillerson, is that both have come to office with empty heads. Devoid of the facts and education essential to independently and competently make sense of their surroundings and of all incoming data so as to formulate and implement appropriate strategies.
This conclusion may be counter-intuitive when we are speaking of captains of industry. However, I am not speculating, I am speaking from my personal experience working for and with Vice Presidents, International and other members of the board of major US, UK and Canadian multinational corporations.
I have rubbed shoulders with my share of highly paid and widely respected business leaders, who left me astonished at their low intellectual merits, disregard for factual briefings prepared by their assistants and reliance on “gut instinct” to take major decisions on investments, joint ventures and other business initiatives. How then do you explain the undisputed success of American big business in terms of profitability, investor confidence and entrepreneurial dynamism?
The answer is simple: brute force. Market dominance allows the number one, maybe also the number two player in any given market to absorb very big losses from bad business decisions, recoup the losses from the revenue flow of their main clientele, and tweak the failing initiatives until they pay off, which they often will, again due to market dominance.
These are the lessons which Messrs. Trump and Tillerson and others in the Trump Administration have brought with them to high office. It is what feeds the animal spirits of America First. It is behind the Realist School thinking of the new National Security Strategy which Trump rolled out in December. Put in simpler language: under Trump U.S. foreign policy comes down to “might makes right.” Forget facts. Forget all the claptrap about human rights and democracy promotion. We stand for “might makes right.” That, and a good dose of raw selfishness.
Here Trump, the real estate developer and Tillerson, the boss of the country’s largest oil company are indistinguishable.
None of this makes for “Soft Power.” And it is no surprise that the concept of ‘soft power’ is OUT in this administration. It is the new passé.
It is unclear whether the “might makes right” foreign policy will be more or less prone to armed aggression abroad than was Humanitarian Interventionism or Neocon prodding of History’s eventual course towards global and universal democracy. But it is clear that the new transparency in US foreign policy will upset a great many allies, for whom there is no longer a fig leaf to justify knee-jerk agreement with every demand coming from Washington. That was perfectly clear in yesterday’s statements by EU chief diplomat Frederica Mogherini during her visit to Cuba that the EU will ignore what Washington says and continue its policy of no-sanctions and growing rapprochement with Havana in pursuit of Europe’s commercial interests. We saw the same in the recent UN General Assembly vote on the resolution against Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, when the United States found itself isolated, abandoned by nearly all friends, allies and vassals. The “i” was dotted by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during his press conference yesterday with Emmanuel Macron. With reference to the UN General Assembly vote, Erdogan explained that while some countries may believe that “might makes right,” they are sadly mistaken. It is the other way around, he insisted. Only the truly hard of hearing in Washington will miss this cue.
In this holiday vacation period between Christmas and New Year’s, a time when we tend to put the cares of daily life aside, the Financial Times has published an interview with Herman Gref, chairman of Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, that contains a clear warning of dire developments in the New Year should the United States push its economic sanctions to the limit, as may well occur given other very troubling items in the news with respect to Ukraine. See https://www.ft.com/content/9c25c852-e400-11e7-97e2-916d4fbac0da
It bears mention that Herman Gref is a highly intelligent, capable and widely respected Russian statesman and business leader. He is a key exponent of Liberal economics and democratization of state governance within Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. Gref is by nature reserved, not at all an alarmist.
The detonator of dire developments to which he alluded is the threat by some politicians on Capitol Hill to extend the economic sanctions against Russia to a cut-off of access to SWIFT, which is a vital component of the global infrastructure for interbank settlements. This threat has been in the air ever since the initial imposition of sanctions on Russia in 2014 following its annexation of the Crimea and intervention in the Ukrainian insurgency of Donbas.
Said Gref, termination of access to SWIFT would elicit Russian strong countermeasures against the United States. Whereas till now only Europe has paid a price for the sanctions and the United States got off scot free, in any new Russian response the United States will feel the pain. The result would be a confrontation that would “make the Cold War look like child’s play.”
This warning comes in the wake of very troubling signs that the Ukrainian conflict, which is the cause or pretext for U.S.-led sanctions against Russia, is spinning out of control. Russian television reportage in recent weeks speaks of a major intensification of shelling by Ukrainian forces directed against civilians in Donetsk and Lugansk provinces, reaching a level not seen for more than a year. Russia is in the meantime withdrawing its officers-observers from the Donbas, and this is remarked with alarm by Poland and other countries participating in the OSCE force. They believe Russian withdrawal jeopardizes the security of their personnel on the ground in the region. It also may be a prelude to larger Russian intervention in the conflict. And also in the meantime, the United States and Canada have authorized the shipment of lethal weapons to Ukraine, which crosses the “red lines” that Russia spelled out clearly.
The new and provocative military support by the United States for the regime in Kiev may well be part of a greater plan by the Deep State in Washington to completely neutralize the foreign policy initiatives of Donald Trump in favor of accommodation with Moscow. If there is an escalation of fighting in the southeast of Ukraine and Russia steps up its assistance to the insurgents, the arguments will be in place to implement the most drastic economic measures against Russia and expel it from the global financial system, leading to the scenario cited by Gref.
For those who are not familiar with the details of world banking, SWIFT is a private company based in Brussels, Belgium. Any order to deny Russia access to its infrastructure would have to come from the federal Belgian government, which is otherwise very busy these days planning the visit to Moscow at the end of January by Prime Minister Charles Michel.
In a speech last week to the 130 plus ambassadors from Belgium posted around the world, Prime Minister Michel called for a new and broader dialogue with Russia even as we have differences over Ukraine and other issues and even as sanctions remain in place. His mission to Moscow will surely have on the agenda the ongoing construction of an LNG terminal at the Flemish port of Zeebrugge implementing agreements between the Russian gas exporter Novatek and the Belgian gas distributor Fluxys. This enormous project would position Belgium as a major hub for distribution of Liquefied Natural Gas coming from the newly operational Russian field in Yamal, north of Siberia, a hub having pan-European importance. It would also position Belgium as a major competitor to Poland, which not long ago opened its own LNG terminal to receive American shale gas, also with aspirations to achieve pan-European scale.
Any US-led intensification of sanctions against Russia, and in particular any cut-off of Russia’s access to SWIFT will necessarily kill the Belgian gas project and cause grave harm to the local economy in Flanders. In this connection, it has to be stated that the power behind the coalition government of Mr. Michel is precisely the Flemish nationalist NV-A party. All of this means that here in Belgium a constitutional crisis would likely follow.
For all of these reasons, 2018 will be a year for vigilance and attention to detail in a world that is very troubled and moving towards disorder.
It is a rare event that Foreign Affairs magazine turns over 14 pages of its “prime real estate” to a politician for a fiercely partisan programmatic statement. But that is precisely what has happened in the January-February 2018 print edition with publication of Joe Biden’s co-authored article entitled “How to Stand Up to the Kremlin. Defending Democracy Against its Enemies.”
As we know, Biden held back and did not challenge Hillary in the 2016 primaries for personal reasons relating to the recent death of his son. But as we also know, the chair of the Democratic National Committee was nonetheless considering tapping Biden to take over the party’s nomination in case Clinton crashed and burned amidst investigations into her email scandals and other alleged wrongdoing.
Biden was Mr. Clean. Now he is considered by some as the frontrunner among senior Democratic leaders for the 2020 presidential race. Almost the only mark against him is his advanced age. Thus, it should come as no surprise that he claimed and received the FA real estate.
What he has done with it is in a way instructive. By this awful confection of lies and inventions, Joe Biden provides a valuable reminder of the disaster we narrowly averted by not electing Hillary Clinton on November 8, 2016.
In this essay, Biden has taken the whole Clinton fantasy of “we wuz robbed” to explain away her electoral loss and her scapegoating the Russians, has made it his own and is using it as a platform to gain support and visibility among the Democratic party faithful.
While repeating several times in this article the soothing words that we must remain in dialogue with the Russians whatever our differences to avoid misunderstandings that could lead to war, he paints the Kremlin as a cesspool of corruption, organized crime, kleptocracy, authoritarianism. The country and its president are plain evil, intent on damaging Western democracies and raising international tensions by aggressive behavior so as to keep their own populace down and thereby consolidate their fragile hold on power.
