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This new book shows the future of the US

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.

 

                           

For all of the above positive and negative reasons listed below, the Russia-China relationship should be viewed with equanimity in Western capitals

Continue reading “Russia-China Strategic Partnership: why US and European political analysts miss the point entirely and what does it tell us about the multipolar world” →

 

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.

 

 

by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

 

From time to time, the Kremlin uses the Sunday evening weekly news wrap-up program of Dmitry Kiselyov on state television channel Rossiya-1 to send blunt and public warnings to Washington without diplomatic niceties.  Last night was one such case and we must hope that the intended audience within the Beltway can put aside its focus on Russia Today’s supposed fake news long enough to read a real message from Moscow.

 

The last such message came in the week following the 6 April Tomahawk attack on a Syrian air base that Donald Trump sprung on the world, allegedly to punish the regime of Assad for a chemical attack on a village in Idlib province.  Kiselyov used his airtime then to spell out the Russian response, which he characterized as unprecedented in scope and seriousness. It was essential to put all of its elements together in one place, as he did, because our boys in the Pentagon chose to downplay one or another element in isolation, such as the Russian installation of their Iskander nuclear potential missiles in Kaliningrad, or the abrogation of the deconfliction agreement relating to air space over Syria, or the dispatch of still more Russian vessels to the Eastern Mediterranean equipped to sink our Navy. While our generals were saying that the Russians didn’t really mean it, Kiselyov put the whole picture on the screen:  an ultimatum to Washington to back off or be prepared for war.

A still earlier message of this kind to Washington aired on the Kiselyov Sunday news show in the week following the supposedly accidental US and allied bombing of Syrian army positions in the encircled eastern town of Deir Ezzor, which killed more than 80 Syrian soldiers and prepared the way for a renewed offensive by the siege forces.  That bombing scuttled the agreement on a Syrian cease-fire concluded with the approval of Barack Obama less than a week earlier by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State John Kerry after a 14 hour negotiating session.  Lavrov was shown on the Kiselyov program openly accusing US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter of directing “friendly fire” against Kerry and of dangerous insubordination to his boss, the US President, which put in question any possibility of reaching agreements with the Americans on anything.

That last charge has now again re-emerged in the program that Kiselyov presented yesterday.  The Americans were identified as the “main obstacle” to the mopping up operation in Syria, at a time when “the light at the end of the tunnel” is visible [Kiselyov’s characterization], when more than 90% of the Syrian territory is under government control.

To wit, the United States is secretly aiding the terrorists: supplying them with weapons, helping them to move around, removing them from under hostile fire, giving them the findings of aerial reconnaissance, maps of where Syrian government forces are operating and even the locations of Russian military detachments. Things have gotten to the point where it is not the military capability of the Islamic State but the American assistance which stands in the way of the total liberation of Syria from terrorists.

This, says Kiselyov, is not his own idea: it is the official position of the Russian Ministry of Defense as issued through its spokesman this week, Igor Konashenkov.

 Kiselyov resumes:

The Americans deny everything. But the RF Ministry of Defense does not believe their words, relying instead on facts. We recall in the past week how part of the main road connecting Palmyra and Deir Ezzor was taken over by the fanatics. This is the main artery supplying the Syrian forces leading the offensive from Deir Ezzor against the remaining forces of the terrorists in Syria. De facto this was an attack in the rear. This was planned and facilitated by the Americans. In parallel, on 28 September a large group of terrorists numbering about 300 men left the area of the American base in Et Tanf at the Jordanian border. In this area there is a refugee camp numbering tens of thousands.

Per Kiselyov, the Americans have cut off the refugee camp, not allowing in UN or other humanitarian relief convoys, so as to use the camp as cover, a human shield, for the Islamic State fighters they are supporting.

Then comes the direct warning from Konashenkov: If the US forces see these attacks by mobile units of terrorists they are assisting as “unforeseen random events,” then Russian armed forces in Syria are prepared to totally destroy all such random events directed against the zone under their control.

Kiselyov asks why is this happening?  Did Trump decide this?

The question is rhetorical. Trump is exculpated.  It may be “amazing,” but it appears that Trump was not a party to this.  More likely it is due to what he calls sloppy management, when the military gets out from under political control, and then on the territory of Syria, “they start wandering around quite on their own” and “flirting” with the terrorist groups.

Whatever the case, says Kiselyov, the result is extremely unpleasant both for Russia and for the American leadership as its generals are being pushed towards adventurism.

Konashenkov characterized the area in Syria under American control near the Jordanian border as a “black hole” that is 100 km long. From this black hole, like devils escaping from a snuff box, the terrorists come out to stage their attacks on Syrian troops and against the peaceful civilian population.

 

The feature segment moves on to a calm note, with insistence that Putin remains confident in the victory over the terrorists regardless of who is aiding them.  To demonstrate this Olympian calm, which comes from certainty of victory in the near future, we are shown footage of Putin’s response to questions put to him at the Energy Forum in Moscow at mid-week. Putin tells us that “in the end, we all [presumably including the Americans] have common interests in securing Syria and the region against terrorists and that will bring us together for cooperative action.”

In the meantime though, we are treated to videos showing the consequences of Russian air activity in Syria this past week.  That included more than 400 sorties of Russian planes based in Syria, plus bombing by SU 134 and 135 arriving from Russian territory that killed a dozen or more terrorist leaders together with 50 security personnel and seriously injured their top official, who lost an arm and sank into a coma.  

Russian air attacks destroyed the terrorists’ main underground weapons caches amounting to a thousand  tons.  And an attack by Kalibr cruise missiles launched from submarines in the Mediterranean destroyed Islamic State command installations and vehicles as well as weapons supplies. This cleared the way for Syrian troops to move to liberate the town of Meyadin.

The dots are left unconnected, but the Russian threat is clear: they will use their air power to eliminate all forces standing in the way of their complete victory including US forces on the ground near the Jordanian border.

The same news round-up last night also had another segment that relates in less direct fashion to the coming Russian victory in Syria: this was a week when the king of Saudi Arabia made the first state visit to Russia in their 90 plus years of diplomatic relations. And it was not a simple affair.

Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud brought with him a suite of 1,000, including business leaders, ministry officials and senior military.  We are told they came with 100 tons of baggage, including favorite carpets and other necessities of life.

All aspects of this visit were impressive, including the signing of contracts and letters of intent for multi-billion dollar joint investments in industrial projects in both countries, possible Saudi purchases of Russian Liquefied Natural Gas from yet another mega-project seeking financing and multi-billion dollar military procurement, said to include the latest S-400 air defense system that Russia agreed to supply to Turkey a few weeks ago in exchange for a 2.5 billion dollar down payment and which Turkey accepted gratefully over NATO objections.  Putin quipped to the moderator of the Moscow Energy Forum also held during the past week that nothing is forever, not even the U.S. hold on the Saudis.

Kiselyov placed the visit in the context of Russian foreign policy in the region generally. Putin, he said, is pursuing a policy of seeking peaceful harmony in the Near East that takes into account the balance of interests of all countries in the region, a policy which is paying off: Russia is now the only country in the world to have good relations with Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, Turkey, Iraq and, of course, Syria.

From both segments it would appear that US domination is unraveling.

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2017

 

 

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Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. His forthcoming collection of essays Does the United States Have a Future? will be published in October 2017

 

by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

 

When in 2014 the United States and the European Union slapped sanctions on Russian officials and business entities as punishment for what they called the “annexation” of Crimea and military intervention in the Donbas region of Ukraine, when Russia responded with its embargo on food products from those countries and rolled out a generalized policy of “import substitution” to sharply curtail dependency of the domestic economy on external factors of international relations, there were many observers both within Russia and in the West who predicted the failure of the Russian government’s efforts.  The dire predictions were based on a complete misreading of the mood and general political situation in Russia: the American legislators who initiated the sanctions believed that the punishment directed at the Kremlin entourage and big business would alienate the oligarchs from Vladimir Putin and lead to regime change, or at a minimum, to change in Russia’s foreign policy to suit better the wishes of Washington.

We now know that the stated ambition of the sanctions on Russia never worked. Reunification with Crimea and the Western sanctions aroused swelling national pride and patriotic feelings in the broad public. The Kremlin doubled down and has stayed the course on Crimea, on Donbas and more recently in Syria where its military support for the regime of Bashar Assad has gone directly against US and Western policies of backing the insurgents. But what about import substitution?

Within months of the Kremlin’s announcement of this policy, commentators were publishing statistics showing that import substitution was negligible. Ignoring the reality that re-creation of industrial sectors usually takes years, on the basis of first findings they predicted that import substitution would never amount to anything. They pointed to the unbalanced structure of the Russian economy, with massive resources invested in the highly profitable energy industry providing “rents” to the ruling elites. Moreover, the investor unfriendly country ratings bode ill for attracting foreign or even local capital to restructuring.

Those remarks were largely correct, but they missed other highly relevant problems facing the plans for import substitution resulting from new business ventures and capital investment.  The bigger issues were around money, namely the cost of money and its scarcity.  In 2014, Russia was still experiencing high inflation and the attempts of the Bank of Russia to contain it by tight money.  The costs of borrowing for small businesses in particular were usurious. Indeed, the disparity with the West on both counts was a direct continuation of what had been going on since the 1990s. Lack of working capital on competitive conditions was the main contributor to the flooding of the Russian market with imports and the collapse of local industry. 

In its implementation of the import substitution policy, the Russian Government identified priority sectors and provided various kinds of federal assistance that included credit subsidies.  It also has taken steps to maintain the ruble at a low exchange rate to protect against imports whatever happens to the sanctions and embargo.

Agriculture is one sector where the payback can be very quick if one chooses carefully the given application, as for example wheat over livestock, poultry over pork.  And when the oxygen of subsidized credit was applied, the results were stunning.  In 2017, despite capricious, if not malicious weather conditions in the spring and early summer, Russia is expecting its largest ever grain harvest, possibly reaching 130 million metric tons, and the country retakes its position as the world’s top wheat exporter and leading exporter of other grains and of beet sugar.

What is happening in other sectors of the economy which the Government prioritized for import substitution will be obvious only in the years to come, precisely because of the greater capital and knowhow requirements and slower payback. But given the way agriculture has responded to stimuli from the federal government, it is reasonable to expect similar success stories in manufacturing and service industries like banking, insurance, and computer programming over time.

The rising tide raises all ships, and the success of parts of agriculture have attracted big business interest not only to industrial-scale farming of grain crops but also to many other sides of food supply and processing. Such investments are being made not only by start-up small and medium sized businesses but also by the oligarchs, for whom this is a point of pride and a direct response to the wave of patriotism that has swept the country. Thus, as The Financial Times recently reported oligarch Viktor Vekselberg has been pouring vast capital via his Renova holding company into the construction of greenhouses for vegetable crops that are in great demand among Russia’s urban populations. Payback on these investments is measured in years, not months and demonstrates great confidence of Russian competitiveness against ground crops from Turkey, from Central Asia and from hothouse crops from Western Europe whenever the sanctions are lifted.

The result of these various undertakings is that Russian Federation Minister of Agriculture, Alexander Tkachev himself a farmer with large-scale interests in the sector, can report regularly on the dramatic progress being made in all areas of agricultural self-sufficiency, meaning import substitution. Indeed, in many product groupings quite apart from grains, Russia is becoming an exporter for the first time since before WWI.

In this essay, I would like to focus on one area of food production and processing that is especially surprising given the national traditions:  fish. Russia, like Serbia, has long followed the folk saying that the best fish is a pig. This prejudice was long justified by the quality of fish products that were available in the market as from Soviet times. The improvement in assortment and appeal of these products dates from the middle of the first decade of the new millennium.

To be sure, what is happening in aquaculture did get coverage in The Financial Times article mentioned above, which gave statistics for the Murmansk-based LLC Russkoye More, an ambitious firm that is rapidly expanding to occupy the leading position as supplier of farmed salmon in what is a major import substitution project. The Russian market for fresh salmon, like the European Union market, was until two years ago entirely dominated by the Scandinavians, now on the embargo list.