I will not attempt to rebut Biden’s cocksure but deeply ignorant statements about how Russia is despicable and, as the title tells us, an “enemy.” Every sentence is an unsupported allegation that is used by Biden as a building brick in an edifice that is self-reinforcing but has no reality outside his say-so.
During his eight years as Barack Obama’s Vice President and handler, Biden traveled widely as emissary of the imperial presidency. He was particularly active on the borderlands of Russia. When he was not advising one or another local president or prime minister to step down so as to make way for Washington’s latest favored son, he was encouraging illusions of American hard power support for anti-Russian actions including accession to NATO. In this way he personally contributed greatly to the confrontation we now have with Moscow. But about this past we read nothing in his essay. One might imagine reading Biden that the evil and aggressive Putin regime arrived in power fully-grown.
Biden likes to talk about his own education, about the university education and professional choices of his children. He enjoys speaking on campus and likes to claim that he has a special affinity for college students and they for him. This is the context in which I heard him this past May, when he was the choice of the graduating class of Harvard to be their Speaker, whereas Mark Zuckerberg, who spoke the next day, had been the choice of the university administration. And yet, there is in Biden’s article sound reason to believe that he despises the principles of free intellectual enquiry that constitute the foundation of education.
A lengthy section of his article in FA deals with alleged Russian subversion of American democracy through use of disinformation, through illicit campaign financing and lobbying, through corrupt practices financed by money laundering, through abuse of the social networks, through cyber crime. Where there is subversion, there are dupes and agents. This is the set-up for McCarthyism that the Democratic Party is presently instrumentalizing for its partisan purposes while, by that very act, attacking the democracy and freedom of speech it says it is defending.
Those who believe that Donald Trump is witless, a “moron” to quote Rex Tillerson, were proven wrong on December 18 when the President released his National Security Strategy (NSS). Those who believe that the Deep State operates entirely on its own, without taking any cues from incoming presidents were also proven wrong.
Going through this 68 page document issued in keeping with tradition by each administration at regular intervals, I find very important changes in language from where official America has been operating these past 25 years suggesting that, after all, Henry Kissinger has made a come-back and may well be this president’s mentor on international affairs, as seemed to be the case during the electoral campaign and into the first months following his inauguration, before the removal of Flynn and the running aground of Trump’s foreign policy initiative in March.
In saying that, I am speaking not about the Henry Kissinger who was the implementer of Nixon’s détente with Russia or of Nixon’s great rapprochement with China that led to an informal partnership in managing world affairs of mutual interest. Nor am I speaking about Kissinger Unbound: the strident exponent of Realism and critic of Idealism who authored the master work Diplomacy in 1994, when there was still no road map to post-Cold War American foreign policy and he hoped pragmatism would finally prevail over ideology, when he hoped that he would return to a position of influence from the decades in the wilderness that began with the Reagan presidency and Neocon ascendancy.
What we have here is the contrite Kissinger who made his peace with the unavoidable political prejudices of our day and made certain that every appeal to national interest was accompanied by due genuflection before the altar of national values, Kissinger, the author of World Order (2015).
We are told the following at the very first page of the Introduction: “[This] is a strategy of principled realism that is guided by outcomes, not ideology.”
Kissinger’s concepts as leading exponent of the Realist School of International Relations permeate the document. We find here mention of “balance of powers,” a key Realist School term. In the NSS, it is used in matter-of-fact manner, whereas the notion had in the first Obama administration been condemned by Joe Biden, by Hillary Clinton as “passé,” as so very 19th century, an antiquarian object that is inadmissible in our modern age. We were told by our Liberal Interventionists that we are now living in the age of “smart power,” the latest version of “soft power” invented by Harvard professor and Democratic Party thinker Joseph Nye.
In the NSS, there is the notion that states have always been in competitive relationships, are so today and will be so far into the future: the challenge is to position oneself to win in the competition.
By the same token, the given text is devoid of all the Cold War vintage legalistic argumentation against Russia or China that Kissinger found so galling and denounced in his memoirs. The Dulles brothers’ thinking was still going strong under Bush and Obama. But lawyer statesmen are well and truly buried in Trump’s NSS. There is not a word about our competitors violating international law, only about their going against our interests in pursuit of their own interests.
Equally telling, there is not a word in the NSS document about malicious foreign leaders and their evil regimes. The personalization of politics, the denigration of foreign presidents and prime ministers that has characterized most official American pronouncements on international affairs these past 25 years and prepared the ground for open and covert attempts at regime change – all of that is absent. This is entirely in keeping with the overarching concept of Realism, namely that national interest is in the DNA of nations and not merely the whim of whoever has come to power.
Moreover, when you characterize leaders of other states as evil, when you call Vladimir Putin a “Hitler,” as Hillary Clinton did a number of times during her campaign speeches, then you close the door on negotiations and have entered the antechamber of WWIII.
What we see in the NSS is prioritization and true strategic vision as opposed to ideological cant and ad hoc responses to global developments, or, as one might have expected from Trump, given his reputation for a disorganized mind, some grab-bag of issues to be pursued, starting with the hot ones in his tweets, Iran and North Korea. No, the stress in the NSS is on competition with two great powers, China and Russia, both described as revisionist, meaning that they want to re-claim their positions of influence at the world’s board of governors at the expense of the sole surviving superpower, the United States.
This is in itself a wholly new appreciation. With respect to Russia, for example, Obama had foolishly told us it was just a “regional power.” Putin replied with amused irony: which region? But the point was lost on Washington. Now we find that the United States is engaged in a hot competition with both China and Russia in virtually every corner of the globe.
Fact versus Fake
Over the past 18 months there has been a lot of talk in public space about “fake news” and about lies coming from high places. The former has been the repeated message of Trump in his attacks on CNN, the BBC and other mainstream media. The latter has been the push-back from the media and political opposition to Trump. By way of example, to this day a regular feature item in The Washington Post is a fact check on whatever Trump says, or Pinocchio index.
The refreshing thing about the NSS is that it is fact oriented. This is in keeping with the tenets of the Realist School of International Relations.
Russia is very correctly identified as a military threat, first and foremost.
“Russia is investing in new military capabilities, including nuclear systems that remain the most significant existential threat to the United States…”
To be sure, the NSS also carries the fake news accusations against Russia for political destabilization of democracies through information and cyber war. This is part of a shared authorship issue which I will mention in a moment.
China is identified in the NSS as a growing military power with great potential:
“It is building the most capable and well-funded military in the world, after our own. Its nuclear arsenal is growing and diversifying.”
But otherwise China’s threat to United States interests is shown primarily in terms of economic aggrandizement and unfair trading practices that do harm to the United States economy. The Chinese economic expansion is noted in all continents.
The competitive pressure from both China and Russia taken together present a formidable challenge, which is described in almost but not quite value neutral terms:
“…after being dismissed as a phenomenon of an earlier century, great power competition returned. China and Russia began to reassert their influence regionally and globally. Today, they are fielding military capabilities designed to deny America access in times of crisis and to contest our ability to operate freely in critical commercial zones during peacetime. In short, they are contesting our geopolitical advantages and trying to change the international order in their favor.”
I would qualify that generalization as correct, and I commend its neutral tone. Similarly Kissingerian is the description of what our yellow press likes to call “hybrid warfare.” In the NSS that is defined as “operating below the threshold of open military conflict and at the edges of international law.” Note: “at the edges” not in violation of international law. Note, too, the follow-on criticism of American policy-makers for having a hard time walking and chewing gum at the same time:
“China, Russia and other state and non-state actors recognize that the United States often views the world in binary terms, with states being either “at peace” or “at war,” when it is actually an arena of continuous competition.”
This remark comes straight from the Master. So, too, is the call for sophistication in pursuing the overarching strategy in regional contexts:
“The United States must tailor our approaches to different regions of the world to protect U.S. national interests. We require integrated regional strategies that appreciate the nature and magnitude of threats, the intensity of competitions, and the promise of available opportunities, all in the context of local political, economic, social, and historical realities.”
Those realities can be appreciated only if the relevant area studies are sustained, which ceased to be the case in the United States years ago, when universal values hijacked foreign policy and regional differences were dismissed by the political bosses.
As for any contradictions in the text, we must remember that Trump is surrounded by officials who are carriers of the world view and prejudices of the preceding 25 years. Partly they are the holdovers whom he could not fire lest the bureaucracy be totally depopulated. Partly they are his own appointees as he sought to fill posts the easy way, without confronting the Senate on each and every appointee. We know that one officer in his National Security Council was responsible for the NSS text, and not all that she wrote was red-penciled. However, the dominant lines of the NSS were clearly written by others, who are close to Trump, and presumably close to his mentor Kissinger. So there are unavoidable wrinkles.
Values
The following pearl says in eloquent, Kissingerian terms what Donald Trump has been saying in his more tongue-tied way ever since he entered the presidential race:
“We are…realistic and understand that the American way of life cannot be imposed upon others, nor is it the inevitable culmination of progress.”
The NSS tells us that the United States will stand by the values of its Founding Fathers, will seek to be a beacon of light and hope to the world on behalf of democracy, the initiative and enterprise of citizens and rule of law, but it will not impose its ways on others. This is what Trump said on the campaign trail, but here the notion is given more specific form.
The Neoconservative-Liberal Interventionist claptrap that has had a monopoly position in all International Relations literature and US government documents for the past 25 years is stripped away. The theses of our post-Cold War secular religion, and in particular the conviction that only democratic countries can live in peace, are almost entirely absent from the NSS. The metrics of democracy promotion have been removed. What remains is the feeble statement that authoritarian countries, countries that do not allow women to participate equally for example, deprive themselves of major sources of economic strength and well-being.
This is not a small matter. To be sure, over the past 25 years the Neoconservative-Liberal Interventionist claptrap has been wrapped around a core of Realism that promoted not only U.S. ideological preferences but also U.S. hard power and economic interests. But the claptrap was dangerous because the democratic and free market values, claimed to be universal values, were by definition not amenable to compromise. They were seen as the “End of History,” the ultimate berth of the ship of humankind. This justified the demotion of diplomacy to a weak supportive role for military policy.
Put in other words, a foreign policy based on universal values can only lead to war. However, when the driving force of foreign policy is precisely national interest, then diplomacy has a chance to thrive. By definition, national interest is subject to compromise based on unsentimental calculation of power equations.
Words count
Analysis of the NSS requires that we pay attention not only to concepts but to vocabulary. The key words in the NSS is “competitor” or “rival,” although we also find in the text the substitute word “adversary.” “Competitor” is the word applied repeatedly to China and Russia. It is perfect for the purposes of Realist School foreign policy, precisely because it is descriptive, not judgmental, and not emotional. The text reads: “Competition does not always mean hostility, nor does it inevitably lead to conflict…”
The word “adversary,” also found in the text, is more troubling, because it is seen by some as a synonym for “enemy,” which in turn has within it the semantic load of “hostile.” These terms are emotive, not descriptive and are not far removed from the “axis of evil” thinking brought into public space by Ronald Reagan and picked up and propagated by George W. Bush. Happily, in the National Security Strategy “adversary” is not spelled out, not applied to specific countries.
Unredacted mention of “authoritarian regimes” appears in the NSS here and there. but this donkey tail is also not pinned on specific targets. The term stands in contradiction with the Realist School’s indifference to the nature of regimes and sensitivity only to raw power. This betrays the obvious fact that this new Security doctrine is the work of at least two agencies: the National Security Council and unnamed individuals in the circle of the President who had the final say on the text. Trump could not dispense with staff whom law and custom oblige him to retain but he could overrule them, resulting in the contradictions that appear in many places in this document.
Words and Deeds
As I have indicated in the foregoing, the thinking underpinning policy has changed dramatically in this new Security doctrine compared to the thinking highlighted by the presidential administrations of the past 20 years or so. However, when we look at the recommendations for implementation, at the priorities, it is also clear that there will be no big changes in day to day US policy because, as I noted, the thinking behind US policy has always had both Realist and Idealist components to it. The question is the balance between the two and which is on the surface.
For example, with regard to sanctions directed against Russia and the U.S. attempts to isolate and penalize the country especially since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, it is clear from this new doctrine that the sanctions may remain in place in perpetuity. Not because of any violation of international law, as U.S. diplomacy has maintained loudly in every imaginable forum. But simply because the United States reserves the right to apply these tools against every power which works against its interests, and in particular “to ensure that regions of the world are not dominated by one power.” This matter-of-fact declaration violates directly the entire logic of the WTO and free trade. But the notion of preventing the formation of local hegemons, whether Russia in its “near abroad” or China in Southeast Asia, has always been a principle of U.S. policy, though rarely in the past 25 years has it been stated so baldly.
The change in justification from violator of human rights or of the territorial integrity of sovereign states to “acting against US interests” is of very great importance. This removes all justification for other countries to apply sanctions against whomever the United States is punishing except as their own interests are also threatened by the offender. In the case of the European Union and Russia, national interests speak to the opposite policy – namely for full normalization of relations with Russia.
It is also worth noting that the NSS makes clear that the US policy of fighting Russian energy dominance in Europe going back to the second term of Bill Clinton will continue unabated. But whereas until Trump that card was played by seeking to stymie Russia’s paths to market via gas pipelines, and to bring in gas from Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and other non-Russian sources via pipelines that do not cross Russian territory, the new game is to promote America’s own shale gas to displace Russia in its traditional markets.
“As a growing supplier of energy resources, technologies and services around the world, the United States will help our allies and partners become more resilient against those that use energy to coerce” – sums up this policy neatly.
Diplomacy
Without any question, expanding and upgrading U.S. military forces is seen by the authors of the NSS as one of the key tasks to ensure American security, alongside growing the domestic economy so as to support this burden. However, the NSS makes an intelligent, almost impassioned argument in favor of “competitive diplomacy.” And even the platitudes set down here have potential value if they will be implemented with any consistency:
“Diplomacy sustains dialogue and fosters areas of cooperation with competitors. It reduces the risk of costly miscommunication.”
Indeed, at a time when lines of communication with Russia built over decades have been severed unilaterally as “punishment” for its alleged transgressions, this is a powerful argument for a re-think in Congress and at Foggy Bottom.
Nonetheless, it bears mention that the NSS speaks of negotiations being carried on “from a position of strength.” That phrase also is a long-standing entry in the Kissingerian inventory of concepts.
How has the NSS been seen by commentators inside and outside the United States
Given the contradictory elements in this National Security Strategy, given the obvious contradictions between the many high-minded declarations of principle it contains and the actual words and deeds of the sitting President over the past year, it should come as no surprise that observers within and outside the United States have interpreted the document variously. I will comment on just three of them here.
The Wall Street Journal was cautiously sympathetic to the key role given to economic and trade policies in the new national security strategy. The paper gave a factual account of highlights in the document, starting with its focus on the challenges presented by China and Russia. It attributes oversight of the project to Trump’s national security adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster and one of his deputies, Nadia Schadlow, whose writings are reflective of the Washington Consensus thinking of the Department of Defense and private research institutions in which she served before joining the NSC. Who may have actually written the NSS text is a matter about which they do not speculate.
The anti-Trump liberal journal of commentary The Atlantic takes a less generous direction in “Trump’s National Security Strategy is Decidely Non-Trumpian.” They conclude that the plan “highlights the wide gulf between what the president says and what he does.” However, that view comes from the attention they direct to the values passages in the NSS such as “The United States rejects bigotry, ignorance, and oppression…etc.” They insist on Trump’s violation of the principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights, cited in the NSS, by his travel ban and “targeting of Muslim-majority countries.” This is a fair line of attack, but one which has little relevance to the main contours of the security doctrine as I have delineated them.
The Washington Post calls attention to the hard line on China which, they say, is mentioned 23 times in the doctrine
In Russia, the new NSS immediately became a lively subject for discussion on the political talk shows, where it was generally viewed with ironic bemusement. For its part, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a negative commentary, noting that the document’s idea of negotiating “from a position of strength” is a policy line that is not conducive to “constructive partnership on an equal basis for the joint solution of existing problems, but to confrontation.” They go on to say that the United States is “trying to preserve the noticeably weakened American domination in the international arena at any price.”