Whereas The Financial Times addresses the changes in the fish sector at the corporate and macroeconomic level, here we will talk about the microeconomic level, where people live and demand meets supply. What follows comes from my visits to supermarkets, to independent fish vendors, to covered street markets in cities and in the countryside up to 80 km from St Petersburg.  It is one thing to speak about supply at source, and another to speak about supply as it reaches consumers. The distribution and logistical chain is all the more important in products as perishable as fresh fish. Moreover, this informal sampling will look not only at fresh fish but also frozen and tinned fish to get a more comprehensive overview of the situation.

In past surveys of the changing Russian shopping basket, I pointed to some specific fish varieties that are locally grown in the Russian Northwest region. These include the sig, a fresh water member of the salmon family native to Lake Ladoga, Europe’s largest body of fresh water that is 50 km east of Petersburg, and also the minnow-sized koryushka, another native of Ladoga that each spring travels down the Neva River to the lightly saline Gulf of Finland to lay its eggs and is caught on the way in vast quantities to the great pleasure of Petersburgers.

However, the bigger picture is that as the largest country on earth, representing more than 10% of the world’s land surface, Russia has tremendous fresh water resources in terms of lakes and rivers that still abound in fish enjoying local reputation and retail distribution. This is particularly true of the Siberian rivers; smoked delicacy fish from there are sold at high prices across the Russian Federation.  In addition, of course, Russian fishing fleets based in Murmansk, to the north and in Vladivostok to the east have been and remain large suppliers of ocean fish.

What has changed is the scale of production and distribution of fresh salt water or lake and river, wild and farmed fish.  Whereas in the past, the fish section in Russian supermarkets meant shelves of tinned sardines or catfish in tomato sauce, today every respectable market offers fresh fish, in filets or whole, presented on beds of ice and in better or worse condition depending on the store management.

Specialized fish stores have sprung up even in the hinterland here in the Northwest, receiving daily shipments of farmed salmon, wild gorbusha and hefty flounders, among other varieties. By local standards, these fish are all substantially more expensive sources of protein than domestic chickens or pork chops. But they obviously do find their consumers and they are priced 30% or more below West European store prices for similar fish.

Speaking of ocean fish meant until very recently fish brought to market frozen.  The Soviet Union developed a large fleet of trawlers and fish processing ships that brought frozen product to port, much of it going into export.  The fish were usually low grade, bony, good only for stews and soups.  Intrinsically higher grade fish like cod appeared for sale in shops in bulk in contorted stages of rigor mortis, not very appealing to the faint of heart.

Now, in the past couple of years, the frozen foods bins of super markets are stocked with fish steaks packaged in clear plastic that are as attractive and as high quality as anything sold in Western Europe. These cod steaks, wild salmon (gorbusha) steaks have been flash frozen and are offered in half-kilogram portions. The labeling stresses that no preservatives have been used, that the products are natural and healthful, with detailed nutritional information provided.

 

In the days of the Soviet Union, the Russian fishing industry produced some world-beating tinned products including red and black caviar and Chatka brand king crab meat. These exclusive and very pricey products are exported, where they enjoy demand and are available domestically in specialty shops. However, most tinned fish traditionally fell into the category of low-grade fish in tomato sauce or very poor grade vegetable oil.  Over the past several years, that has changed beyond recognition. Tinned fish of world-class quality is making its appearance on store shelves.  For example, a week ago I discovered a new arrival: “premium” class chunk tuna in olive oil packaged in 200 gram glass jars. The producer is the Far East fishing fleet, and the fish name is given in Japanese as well as Russian.  The product is similar in design and presentation to premium tuna on sale in Belgium at twice the price.

And finally another fish product category is worth mentioning:  the salted, smoked or otherwise processed and unit-packed fish sold in the chilled products sections of supermarkets. This has expanded in product range and quality so as to be beyond recognition when compared with similar offerings just a few years ago.  Many different suppliers vie in the category of cold or hot smoked, salted salmon shrink wrapped in units of 200 grams plus or minus.  Herrings filets in oil or in sauces are now very attractive and of generally high quality. Anchovies and other small fish filets have proliferated. And hitherto unknown product categories such as “seafood cocktails” consisting of baby octopus and squid, pink shrimp and mussels in brine are offered in small plastic pots; quality is in no way inferior to what you would find in an up-market supermarket in Western Europe.  All such alien, “indescribably awful” (гадости) foods in the judgment of your average Soviet consumer, are today welcomed as the basis for salads, as stuffing for avocados, themselves a relatively new food item to the Russian shopper.  Travel abroad, and 10 million Russians do travel abroad each year, has turned them into quite sophisticated shoppers and diners. And what they have come to love they now can largely find in their supermarkets supplied by domestic producers, including all varieties of fish specialties.

The point is, that from nowhere, the Russian fishing industry has made enormous strides and, unlike the cheese industry, is fully replacing imports with equal or better quality contents and lower prices.

This is the consequence of change in demand as well as change in supply.  Demand has changed because before 2014 Russians still distrusted their compatriots and believed that everything made in their country was rubbish.  Come the Crimea annexation, come the war in Donbass and the upsurge of patriotism prodded folks to try their own.  What Russia has now is a virtuous cycle:  more positive expectancy, more positive supply.

 

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2017

 

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Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. His last book Does Russia Have a Future? was published in August 2015. His forthcoming collection of essays Does the United States Have a Future? will be published in October 2017.

 

 

by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

My political positions have very frequently been countercurrent.   When the Liberals were calling for Trump’s head, when Senator Charles Schumer and Representative Nancy Pelosi in Congress were preaching all-out obstructionism against the newly inaugurated President to thwart his policies, I was urging Progressives to lay down their pitchforks and try to deal constructively with the new administration for the good of the nation.

Now, in the past several weeks, in a belated show of bipartisanship, Democratic Party leaders have finally found a negotiating partner in Donald Trump, starting with relief to the “Dreamers” in the sphere of immigration policy and extending to the bill raising the national debt ceiling.  More deals are said to be underway. In theory, that is all to the good.

However, in the meantime this President demonstrated fulsomely in his speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations, that it is high time for him to go.   And that is not because of his widely discussed volatility, impulsiveness and narcissism.  It is because of his irremediable stupidity, primitivism and thuggery that are leading this country on a path to commit unspeakable horrors abroad.