This official Russian appraisal chooses to overlook Kissinger’s long association with the offending phrase. After all, Kissinger is treated with high respect by the Kremlin to this day. But more generally, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs ignores the obvious switch in principles guiding U.S. policy from Idealism to Realism, although Russia itself builds its foreign policy primarily on the principles of the Realist School and should be pleased by what now will be a level playing field. I would therefore characterize the Kremlin’s reaction as mere posturing that will change quickly as opportunities to enter into talks with Washington materialize.
Kissinger for better or worse
Surely some readers of this essay will express dismay that I put a positive value on Kissinger’s having influenced Trump’s security doctrine. Among many sincere, educated, right-thinking Americans, there is the belief that Henry Kissinger is a war criminal. His role in conducting the Vietnam War, and in particular events like the ferocious Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972 and the spread of the war into Laos and Cambodia still earlier are not forgotten or forgiven by his detractors to this day.
It is also true that Henry Kissinger has spent the second half of his long life making amends for the misdeeds of the first half. And in the present day environment, it is reassuring that we have at the side of Donald Trump not only generals known by their sobriquet “Mad Dog” but also a civilian expert with deep experience in statecraft and appreciation of how far you can go in applying pressure to the likes of Russia or China before all hell breaks loose.
BOOK PRESENTATION: DOES THE UNITED STATES HAVE A FUTURE?
by Gilbert Doctorow. Ph.D.
I am going to deliver a talk that will come in at 30 minutes in which I address in greater detail than you will find in the book the connection between the title question and the content of the book. To be more specific, I will explain why a book about the United States failing on the world stage deals so largely with what is happening in Russia.
This is not an overview of the book. It is essentially a new chapter of the book. For those of you who want a quick listing of the merits and highlights of the book, I refer you to the thorough review by Alexander Mercouris that appeared on November 19th on the portal of The Duran. This was republished the next day on Johnson’s Russia List, the digest of writings about Russia that is hosted by George Washington University and is received daily by all US university centers and think tanks interested in Russian matters.
When I began preparation of this book six months ago, I never imagined the title and overriding concept would be so timely as it is today. Each new issue of The New York Times or The Washington Post provides additional material for the case. Each new revelation about “groping” or other sexual misconduct by US Congressmen reveals the Nation’s Capital as a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah. But that is today. The evidence has been piling up for at least as far back as the essays in this new book were being written.
In particular, the questioning of America’s future has become a mainstream issue ever since the election of Donald Trump.
The movement to obstruct and take down Trump began immediately. Open and public attacks not just on his policies but on his intellectual faculties and mental balance have appeared in our mainstream press every day. A beleaguered President is lashing out in all directions. We see chaos in policy formation. Executive staff contradicts one another and contradicts the President on a nearly daily basis. The President himself is flip-flopping on policy. He is issuing alarming tweets.
Some well considered observers have drawn dire conclusions from all of this. I think of David Rothkopf writing in Foreign Policy magazine on 10 May 2017. The title of his article: “Is America a Failing State?”
The author was for five years chief editor of what is a respected International Relations journal. He believes that the United States is well on its way to becoming a banana republic. And for this he blames Trump and his cronies in high federal offices. They are a threat to national security, a disgrace on the world stage. The cronies are feathering their nests at the expense of the broad public, while the Commander in Chief shows open admiration for thugs and authoritarians around the world and disparages his federal employees, mocks the Constitution.
In continuation of the same idea, an Op Ed essay by E.J. Dionne, Jr. in the Washington Post on November 30 was given the title “Our political foundation is rotting away.” Dionne concludes: “The longer this president is in power, the weaker our country will become.”
However, the gloom over the future of the US also appears in other, still more moderate and respected establishment publications. I take as my marker Foreign Affairs magazine, which has a subscription in the USA and abroad of several hundred thousand and may be called the bedrock of the Establishment. The essays there are issued in a neutral, scholarly tone, rather than deeply partisan attacks such as you find in the daily newspapers.
Tellingly, the September-October 2014 issue of Foreign Affairs ran on its front cover the headline: “See America. Land of Decay and Dysfunction.”
More recently, in mid-August 2017, an FA article entitled “Kleptocracy in America” takes us entirely away from the personality peculiarities of the 45th President into the broader and more important realm of the systemic flaws of governance, namely the extraordinary political power wielded by the very wealthy due to the rules on election financing and the self-serving policies that they succeed in enacting while the general public has stagnated economically for decades now, setting the stage for the voter revolt that brought Trump to power.
Then as one final straw in the wind, I would mention the remarkable Op Ed piece in The Washington Post on September 1, 2017 written by Senator John McCain. He described American politics at the federal level as simply not working due to overheated partisanship that compromises the national interest (a problem to which he has himself contributed handsomely) and due to a never ending electoral cycle.
Indeed, a country which appears to be unable to govern itself is hardly the exemplar and all-powerful state suitable to govern the rest of the world.
However persuasive these points of analysis may be, they overlook what I believe is the main determinant of the onset of America’s decline as a world power that we are presently witnessing and of its possible withdrawal into true isolationism: the decision going back to 2007 to break the back of Russia.
Why Russia? Because it has been the only major power to publicly reject the US global hegemony both in word and in deed
The US has applied all imaginable efforts to put Russia in its place, as Washington sees it – namely as just another regional power, a European state that is in decline, that nods approvingly to whatever policy line comes out of Washington.
These endeavors have mobilized American Soft Power and Hard Power.
Soft Power – attempts to foment a color revolution in Russia that removes Vladimir Putin from power by financing opposition figures, by imposing personal and economic sector sanctions in the hope of splitting the Kremlin elites from the broad population and from Putin, by denigrating the President of the Russian Federation in terms that no one would have dared to use during the original Cold War in addressing Leonid Brezhnev, for example. I think of Hillary and her repeated description of Putin as a “Hitler.”
In parallel, there have been our attempts to contain Russia by our physical presence at its borders and off its shores through expansion of NATO going back to 1996 and more recently through positioning of NATO brigades in Poland and the Baltic States, and holding large scale military exercises in these advanced positions, within easy striking distance of St Petersburg and other Russian population centers.
Then there has been the US drive to achieve a first strike capability, namely development of weaponry and systems intended to decapitate Russia or any other enemy, systems which are globally positioned and in space.
Less dramatic technically, but from the Russian perspective equally threatening has been the construction in Poland and Romania of US installations that are nominally designated as elements in a missile defense shield but are easily usable for the launch of intermediate range missiles, i.e. offensive weapons systems that can strike Russian targets in minutes. This, despite the oft repeated Russian objections and finally threats to respond effectively if asymmetrically.
The end result of these several intertwined policies has been to create the very Frankenstein monster we have talked up.
The few politicians and Pentagon generals who have identified Russia as the single greatest threat to American security are entirely correct. Today, as in the past during the original Cold War, Russia is the only country on earth capable of reducing the entire Continental United States to ashes within a day.
But it is also, as was not the case during the Cold War, the state most capable of deterring American military action against it by its advanced conventional warfare men and materiel, meaning precision bombs and cruise missiles launched from air and sea, with global reach. This conventional capability was developed from virtually zero in the past 15 years and implemented throughout the Russian armed forces over the past 5 years with very specific target metrics for modernization of the fighting units, not just parade units.
This has been noted by US security analysis. An article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine by Ivo Daalder, who was for several years the US ambassador to NATO, makes precisely the point I just described about the new military capabilities of Russia. However, Daalder gives you the end result of Russia’s modernization program and does not give you the information essential to respond appropriately: namely how and why this threat came about. That is precisely what you find in my books: the action, reaction that has brought us to the present.
Moreover, an article like Daalder’s is not what the general public is reading.
Although Russia’s threat to American well-being features daily on the front page of our newspapers of record, this military threat is not what we read about. Instead, we are told about alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential elections with the aim of discrediting Hillary Clinton and so promoting the electoral chances of Donald Trump, about Russian attempts through social media advertising and otherwise to discredit the institutions of the American political system and to call into question the reliability of the voting procedures.
This is fake news that obscures the far more ominous problem of Russian military forces and the dangerous confrontations with Russia over the past year that were played down to the American public by the very same Pentagon sources.
The closest that the media come to identifying a Russian military threat is talk of cyber warfare, itself only a small part of non-nuclear strategic and tactical means being deployed by Moscow.
Let me be specific about how the US attempts to contain and control Russia over the past 25 years have backfired:
Objective One: cripple the Russian economy by reducing its single biggest source of export revenues: gas and oil sales to Europe. You can trace this economic warfare back, as I did in my 2012 book Stepping Out of Line, to the policies of the 2nd Clinton administration that are widely called the “Pipeline Wars” or “New Great Game.” This entailed US promotion of new energy suppliers to Europe – Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and finally, most recently, the USA itself – and its promotion of new paths to the European market – whether pipelines that bypass Russia or LNG, as is the case today.
The second dimension of this economic warfare has been sanctions, which the US first imposed in 2012, under the guise of punishing Russian violations of human rights –the Magnitsky Act – and which were vastly expanded in 2014 up to present to punish Russia for alleged violations of international law and of the post-Cold War world order by its annexation of Crimea and intervention in the Ukrainian civil war, in Donbass.
Objective Two: Isolate Russia and cast it as a pariah state, without friends or allies. Expel Russia from major international gatherings, like the G8. Strip Russia of its veto in the United Nations Security Council. Impugn its integrity, as in the World Olympics movement. See the decision last week to strip two more Russian gold medalists of the awards received in Sochi 2014. In these ways cripple Russia’s chances of interfering with American global leadership.
A subset of the “isolate Russia” campaign is to cut off Russian access to military technology. Halt the two way flow of materiel and components. We see this most recently in the decision by the organizers of the Farnborough Air Show to exclude Russian participation.
What have we gotten for these efforts?
First, the political effect of the economic warfare, especially of the sanctions, has been to rally the Russian population around the President and in defense of the nation, that is to say it has been precisely the opposite of what the authors of these measures in US think tanks and in the State Department had projected. All of this has driven the approval ratings of Putin from about 65% three years ago to over 80% for months on end this year.
Secondly, these attacks have only strengthened the resilience and self-sufficiency of the Russian economy. Indiscriminate importation of all possible consumer and investment goods has stopped. Import substitution is the slogan of the day, and it is heartily supported by the general population that has reversed its feelings about domestic products, which were formerly considered to be inferior, and encouraged a “buy Russian” mentality. With increased demand and less price competition from abroad, Russian producers have improved quality and variety of their offerings in striking ways.
In response to sanctions and its own embargo on imported foodstuffs from those who imposed sanctions, Russian agriculture has boomed, attracting large domestic investment. The result is that this year Russia had its largest grain harvest in 100 years and replaced US and European suppliers on global markets. Russia this year also became the world’s largest exporter of sugar beet sugar, displacing France. Poultry and livestock are also well on the way to self-sufficiency. Even milk production, which was one of the least performing agricultural sectors seems to be turning the corner and attracting substantial investment with government encouragement.
Thirdly, the Russians came up with other pipelines and other partners to ensure their dominant position as provider of imported gas to the EU. Russia has maintained and even slightly expanded its share of the energy supplies to the EU. But let us remember that Russia never was and is not today a monopoly supplier. It accounts for 40% of EU gas imports and 30% of gas consumption.
Russia continues to work on solutions that ensure that to the greatest extent possible those supplies pass directly from its shores to the EU consumers.
Despite all the objections and difficulties raised by the US, by Poland, by the Baltic States, Russia continues to pursue the Nord Stream II project and has replaced the frustrated South Stream project by the Turk Stream, which is in early implementation stage.
Gas and oil production remain strong and Russia has been developing its markets in Asia. First and foremost is with China for pipeline supplied gas and oil. Existing contracts call for supply to China of more than $300 billion in gas over 20 years via the Power of Siberia pipeline now nearing completion. New markets are being opened in Eastern and Southeastern Asia for LNG which is being supplied from new Russian fields in the Far North (Yamal) and Eastern Siberia.
The government’s import substitution program in other economic sectors has been making some remarkable progress, achieving what was long beyond reach in Russia due to the key role and profitability of energy production in the economy and to an accommodating policy on imports within the context of WTO membership. Government sponsored national heroes lead the way. We see this in the revived civilian aircraft production. Also in pharmaceuticals, to name just two sectors.
Deterrence parity.
The Russians have done exactly what Vladimir Putin said they would do: react in asymmetrical ways, finding defensive solutions entirely designed and produced at home that are vastly less expensive to implement than the offensive systems developed by the United States, but having all necessary potency to neutralize the American initiative and to render useless all the US scheming at gaining a first strike capability that would decapitate the enemy and spell military victory at one stroke.
That objective today has been stymied on a Russian military budget that is 10 times less than the US spends, which consumes just 5% of Russian GNP. For those who find the Russian military budget high, let us remember that in Soviet times the military consumed 25% of GNP. That was unbearable. 5% is wholly supportable by a motivated government supported by a patriotic minded population. Moreover, to put this 60 billion dollar annual spend in another context, let us remember that Russia spent 51 billion dollars on infrastructure projects to hold the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.
Geopolitics
The most stunning dimension of Russia’s successful pushback to the US led Western world has been geopolitical, entirely neutralizing the efforts to isolate Russia.
The historic geopolitical achievement of the Nixon-Kissinger period, namely making Washington closer to Beijing and Moscow than they are to one another, has been utterly undone. Russia and China today are in a de facto strategic alliance that is changing the geopolitical landscape of the globe and promises to change the economic power balance as well as they pursue determinedly a policy of removing the dollar from its pedestal as the world’s leading reserve currency. The key measures have been to claw away at the Petrodollar, which going back to the 1970s is what built up the dollar to its unique standing. This position as prime reserve currency has been a major lever in US global hegemony. Russian sales of oil to China are now in yuan, and this factor also explains how Russia overtook Saudi Arabia as the leading oil supplier to China.
The Chinese and Russians have put in place new global financial infrastructure to prevent the US from imposing on them what it did to Iran. These institutions are parallel and alternatives to the US controlled institutions dating from just after WWII, like the IMF and World Bank.
Furthermore, Russia, like China, has been developing new sea and land lanes for global goods movements, including movement of hydrocarbons, that can replace and certainly reduce the importance of the US-protected sea lanes through the Malacca Straits and Suez Canal. In the case of China, this is the well-known New Silk Road, or One Belt One Road. In the case of Russia, it is the lesser-known but also game-changing Northern Sea route secured by the world’s largest ice breaker fleet, and also the expansion of rail capabilities to and in the Far East. The latter will include the building of a bridge from the Continent to Sakhalin Island, to be officially announced early in 2018, and the follow-on construction of a rail bridge to Japanese Hokkaido which will be the lynch-pin of the coming Russian-Japanese Peace Treaty.
In speaking of the Russian – Chinese alliance, I fully acknowledge that this was not something arrived at naturally. The two countries have one of the longest common borders in the world, with a history of disputes going back more than a century.
There is the obvious point that the Russian side of the border is almost empty, while the Chinese side is brimming over with population. That these sides have come together is the result of both simultaneously coming under threat and containment measures led by the United States and its allies.
The US led effort to drive Russia from the Middle East by toppling the government of Bashar Assad in Syria, the one secular Arab state where the Russian Federation maintained a significant naval base supporting its presence in the Eastern Mediterranean, has been the bellwether in the US initiated struggle with Russia to maintain global “leadership.” By all parameters, the US proxies in Syria have been defeated.
The tide turned for the Assad regime when the Kremlin sent in its air force in September 2015. The game is almost up, and the net result for Russia and net loss for the United States is vastly greater than Syria itself.
The war zone became testing grounds for Russia’s latest precision weapons systems, command and control, space and drone reconnaissance. Russia demonstrated capabilities in conventional warfare that none of the NATO countries has separately or even collectively without the United States participation.
Russian self-confidence allowed them to feature their actions on television and in real time. All of this, combined with their demonstrated diplomatic skills in working harmoniously with regional states that have difficult relations among themselves, by working in great secrecy, and by showing loyalty to their allies have won for Russia newfound respect in the region and in the world.