To be sure, Trump’s shocking debut at the UN comes as the culmination of a lengthy decline in civilized behavior by our national leaders over the past two decades.

The swagger and bloated self-importance of George Bush did not itself come of a day.  At the start of his presidency, after 9/11 but before the fateful invasion of Iraq, Bush would make one or another outrageous, lying statement about international affairs, such as the “weapons of mass destruction” he alleged were retained by Saddam Hussein. Then he would pause and look into the camera with hesitation, as if wondering whether his whoppers would be swallowed by the public. Satisfied that he had gotten away with it, he resumed his rant.  That hint of self-doubt or fear of discovery disappeared with the years even as adversity on the battlefield and in the economy that his misguided, if not criminal acts gave rise to progressed apace. Bush limped along to the end of his second term none the wiser.

Our intellectual president Barack Obama, with his term on the Harvard Law Review as seeming proof of mental and cultural distinction, never did learn to behave in a statesmanlike manner.  From start to finish, he conducted himself with scandalous insouciance. His well-meaning arm over the shoulder of Queen Elizabeth, which the Brits saw through as disrespect for court decorum, his chewing gum while  standing before the public eye were noted by our commentators indulgently. They never noted, however, when he slipped beyond faux pas to openly insulting behavior towards leaders of the world’s great powers, when he issued slurs which in other people’s mouths would be denounced as a form of racism.

One such case occurred when Obama stood by the side of Chinese President Xi in the White House Rose Garden for a press briefing, and said that he would be watching closely to see that the Chinese implemented the actions that had been agreed upon.  Then there was his likening Putin to a misbehaving schoolboy, skulking at the back of the classroom. Or his description of the whole country, Russia, as a fading regional power that produced nothing that anyone wanted. This was gratuitously insulting, degrading and finally very primitive behavior for the leader of the world’s mightiest country. And the content of his remarks was based on verifiable untruths, if only he had taken care to do fact check.

However, all of these inexcusable verbal misdeeds of the recent past are nothing compared to what Donald Trump delivered on Tuesday during the 42-minute speech marking his debut at the General Assembly of the United Nations.

Trump’s vicious remarks directed at Iran and Venezuela may have been in line with the “Axis of Evil” speeches of George W. Bush.  But his threat to “totally destroy” North Korea, a country of 22 million, if it so much as “threatened” the United States and its allies went beyond incivility.

The name Adolph Hitler has come up repeatedly in American political discourse over many decades in a search for a likeness going beyond the pale. It was applied famously by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Russian President Vladimir Putin when she sought to vilify the Russian leader as had never been done before even in the worst days of the original Cold War with the Soviet Union.

By his threats to annihilate a nation issued from the tribune of the world’s greatest forum for peace-making, Trump cast himself as a modern day Hitler.

Those of us who once backed Donald Trump on the basis of his promised normalization of relations with the world’s other nuclear superpower were initially confused and disappointed when he surrounded himself with Neocons, Liberal Interventionists and other advisers and implementers who proceeded to speak and act in ways that directly contradicted Trump’s promised changes to US foreign policy.

But now there is no room for confusion or indulgence.  We cannot point a finger at his defense secretary, “Mad Dog” Mattis, or at his Neocon ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, or at any of the generals propping him up from the right and the left.  This time it is the boss himself who spoke outrageously, who delivered what some media outlets properly called a “tirade” and others, more timidly spoke of as “bellicose.”  

What marked this speech from the long series of uncontrolled, self-indulgent tweets on foreign and domestic affairs from this President, was that it was precisely a scripted speech in which every word had obviously been weighed beforehand for its likely interpretation and public impact.  And it was the speech of a thug, of a dictator whose place in the world’s gallery of aggressors and war-makers is safely reserved.

On the day of the speech, major U.S. media contented themselves with quoting Donald’s more remarkable statements, starting with his threat to North Korea.  On day two, the editorial boards reached their conclusions on how to handle it and the remarks became more interesting and revealing. The New York Times, for example, allowed itself to point to the contradiction between Trump’s celebration of sovereign nation states, with their own traditions and patriotism and his call for regime change with respect to the three states singled out as “rogues” threatening the world order

Indeed, the sovereignty for some and not others approach on which the entire speech was built is a fault line of illogic in Trump’s thinking, if we divert ourselves with a rational analysis of what was an irrational speech.  The same fundamental contradiction was inherent in all of US foreign policy these past twenty-five years,  that of some farm animals being more equal than other farm animals, to put it in terms of George Orwell.  However, until now it was masked by the stress on universal values as the guide to foreign policy and as the justification for punishing evil-doers.  When that fig leaf is stripped away, when foreign policy is said to be built on principles of Realism and national interest, then the whole logic of might makes right, and US assertion of its right to be the world’s judge and jury is plain for all to see.

After he is removed from office on whatever grounds will do the trick, including phony charges of collusion with the Kremlin to win the presidential race, I wish Donald Trump a comfortable retirement to a bar stool at one of the lounges of Trump Tower, which is where he and his bombastic remarks truly belong.

 

 

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2017

 

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 Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. His latest book Does Russia Have a Future? was published in August 2015. His forthcoming book Does the United States Have a Future? will be published in October 2017.

 

 

by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

 

Twenty years ago posing this question would have seemed absurd. The United States was fully self-confident about its position as the sole surviving superpower in the world which faced virtually no obstacles or objections to its performance of “public goods” that brought order to the world either through the liberal international institutions that it helped to create after WWII and dominated, or unilaterally when necessary through “coalitions of the willing” aimed at bringing down one or another disruptive malefactor on a regional stage. From all sides abroad it heard only “amen” to its claims of exceptionalism and farther-seeing vision that came from its standing taller, as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it.

 

Fourteen years ago, when America prepared for its ill-conceived invasion of Iraq and encountered loud resistance from France and Germany, backed up by Russia, it became possible to wonder whether U.S. global hegemony could last.  The disaster that the Iraqi adventure quickly became within a year of George W. Bush declaring “mission accomplished” rolled on and progressively diminished the enthusiasm of allies and others hitherto in the U.S. bandwagon for each new project to re-engineer troublesome nations, to overthrow autocrats and usher in an age of liberal democracy across the globe.