A couple of weeks ago, we received still more interesting news demonstrating Russia’s upper hand in Syria and the Middle East. I have in mind the meeting of the Russian, the Iranian and the Turkish Presidents in Sochi to agree a common approach and procedures for a political settlement in Syria that brings in all domestic parties to the conflict. The three states will be co-guarantors of a congress of the Syrian parties to be convened in Sochi in order to define the parameters of a new inclusive Syrian constitution on the basis of which parliamentary elections can be held and the country can return to normal functioning. Iran, Turkey and Russia: once again an “unnatural” coalition brought together by common interest in putting an end to the civil war that is a hotbed of terrorism in the region and in the wider world. It is a major achievement of Russian diplomacy and political will in which the United States is now just a bystander. The tables have been turned and US “leadership” in the Middle East is waning.
My point is that by pursuing its at times vicious campaign against Russia, the United States has been setting itself up for humiliation.
These are trend lines that preceded Donald Trump’s accession to power. His personal contribution through his chaotic administration, inconsistent if not contradictory policy decisions from day to day, unconcealed boorishness and regular betrayal of his close aides and supporters has been to further undermine faith among America’s friends and fear among its detractors. His questioning of NATO has sent European politicians into a fit of confusion and despair. All of this gives greater impetus to the decline of US standing that it will be very hard for any successor in the White House to restore.
However, all the foregoing pales in significance compared to the ongoing risk of WWIII and nuclear Armageddon from the present dismal state of US-Russian relations. There is little communication. There is still less mutual trust. The two powers operate in war theaters like Syria and Ukraine within close proximity and without well-established rules of conduct that developed in the original Cold War in the immediate aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Missed signals, accidents in the field can lead unintentionally but surely to the outbreak of hostilities that would escalate very quickly from local events to worst case scenarios on the global level.
I have little doubt that many of you see this statement as overdramatizing the risk of war. However, I wager that your feeling of security comes from simply not being informed.
Regrettably, the information war that developed over the past several years has entailed news blackouts here in Europe and in the US regarding Russia-sourced news. Not news about Russia but news coming from Russia, meaning the policy statements, the other side of the argument.
Hence, you were not aware of how grave the situation became in September 2016 when US led forces attacked the Syrian positions in the eastern city of Deir Ezzor on the Euphrates killing more than 80 Syrian troops and possibly some Russian advisers as well. That attack dealt a coup de grace to the cease fire arrangements signed off by US Secretary of State Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov less than a week earlier. As the Russians saw it, the Pentagon and Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter overruled the Secretary of State and even the U.S . President who had backed the agreement with the Russians. The Kremlin saw a US government out of control, whose signature on a document means nothing. It cut the lines of communication with the US military command in Syria and threatened to shoot down allied aircraft over Syria.
Another very sharp confrontation during which the Russians delivered an ultimatum to the United States came in the days following Trump’s cruise missile attack on a Syrian air base 7 April 2017.
This and other key moments of stress in US-Russian relations that were underreported or simply absent from Western reporting are given due attention in my book.
Did it have to be this way?
That is, for my opinion, a strictly rhetorical question. The answer is a resounding “no.” From 1993, when President Yeltsin visited Warsaw and consented to Poland’s accession to NATO, the Kremlin sought and expected to be admitted to NATO itself. This wish to be integrated into a single security architecture was a consistent theme of Russian foreign policy through the Putin era right up to 2010, when it was reluctantly abandoned for a go-it-alone policy and emphasis on the sovereign state not entangled with security obligations to others.
Let us recall that in 2001, following the attack on the World Trade Center, Putin was the first foreign leader to call President George W. Bush to express support for the USA in its hour of confusion and fear. Putin did more than any of our allies to facilitate the US counter-attack in Afghanistan by opening up Russia’s backyard in Central Asia to American forces. He was repaid with a slap in the face: the cancellation of the ABM treaty and the pressing ahead with NATO expansion to the exclusion of Russia.
Is there a way out? a solution?
I do not come before you today with ready, definitive solutions. To do so would be to compromise the principle for which I and others have been fighting for the last several years when all debate and public discussion of our key security risks stopped. It would be to replace one solution arrived at behind closed doors with another arrived at behind closed doors. My first mission is to raise questions, to show that the answers which official Washington has been implementing are poorly conceived and ineffective, not to mention destructive for the Greater Middle East, where we have brought chaos from our democracy promotion.
But having issued that warning, I do not shy from offering a tentative recommendation on how to step back from the abyss and enter on new, more promising paths to dealing with a world order in profound change.
It took more than two decades for us to reach the present difficult and dangerous confrontation with Russia. This cannot be resolved with wave of a magic wand. But there is a way back.
And while some see a rosy day of US – Russian strategic cooperation in many areas, I would be content if the chances of accidental or intentional war between these two powers were vastly reduced. This is an objective which I believe is attainable fairly quickly.
The Neocons faulted the détente policy with trying to manage a relationship, a coexistence with the Soviet Union which they believed was the wrong goal, when the destruction of the Soviet Union was achievable. They were almost right. The Soviet Union collapsed, but of its own weight, due to its own contradictions and the failures of Mikhail Gorbachev’s economic policies.
However, the destruction of Russia, which is arguably the objective of US foreign policy today is unattainable, or comes at the price of collective suicide. The Russian economy is today very well managed by world class professionals. It is a typically European mixed social and market economy. Meanwhile, the broad population is mobilized around the leadership and quite patriotic. We have no choice but to manage relations and coexist with Russia as it is. In doing so, we will comply with the Kremlin’s insistent demand that its strategic national interests not be violated and that it be treated with respect which it will repay in kind.
The Speech and Q&A moderated by Ray McGovern have been posted on youtube:
Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. His latest book, Does the United States Have a Future? was published on 12 October 2017. Both paperback and e-book versions are available for purchase on http://www.amazon.com and all affiliated Amazon websites worldwide. See the recent professional review
Review of a collection of essays on Russian-American relations 2015 – 2017 by one of the US’s top Russia experts
by Alexander Mercouris
November 19, 2017
4.4k Views 10 Comments
One of the most deeply frustrating things for anyone with any knowledge of Russia who has been following the Russiagate saga is the staggering ignorance of basic facts about Russia which is so prevalent amongst elites in the US.
What makes this especially frustrating is that there is actually no shortage of knowledgeable and erudite experts about Russia who could be called upon if any true desire for knowledge about Russia actually existed.
Of those one who stands out is Gilbert Doctorow, who has been a professional Russia watcher since 1965.
Gilbert Doctorow has now offered us a new book – “Does the United States have a Future” – which brings together his splendid collection of essays about Russia and about Russian-American relations which he has been writing since 2015.
This is of course the same period when in the aftermath of the Ukrainian crisis and because of Russia’s intervention in Syria Russian-American relations entered upon their present catastrophic downward spiral, with the US rolling out successive sanctions against Russia, and deploying ever greater numbers of its troops ever closer to Russia’s border.
In this heavy atmosphere of heightened Russian-US tensions, and amidst a shrill media campaign, the Russian side of the story rarely gets told. What we get instead is an exaggerated focus on the largely misunderstood doings of one man – Vladimir Putin – who is not just routinely blamed for everything that goes wrong – be it Trump’s election, the Brexit vote, the 2015 European refugee crisis, the secessionist outbreak in Catalonia and the rise in Germany of the AfD – but who has become dangerously conflated with Russia itself.
The huge achievement of Gilbert Doctorow’s essays is that they put entirely behind them this disastrous paradigm.
For someone fixated on psychoanalysing Putin’s personality and on learning the gossip about the internal squabbles of the Kremlin, this collection of essays has little to offer. Doctorow has as little patience for this sort of thing as do I.
Ultimately far more interesting to anyone genuinely interested in understanding the rapidly recovering Great Power which is Russia, and who wants to get a genuine grasp of the sort of things that move its people, are those essays which touch on topics other Western reporters of Russia tend to ignore.
Here Doctorow’s immense knowledge of Russia and of Russian history is essential, and it shines through every essay.
Thus we find masterful discussions of works about tsarist history by the historian Dominic Lieven, and an outstanding discussion – the best I have come across – of Henry Kissinger’s insights and limitations as they concern Russia. There is even a remarkable essay which takes Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina as a starting point to discuss war.
However the single thing which sets the essays which are specifically about Russia apart is the extraordinary rapport Gilbert Doctorow has with Russia’s ‘everyman’. Take a comment like this one from the very first page of the very first essay in the book, which is dated 30th May 2015. Against a background of a deepening recession Gilbert Doctorow tells us this:
I say assuredly that the mood across the social spectrum of my “sources” is uniformly patriotic and uncomplaining. These sources range from the usually outspoken taxi drivers; through the traditionally critical journalists, academics, artists and other intelligentsia who are family friends going back many years, to former business contacts and other elites.
How many of those who report from Russia are able to speak to a wide range of contacts like this? How many of them pay heed to the opinions of Russia’s “usually outspoken taxi drivers”, reliable purveyors of the public mood though those people are? How many of those who report from Russia even know how to talk to such people? (confession here: I don’t).
Or take Gilbert Doctorow’s deeply moving account from 10th May 2016 of the March of the Immortal Regiment, held now every year on 9th May to commemorate Russia’s sacrifice in the Second World War. What other Western reporter of Russia has both the erudition and the common touch necessary to write a passage like this?
Given the manifestly patriotic nature of Victory in Europe Day celebrations, which open in Moscow and cities across Russia with military parades, precise marching columns, displays of military hardware on the ground and in the air, I was uncertain how possibly strident the Immortal Regiment component might be. As it turned out, the crowd was uniformly good humoured and focused on its private obligations to be met: the celebration of parents, grandparents, even great grandparents’ role in the war and reconfirmation of their status as family heroes whatever their military or civil defence rank, whether they survived or were among the countless fatalities.
Elsewhere Gilbert Doctorow is able to talk knowledgeably in two different essays about the state of the Russian shopping basket – a matter of fundamental importance to Russians and therefore given Russia’s power and importance to everyone – of Russian responses to the Trump-Clinton debate, of the Russian public’s response to one of Putin’s mammoth annual Q&A sessions, and of the steely response – utterly free of sentimentality and hysteria – of the people of St. Petersburg and of Russia generally to a terrorist attack on the city.
Of the essays specifically about Russia, it is however what Doctorow writes about the Russian media which Western readers may find most surprising.
It is now generally conceded even in the West that Russia does have a public opinion, something which tended not to be admitted in Soviet times, though there still seems to be little genuine interest in finding out what it is.
The lazy assumption is anyway that in Russia public opinion is effectively manipulated by the government through its supposedly all-encompassing control of the news media.
Though it is sometimes grudgingly admitted that the printed media does have some independent voices, and that the Russian media now has a degree of sophistication unknown in Soviet times, the prevailing opinion in the West is that it remains every bit as propagandistic and mendacious as it was in Soviet times. The classic statement of this view is Peter Pomorantsev’s “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia”.
Doctorow’s essays are an important corrective to this bleak and distorted picture.
Doctorow does not sugarcoat the reality. He concedes that the television media has a bias favouring the Kremlin and that ‘non-system’ politicians whose parties are not represented in the Duma like Kasyanov and Navalny have difficulty gaining access to it.
I would say in passing that Russia’s television media is not exceptional in this. In my opinion Russian television today is much less controlled by the government than was French television during Charles De Gaulle’s and Georges Pompidou’s time in France, when I was in Paris as a child.
In any event, as a regular participant in Russia’s extraordinarily extended and elaborate political talk-shows – a vital and massively popular information tool for the Russian population – Doctorow shows that the common Western view that Russian television viewers get no exposure to the Western view-point and hear only the Kremlin’s view is simply wrong. Here is one passage where Doctorow describes them
The regulars of these talk shows are a mix of Russians and foreigners, pro-Kremlin and anti-Kremlin voices. There inevitably is at least one American who can be counted on to purvey the Washington Narrative. A reliable regular in this category has been Michael Bohm, who was for a long-time op-ed manager at The Moscow Times and now is said to be teaching journalism in Moscow….
From among Russians, the talk show hosts bring in one or more representative of opposition parties. On the 11th it happened to be a personality from the Yabloko Party (Liberals). But at other times there will be the leader of the Communist Party, Gennady Zyuganov, the founder of the right nationalist LDPR, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, or the leader of the social democratic party, Just Russia, Sergei Mironov. They all get their time on air in these shows.
Elsewhere Doctorow gives vivid accounts of these sprawling and at times chaotic talk shows, which have no precise analogue anywhere else that I know of.
Doctorow’s book, as its title shows, is not only about Russia. Rather it is about the collapse of any sort of dialogue based on mutual respect and understanding between the US and Russia.
In essay after essay Doctorow pinpoints the cause: at a time when the Russian mind is becoming increasingly open, the American mind is becoming increasingly closed.
The title of the book – “Does the United States have a future?” – is in fact an intentional exercise in reverse imaging.
At its simplest it refers back to Doctorow’s previous book: “Does Russia have a future?” published in 2015.
However the title of both books must also be seen as a comment on the ‘disaster literature’ about Russia which has become so prevalent in the West, and which continues unabated to this day even as it is repeatedly proved wrong.
Basically what Doctorow is saying is that it is in the US not Russia that the suppression of debate and independent voices is putting the future in jeopardy.
It is in these essays that look at the situation in the US where Doctorow dissects the evolution or rather regression of US policy towards an increasingly strident Russophobia, and where one senses Doctorow’s growing exasperation and alarm.
Take for example what Doctorow has to say about one of the most outspoken Americans calling for ever more confrontation with Russia: NATO’s former military chief General Breedlove
Most everything is wrong with what Breedlove tells us in his article. It is a perfect illustration of the consequences of the monopoly control of our media and both Houses of Congress by the ideologists of the Neoconservative and Liberal Interventionist school: we see a stunning lack of rigour in argumentation in Breedlove’s article coming from the absence of debate and his talking only to yes men.
Perhaps the biggest mistakes are conceptual: urging military means to resolve what are fundamentally political issues over the proper place of Russia in the European and global security architecture. Whereas for Clausewitz war was ‘a continuation of politics by other means’, for Breedlove politics, or diplomacy, do not exist, only war.
The alarm in the last paragraph finds still greater emphasis in the essay which immediately precedes ot. This has the ominous title “The Nuclear Clock is at Two Minutes to Midnight”.
It is however in the closing of the American mind where Doctorow pinpoints the danger
My point is not to ridicule the very earnest and well-intentioned anti-war campaigners whose ranks I joined that day. It is to demonstrate how and why the highly tendentious reporting of what we are doing in the world and what others are doing to us, combined with the selective news blackouts altogether by major media has left even activists unaware of real threats to peace and to our very survival that American foreign policy has created over the past 20 years and is projected to create into the indefinite future if the public does not awaken from its slumber and demand to be informed by experts of countervailing views. We are living through a situation unparalleled in our history as a nation where the issues of war and peace are not being debated in public.
Along with the alarm and frustration there is also very real disappointment.
Like most people who lived through the later stages of the Cold War Doctorow remembers a world where the US’s European allies acted as a force of restraint on the US.
Based now in Brussels at the very epicentre of the European Union, Doctorow is shocked at the extent to which this is no longer the case, and at the degree to which the same attitudes of hubris, belligerence and hysteria which have gained such a hold in the US have now also managed to gain a hold in Europe.
Like many others Doctorow is totally unimpressed by the current crop of European politicians, and as someone able to remember the likes of Charles De Gaulle and Helmut Schmidt Doctorow does not balk from expressing his scorn in withering terms. A good example is to be found in the title of one of his essays: “News flash: Europe is brain dead and on the drip”.
It is in his discussions of Europe that Doctorow allows himself his brief flashes of anger. Take these comments he makes about Elmar Brok, the truly dreadful chairman of the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs
I remember with a shudder an exchange I had with Elmar Brok on 5 March 2015 on The Network, a debate program of Euronews. Brok, a German, is the chairman of the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs. He comes from Angela Merkel’s CDU party and within the Parliament is in the European People’s Party bloc, on the center right, the bloc which really calls the shots in the EP.
Brok is big, brash and does not hesitate to throw his weight around, especially when talking with someone outside the Establishment whom he has no reason to fear. We were discussing the shooting of Boris Nemtsov, which occurred just days before. Brok insisted the murder was the responsibility of Vladimir Putin. Not that Putin pulled the trigger, but he created the atmosphere where such things could happen, etc., etc. One way or another the talk shifted to the allegedly autocratic nature of the Putin ‘regime,’ with its crackdown on freedoms, and in particular ever tightening control of media.