Still, the doubts were discussed sotto voce. Governments tended to conform to what the Russians colorfully call “giving someone the finger in your pocket.”  Observers spoke their piece privately against the violations of international law and simple decency that the United States was perpetrating, against the swathe of chaos that followed American intervention across the Greater Middle East.  But such persons were on the fringes of political life and drew little attention.

What has happened in the past couple of years is that doubts about the competence of the United States to lead the world have been compounded by doubts about the ability of the United States to govern itself. The dysfunctionality of the federal government has come out of the closet as an issue and is talked about fairly regularly even by commentators and publications that are quintessentially representative of the establishment.

In this connection, it is remarkable to note that the September-October issue of Foreign Affairs magazine carries an essay entitled “Kleptocracy in America” by Sarah Chayes. This takes us entirely away from the personality peculiarities of the 45^th President into the broader and more important realm of the systemic flaws of governance, namely the extraordinary political power wielded by the very wealthy and the self-serving policies that they succeed in enacting, all at the expense of the general public that has stagnated economically for decades now, setting the stage for the voter revolt that brought Trump to power.

And in an op-ed essay in the The Washington Post on September 1^st that is remarkable precisely for its identification of the failing political culture in Washington, Senator John McCain says the following:

“Congress will return from recess next week facing continued gridlock as we lurch from one self-created crisis to another. We are proving inadequate not only to our most difficult problems but also to routine duties. Our national political campaigns never stop. We seem convinced that majorities exist to impose their will with few concessions and that minorities exist to prevent the party in power from doing anything important.”

McCain himself was till now a major contributor to the poisonous political climate in Washington, to partisanship that tramples patriotism under foot. One thinks of his unprecedented attack on fellow Republican Senator Rand Paul several months ago whom he accused of “working for Putin” because the good Senator refused to vote for the accession of Montenegro to NATO.

Gridlock in the federal government is nothing new. In the past decade, work of the federal government came to a standstill when Congress and the President could not agree the conditions under which the federal debt ceiling would be raised.  Such an eventuality was just narrowly averted in the past day.

Public exposure and ridicule of a sitting president for personal failings, such as the case of Bill Clinton’s sexual transgressions, have been exploited for political gain by his opponents whatever the cost to national prestige. We have lived through that crisis of the political elites and the republic survived

What is new and must be called out is the loss of civility in public discourse at all levels, from the President, from the Congress and down to the average citizen.  The widely decried personal attacks that otherwise would be called defamation during the 2016 presidential electoral campaign were symptomatic of this all-encompassing phenomenon.  It signifies a dramatic decline in American political culture that the whole world sees and is beginning to act upon in self-defense.

In what follows, I will speak to each of these levels in the calamitous loss of dignity and reason in the establishment as it bears on the unsustainability of American soft power abroad, which in turn preconditions hard power.

* * * *

 

 

Let us start with President Donald Trump, who is attacked in the news daily by the liberal media that represents the lion’s share of all television programming and print publications, media that vehemently opposes Trump’s domestic and foreign policy positions. In their determination to ensure either his impeachment or effectively to strip him of powers, they speak of Trump the way cheaply printed caricatures for the masses lampooned Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette before the French Revolution.

The President is publicly described by his compatriots as an imbecile, a rabid racist, a misogynist, a volatile and impulsive narcissist whose finger on the nuclear button gives us all goose pimples:  this cannot be ignored by the wider world outside US borders and it is not ignored.

To be sure, Donald Trump has brought a good deal of this ignominy on himself by his intemperate comments on daily events, particularly at home but also abroad, where silence or a nod to conventional verities would be the better part of valor. He keeps his own counsel on foreign affairs and erroneously believes that his instincts are superior to the advice of experts. In his kitchen cabinet, there are no experts.  In the official cabinet, he has for his own reasons assembled a group consisting of Neoconservatives and Liberal Interventionists, who made it easy for him to get confirmation in the Senate but who are all pulling in the direction opposite to the America First concepts of nonintervention in the affairs of other states that he set out in his electoral campaign.

Trump changes direction daily, even on matters as critical as the likely U.S. response to the ongoing crisis on the Korean peninsula.  The tactic of unpredictability was an approach he said in the campaign he would use against enemies, in particular against terrorist groups, not to tip them off about U.S. intentions in advance and weaken the effect of eventual U.S. military strikes. But it makes no sense when applied to all other current business, which requires a firm hand on the tiller and sense of continuity and predictability, not constant disruption.

The net result of Donald Trump’s first six months in office has been to undo the bonds of mutual confidence with our allies and friends, and to put on guard our competitors that America’s role in the world is up for grabs.

Foreign policy has opened up as a topic for discussion here in Europe ever since Donald scattered the chickens by his loose talk about NATO and America’s commitment or non-commitment to the Article 5 provision of all for one and one for all. This has given impetus to the long-spluttering plans to create a European Union army as an alternative to NATO, and as a rallying point for federalists in what will be a two-speed Europe.

During the two terms of Obama, meddling in the internal politics of China and Russia, repeated hectoring over their alleged human rights and rule of law violations, but still more importantly the wrong-headed policy of simultaneous containment of these two giants through construction of military alliances and bases at their borders put in motion a strategic partnership between them that was once improbable but is now flourishing. The Russia-China axis is underpinned by vast joint investments and promises to remake the global power balance in the decades to come.

Now, with Trump, the damage to American power in the Pacific region is spreading. His ripping up free trade accords and his incautious rhetoric regarding possible military strikes against North Korea have pushed both Japan and South Korea to explore actively and urgently how Russia can be befriended, at a minimum, for the sake of greater leverage against the big ally in North America. This has been demonstrated with perfect clarity by the meetings of Vladimir Putin with Japanese premier Shinzo Abe and Korean president Moon Jae-in at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok over the past couple of days.

Russia’s evolving political entente with both South Korea and Japan is providing support for the launch of ambitious foreign investment projects in its Far East as announced at the Forum. These include one which has the potential to re-shape the imagination of regional populations for a generation to come: revival of plans to build a 50 billion dollar rail-auto bridge linking Hokkaido with the Russian island of Sakhalin, thus uniting Japan with the continent and facilitating freight shipments across Russia to Europe. For its part, Korea announced infrastructure investments for the Northern sea route linking their country with European markets through sea lanes kept open by Russian icebreakers.  Like the Chinese One Belt One Road, these plans all dramatically reduce the importance to world trade of the long-standing US policed sea lanes off Southeast Asia up to and through the Suez Canal.

Of course, the low point in America’s image in the world today under Trump is not entirely new. By the end of his two terms in office, George W. Bush had driven American prestige to what were then all time lows even among Europeans.  There was a brief resurgence of American popularity at the start of Barack Obama’s tenure in office. But that was quickly dissipated by his failure to deliver on the pledges of his campaign and inaugural address, as Guantanamo remained open, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continued and as drone strikes proliferated.

But Donald Trump has shaken up the world order by repeatedly questioning the public goods that the country claimed to be delivering these past decades, opening a void without projecting a new vision of global governance. In the meantime, the unique value of America’s public goods is being eroded as alternative suppliers step forward.

* * * *

 

It is commonplace today within the United States to put all blame for the shocking decline in political culture at the door of President Trump with his boorish language and behavior.  However, as we noted from the outset in citing Senator John McCain’s recent op-ed, Congress has contributed mightily to the erosion of civic values by its vicious and counterproductive partisanship.

And yet 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 that the votes in August on the “Countering America’s Adversaries through Sanctions Act.”  This measure removed sanctions on Iran, North Korea and Russia from the category of Executive Order and mandated them by federal law.  In the Senate it passed 98 to 2. In the House, the vote was 419 for, 3 against.  Such results remind us of the rubber stamp legislature of the USSR, the Supreme Soviet, in its heyday.

That particular vote was still more scandalous for its being drafted and passed without any consultation with US allies and friends, though its intent is to control their commercial and credit policies with respect to the target countries under sanction.  For Europeans, in particular, this puts in question their ability to pursue what they see as great economic benefits from trade and investment with Russia and Iran. In this sense, Congress demonstrated that it is pursuing a still more radical program of America First than the President. In-your-face unilateralism such as this works directly to the detriment of the country’s standing in global forums.

 

 

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It would be comforting if the problems of our political culture began and ended with the elites operating in Washington, D.C.  However, that is patently not the case.  The problem exists across the country in the form of stultifying conformism, or groupthink that is destroying the open marketplace for ideas essential for any vital democracy.

Some of us have called this the new McCarthyism, because the most salient aspect of groupthink is the ongoing hysteria over alleged Russian meddling in U.S. domestic politics. The denunciations of “stooges of Putin” and the blacklisting from both mass and professional media of those known to deliver unconventional, heterodox views on Russia and other issues of international affairs is reminiscent of what went on during the witch hunt for Communists in government, in the media during the early 1950s. 

However, no one is being hounded from office today. There are no show trials, as yet, for treasonous collusion with Russia.  So, it would be safer to speak of an atmosphere of intimidation that stifles free debate on the key security issues facing the American public.  Absence of debate equates to a dumbing-down of our political elites as intellectual skills atrophy and results in poor formulation of policy. The whole necessarily undermines our soft power and standing in the world.

Groupthink in America today did not come from nowhere. Debilitating conformism was always part of our DNA, as is the case in a great many countries, though its emergence has been episodic and in varying degrees of severity.  The present acute manifestation in the United States goes back to the mass paranoia which followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks when the  George W. Bush administration introduced the Patriot Act, gutting our civil rights in exchange for the promise of security.

Though the revelations of Edward Snowden have shown the full extent and potency of the  instruments of surveillance over the general population that were introduced by the Bush administration after 9/11, there was enough of state control exposed in the Patriotic Act text to silence anyone with doubts about US government policies at home and abroad.  When the harsh personalities of the Bush immediate entourage were replaced by the liberal talking officials of Barack Obama, people breathed easier, but the instruments of surveillance remained in place, as did the Neocon middle and senior officials in the State Department, in the Pentagon, in the intelligence agencies.  Thus, for a whole generation the Washington narrative remained unchanged, giving encouragement in communities across the land to Neocon-minded administrators and professorate of our universities, publishers and owners of our mainstream newspapers and other arbiters of public taste.  That is quite sufficient to explain the current atmosphere of intimidation and groupthink.

 

 

 

It is improbable that any Humpty-Dumpty successor to Donald Trump can put the pieces back together again and restore American dominance to where it was at the close of Bill Clinton’s first term as president. Given American hubris, will our political class accept an equal seat at the global board of governors or just walk away from the table?

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2017

 

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 Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. His latest book Does Russia Have a Future? was published in August 2015. His forthcoming book Does the United States Have a Future? will be published in October 2017.

 

by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

 

One of the endearing features of the Harvard Alumni Organization is to oversee the production of class books for each graduating class at five year intervals from graduation to the time of collective extinction, which may be 75 years out. Bound in the college colors, this is the proverbial Red Book.  No doubt other prestige universities across the United States have a similar practice, but I will limit our consideration here to one college, which happens to be iconic and thus broadly representative of the American establishment. I will further restrict our consideration to one Red Book issue, that of the Harvard College Class of 1967, my class. These limitations have one purpose:  to arrive at some conclusions based on close study of a control sample as opposed to a broad but superficial survey of elites in general. This exercise is very timely given that the 2016 election was largely fought over the issue of the American establishment’s conflictual relationship with the broad public. So who are we in this establishment?

Despite the best efforts of cheerleading volunteer editors from our class, who tend to occupy these positions for decades and have their network of helpers, the submission of entries by classmates has its ebb and flow, with greatest success rates coming in sync with the most hyped and attractive reunions, the 25^th and 50^th. The first marks the time when professional and familial ambitions have reached flight altitude. The second marks the high water of success and the onset of decline.  These are times to report, times to be seen, if ever and many classmates who were silent finally make their contributions. Our class had something like 75% participation in the 50^th year Red Book, and so it is very indicative of who we are.

Professionally who are we?  The single largest field is clearly health services, and within that, it is psychology and psychiatry.  I will not speculate on what demand for such services says about our society at large, but the fact is striking.  After that, quite predictably, many classmates have made their careers in law and in the justice system.  The third great profession is education, mainly higher education but also going down into secondary and primary education, both public and private. 