At that point, I objected that the Russia media were very diverse editorially, with many different points of view expressed freely. Brok shot back that this was patently untrue, and he did not hesitate to cross all red lines and indulge in libel on air by asking how much the Kremlin paid me to say that.
Apart from the obvious truth that an authoritarian like MEP Brok would not know freedom of speech if he tripped on it, I think back to that exchange every week whenever I turn on Russian state television and watch one or another of the main political talk shows.
Doctorow’s strongest feelings of disappointment however remain firmly focused on the US.
Doctorow’s essays show that like many people he entertained very cautiously worded hopes about Donald Trump.
Hillary Clinton after all was the self-styled ‘war candidate’ and the preferred choice of the Neocons, whilst Trump at least spoke of the need for better relations with Russia.
Not for nothing is one of Doctorow’s essays entitled “War or Peace: the essential question before American voters on November 8th”.
Doctorow’s hopes were never very high and like many others he was appalled by the conduct of the 2016 election, which he calls disgraceful. His essays which follow Trump’s election victory show the speed of his disillusionment. Not only has Trump proved completely incapable of fulfilling any of Doctorow’s hopes; he seems to have no idea of how to conduct foreign relations, and is rapidly reverting to the aggressive belligerence which is now the default position of all US Presidents.
In the meantime his election has heightened partisan tensions within the US to unheard of levels.
In his final chapter, which has the same title – “Does the United States have a future?” – as the whole book, Doctorow sets out the consequences.
A US which twenty years ago bestrode the world is now incapable of governing itself, whilst its increasingly reckless conduct is spreading conflict and alarm around the world.
Not only has trust in “American leadership” as a result all but collapsed but the two other Great Powers – Russia and China – have been completely alienated, and are busy forging an alliance whose combined resources will soon dwarf those of the US.
About all that the US however remains in denial, as it is about the world crisis its actions are generating. In a political system where all dissenting opinions are excluded it cannot by definition be otherwise. Thus the US looks set to continue on its present ruinous course, with no ability to change direction
….a still greater threat to our democracy and to the sustainability of our great power status has come from the inverse phenomenon, namely the truly bipartisan management of foreign policy in Congress. The Republican and Democratic Party leaderships have maintained strict discipline in promotion of what are Neoconservative and Liberal Interventionist positions on every issue placed before Congress. Committees on security and foreign affairs invite to testify before them only those experts who can be counted upon to support the official Washington narrative. Debate on the floor of the houses is nonexistent. And the votes are so lopsided as to be shocking, none more so than the votes in August on the “Countering America’s Adversaries through Sanctions Act”….
It would be comforting if the problems of our political culture began and ended with the elites operating in Washington DC. However that is patently not the case. The problem exists across the country in the form of a stifling conformism, or groupthink that is destroying the open marketplace for ideas essential for any vital democracy.
I recognise the accuracy of this picture and am prey to no illusion. However in my opinion it is still too early to give up hope.
Trump’s victory, if it shows nothing else, shows that there is more resistance to the ‘groupthink’ in the US than Doctorow in these passages perhaps allows. What is the Russiagate hysteria after all if not the expression of a collective nervous breakdown on the part of the US elite at the discovery that the American people as a whole do not share their obsessions?
A state of hysteria of the sort we are going through now cannot be sustained indefinitely. Eventually a reaction will set in, at which point those at the forefront in spreading the hysteria will be exposed as the charlatans that they are, whilst many of those they fooled will feel ashamed.
When that point comes it is good to know from this outstanding collection of essays that there are still genuine experts available that the US can call upon to guide its policies like Gilbert Doctorow.
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Does the United States Have a Future? is available on order from all retail and online bookstores. It is available for immediate delivery from www.amazon.com and affiliated Amazon websites in the UK, Germany, France and Japan, among others.
PUBLICATION 12 OCTOBER 2017: DOES THE UNITED STATES HAVE A FUTURE
An overview of Gilbert Doctorow’s new book Does the United States Have a Future?
In many respects, the United States has made the destruction of the Putin “regime” and of Russian power more generally, a test of its ability to direct the world according to its own preferences, without compromise or serious discussion with other powers. The articles in this collection guide the reader through the action-reaction between the US and Russia over the time covered as the USA arguably began losing the tug-of-war with the Kremlin.
The overarching genre of essays in this collection is reports on events and personalities in the news that the author saw firsthand. These essays are not a daily chronicle. The author did not join commentators on the scrimmage pile-up. He concentrated on impressions drawn from personal activism.
One of the greatest virtues of this collection is the details on how we approached a catastrophic military confrontation with Russia, especially in the final months of the Obama administration. We are still not out of the woods.
This would not have been obvious to most readers because of the blackout on Russian-sourced news imposed from Washington, working hand-in-glove with major media. A number of essays demonstrate this blackout and its tendentiousness very clearly.
There are always two or more sides to an issue, and the author has applied all of his talents and contacts to bring out what the other side has been saying and why, to separate out cause and effect.
Essays in this collection draw upon the author’s experience during a nine-month period of “stardom” from May 2016 to January 2017 as one of a handful of foreigners, and of Americans in particular, who were invited to appear on Russian political talk shows for the domestic television audience to comment on the American presidential campaign through the inauguration of Donald Trump.
The author’s time on Russian domestic television was more important for what he heard than for what he said. He was able to see up close some of Russia’s most articulate and impressive legislators, educators, think tank directors and television hosts. In these essays, he shares his impressions of what is a far more vibrant and sophisticated political and intellectual life than one might imagine.
Appreciations of Does the United States Have a Future? by four professional reviewers:
Robert Parry. Investigative journalist and founder of Consortiumnews.com
Gilbert Doctorow offers powerful and insightful analysis of the crucial events unfolding in what is called the New Cold War, a dangerous, costly and largely unnecessary showdown between the world’s two nuclear-armed superpowers. At the heart of these tensions is a propagandistic distortion of what Russia wants and how it operates. As an American who has lived in Russia, Doctorow strips away the exaggerations and shows you the real Russia.
Professor Robert English, University of Southern California School of International Relations.
This book will make most readers uncomfortable—and it should. Russia is constantly in our news and commentary, yet understanding is scarcer than ever, so this most vital of our international relationships slides deeper into confrontation. Doctorow’s Russian experience is vast, his insights rare, and his judgments sound—whether exposing media pundits’ ignorance, political officials’ hypocrisy, or advising on remedies for all these follies. The demonization of Russia reflects the pathologies of American politics much more than it does the realities of Russia, and few expose these delusions better than Doctorow. A return to reason in US foreign policy is long overdue, and this book is an excellent place to start.
Andrei Nekrasov. Independent film maker, Norway. Director of The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes
Gilbert Doctorow’s sharp and profoundly independent mind makes the reading of this collection of his essays on American Russia politics an intellectual pleasure. It’s a diary of a uniquely unbiased and knowledgeable observer that would help an open-minded reader to see through the clouds of prejudice and propaganda contaminating even some of the world’s most respected “quality media” today. Doctorow’s evocation of McCarthyism seems chillingly fitting in the context of the neoconservative ideological authority giving short shrift to anyone daring to dissent. Spot on are quotations from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina mirroring the jingoism of those who today, as one hundred forty years ago, risk nothing by sending others to kill and die. The difference of course, we are reminded, being in the nuclear warheads, 90% of which are shared by America and Russia, capable annihilating each other and the whole world in a matter of days.
Ray McGovern. Former CIA Presidential briefer, co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
Finally a lucid analysis, by an author with superb academic credentials AND life experience, addressing: “Does America Have a Future?” The US Empire is being trumped by accelerating Russia-China entente and allies hedging their bets. The post-WWII era is over – the new era marked by “goose pimples” at Trump’s “finger on the nuclear button.” Can new realities shatter the groupthink that now prevails and usher in, peaceably, the inevitable erosion of US power? This book could help that happen.
Does the United States Have a Future? is available for purchase as a paperback from amazon.com and related websites globally. In coming weeks the paperback will be listed by all retail booksellers. An e-book version will also be released in this time frame.
Gilbert Doctorow 