After that comes business, though here there are some surprises.  Relatively few classmates made careers in large corporations.  A great many were self-starters, entrepreneurs who founded their own companies.  That attests to considerable self-confidence and risk taking. 

Indeed, very few classmates served in the federal government or other large bureaucratic institutions.  Regimentation apparently is not readily accepted by individuals as talented and ambitious as my Harvard classmates. These talents are multi-dimensional and explain the rather high rate of mid-career changes in occupation, from sciences to arts or vice versa.  No doubt these unusual career decisions were facilitated by substantial financial success at an early age that made experimentation possible.

There are among my Harvard College mates and Radcliffe graduates reporting in the Red Book a very few star performers who enjoy national name recognition.  These include Lou Dobbs (before he fell from grace), the Hollywood and Broadway actor John Lithgow, and several politicians who reached the national stage. One,  Richard Morningstar, was for many years a key official in the State Department in charge of Eurasian energy matters and ended his career as US ambassador to Azerbaijan.  Tom Ridge reached national prominence as Governor of Pennsylvania and then served George W. Bush as the first Secretary of Homeland Security. The most recent big name is Richard Blumenthal, current U.S. Senator from Connecticut, who has been highly visible of late in his attacks on President Trump over Russia-gate and who received pay back in kind from Donald in some fairly vicious denunciations of his misrepresentations of his Vietnam War service.  Sad to say, these political stars all have their place in my personal rogues’ gallery since they one and all have been champions of U.S. global hegemony and stoked the confrontation with our nuclear peer, Russia, putting the security of us all in great jeopardy today.

A much larger number of classmates have achieved state, regional and national reputations in their chosen professions, though they may be invisible to the general public.  They are the chairmen of law associations, or highly decorated research scientists or educators at the head of the national organizations of their discipline.

The great majority of classmates have reached material prosperity and respectability that makes them the pillars of their communities. They are public spirited and generous donors to worthy causes.  They serve on the boards of cultural, educational and other local associations. They work for social justice in their communities.

All of this is to the good, and matches the expectations one might have for graduates of the country’s top elite school with a distinctly left of center political orientation.  However, leafing through the thousand plus pages of the Red Book, I was struck by the way classmates’ vision and interests are concentrated in their families and communities to the exclusion of the broader nation, not to mention the world at large.

Out of the 900 or so entries, you can count on one hand those who expressed any concern about the state of the nation.  And the world outside U.S. borders appears in their writings almost exclusively as a destination for prestige tourism.  Now that many are semi or fully retired, those still in good health are going through their “bucket lists” of must-see locations around the globe.  Indeed, many of the photos that were sent in for photo gallery of this Red Book were chosen to show off desirable backgrounds like the Eiffel Tower or similar. 

Aside from the few foreigners who were in our class, there are almost no American born Harvard classmates who might be considered to be citizens of the world.  Yes, to be sure, we have educators who taught semesters abroad on Fulbright or other grants.  Yes, we have businessmen who traveled widely and even served some time stationed abroad. And there are some diplomats among us but nearly all were political appointees for whom the posting represented a reward for campaign contributions.  None of these professional travelers suggest in their class reports that the experience abroad changed their outlooks in any way.

The net result is shocking provincialism among the country’s best educated and most successful professionals who are my classmates. That was confirmed in face to face meetings we had over the four days of our Reunion and in group discussion events.

The key event of our reunion was about how the Vietnam War affected us all, for which 3 hours were allocated in one of the larger auditoriums.  In preparation for the event classmates were invited to send in personal accounts of the impact of the war on them. About 175 did so, and the organizers compiled from this a pdf book which was distributed to the class ahead of the Reunion on a strictly confidential basis.

The intent of the organizers of the book and the event was to mediate a reconciliation between those who served in the Armed Forces during the war and those who didn’t. The reasonable assumption was that at 50 years distance any hot feelings from our youth will have been dissipated.  Indeed, the event was quite civilized and innocent.

It also revealed something otherwise not the least bit obvious:  that the Vietnam War had almost no impact on the lives and careers of the Class of 1967 though we graduated right into the midst of the draft and the civil disturbances of the antiwar movement.

A fairly large minority of our class did serve during the war, but only a tiny proportion of those saw military action in Southeast Asia.  A large contingent of those who served did so as doctors in training, and most of those served their time in laboratories of the National Health Service or in other capacities which in no way slowed their advance along their career lines. This is not a judgment, merely a statement of fact.  Another large contingent found positions in the National Reserves and remained stateside.  Others volunteered in order to secure places in the Coast Guard or in the Navy (including one or two who chose submarine service). Anything but the infantry!

A majority of our class did no military service and avoided the draft by a variety of respectable and less than respectable stratagems.  Some entered the Peace Corps. Some entered the domestic equivalent, VISTA. Some secured teaching positions in the public school systems which conferred draft deferrals.  Some found ways to get medical exemptions, by hook or by crook.  A very few claimed and were recognized as valid Conscientious Objectors, and did their national service working in hospitals performing menial jobs.  It is interesting that out of 1200 not one said he considered leaving the country, though moving across the border to Canada or finding refuge elsewhere was discussed a lot in the media at the time.

My conclusion is that the convulsions which tore apart Berkeley and other public universities seem not to have influenced the course of action and mentality of my classmates. The war was an inconvenience which with or without connections one could deal with and then move on.

Is it surprising then that today the problems of the wider world, the military and economic posture of our country in that wider world, are of little interest to Harvard ‘67? This is not burn-out and retreat to one’s near surroundings.  It’s all the same “I’ve been blessed” that turned up in the Red Book entries of my class from the very first issue 45 years ago.

The sad, and possibly tragic thing is that the self-satisfaction, the smugness and false sense of security in these entries and the indifference to the broader world and our country’s role in making it the mess it is, means that all the talent and prestige of this elite brings no weight at all to bear on the nation’s politics, least of all on its foreign policy. Our politicians in Washington, D.C. get a free ride.

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2017

 

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 Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. His latest book Does Russia Have a Future? was published in August 2015. His forthcoming book Does the United States Have a Future? will be published in the autumn of 2017.

 

 

 

 

 

by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D

 

Our 5 week stay at our home in the Russian countryside was approaching its conclusion when I got an email from a friend in France asking me to comment on an article in The New York Times entitled “Russia’s Villages, and Their Way of Life, Are ‘Melting Away’” (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/29/world/europe/russia-population-changes.html?_r=0).

The article surely met the expectations of its editors by painting a grim picture of decline and fall of the Russian countryside in line with what the author sees as very unfavorable demographic trends in the Russian Federation as a whole. The fact that his own statistics do not justify the generalization (a net population loss of a few thousand deaths over live births in 2016 for a population of 146 million) does not get in the way of the paint-by-color canvas.  Nor does the author explain why what he has observed in a village off the beaten track in Northwest Russia, in precisely the still poor region of Pskov, gives an accurate account of country life across the vast territory of Russia, the world’s largest nation-state.

As the author notes, the main source of income from the land of the town he visited was in the past linen. That cultivation turned unprofitable and was discontinued. Consequently, the able-bodied part of the population has been looking for employment and making their lives elsewhere.

The author fails to mention that linen production is not a major agricultural indicator in Russia today, whereas many other crops are booming.  Linen goes into the lovely traditional handicraft tablecloths and napkins sold to tourists at riverboat landings, and that is the extent of demand.

I could respond to the overriding portrait of countryside decay in the NYT article by drawing on my observations a year ago from the deck of one of those riverboats navigating the canals and rivers connecting St Petersburg and Moscow.  From that deck and from the experience of walking around the little picturesque towns where we made stops, I understand that growing domestic Russian tourism has pumped financial resources into historic centers, like Uglich. They are coming alive, with infrastructure improvements and reviving trade.

However, tourist sites are not going to be representative of the country at large.  So I will instead use two sources of information that I am confident have greater relevance to the issue at hand.  The first, and surely the most politically significant, comes from a couple of family friends who for nearly 50 years have spent summers at a parcel of land deep in the hinterland, 280 km southeast of St Petersburg, close to regional industrial center of Pikalyovo, (Leningradskaya Oblast) with its train station along the line linking the northern capital to Vologda. The second source is my own experience in and around our property in Orlino, a hamlet numbering 300 inhabitants in the Gatchina district, also Leningradskaya Oblast, but 80 km due south of Petersburg.

The homesteads around Pikalyovo were always hard to get to, with very poor local roads. There was no commercial infrastructure, so the bold and determined vacationers coming here had to bring most provisions for their stay with them. They were rewarded for their efforts by the produce grown in their gardens and by foraging for berries and highly desirable boletes and other wild mushrooms in the surrounding forests.

When the Soviet Union collapsed and the Russian economy followed suit in the 1990s, the Pikalyovo region suffered the kind of economic misery and population loss that the NYT describes today in the Pskov region.  Our friends saw that normal folks left, and the concentration of drunkards and thieves rose proportionately.  The theft of anything of value in common space became acute when scrap metal scavengers pulled up kilometers of electrical cables for their copper content, leaving swathes of the district temporarily without electricity.

Pikalyovo came to the attention of national news during the 2008 – 2009 financial crisis when its three main industrial enterprises shut down, causing widespread misery.  The best known of these enterprises, a clay processing plant owned by the oligarch Oleg Derispaska’s conglomerate Basic Element, caused a major scandal when state television carried reports on how the factory had not paid its employees for months while the boss was seeking and obtaining government assistance with repayment, rescheduling of his foreign loans.  In the spring of 2009, there were protest demonstrations in Pikalyovo that resulted in both Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin personally entering the dispute to pressure Deripaska to do the right thing.

The economic woes of the regional economic hub did nothing to improve the living conditions in nearby hamlets like the one where our friends have their parcel.  Our friends started cutting back on their visits and missed a year or two altogether. All of this would seem to confirm the story line of the Times reporter, but the latest word from Volodya and Tamara overturns the story line completely.

A few weeks ago our friends decided to go back to the property to prepare it for sale. They had had enough, they thought.

However, once there they discovered things were definitely looking up.  A newly completed 35 km highway makes their settlement much more accessible.  But more importantly, the neighbors have changed – for the better.  A retired colonel moved in a couple of years ago and started raising pigs, cows and chickens, offering meat, eggs and dairy products for sale, thereby ending our friends’ need for brought-in provisions. His example attracted others. New and dynamic settlers are putting into practice the ‘return to the land’ trend that is an undeniable feature of current Russian social life.  Our friends have decided not to sell, and to spend more time on their property.

 

 

In legal terms, the parcel of land my wife owns in the hamlet of Orlino (population 300) is categorized as a “subsistence farm.” The nature of the farming to be done there even features in the plan attached to the cadastral registry: the 700 square meters where the house was built facing the “Central Street” can be used for fruit trees and vegetable garden; the back field of another 700 square meters is allocated for potatoes, cabbage and similar crops. 

In the vernacular, however, together with the two-story planed log house we built here 5 years ago, the property is considered a “dacha,” a summer residence. Nearly one in two urban Russian households has a dacha.

 Young people think of dachas as weekend get-away locations to hold a barbecue for friends and family.  If they have a feeling for Russian traditions, it is where they take their Saturday banya, or sauna in dedicated outhouses heated by wood burning stoves and then socialize over a beer. Older folks and pensioners find this frivolous. In their view, the dacha is not so much a place to idle time away as it is a place of honest toil, working the land and communing with nature. And even some of the younger generation buys into the concept of growing their own organic foods on their land, thus getting along without industrially farmed supermarket produce, whether domestic or imported. 

One hundred years ago, Orlino was populated mostly by wealthy merchants whose businesses were in the extended district. They lived here year-round in substantial houses, some of which have survived to this day. To the back of the houses, what were essentially barns were built on, and there they kept some small livestock.  No one in Orlino today keeps chickens, pigs, goats, not to mention cows.  But they do till the land with great enthusiasm and look after their fruit trees and red berry shrubs.

The notion of subsistence farming suggests border-line poverty. But Orlino was never poor, and its residents are not indigent today.  Oldsters whose pensions are inadequate are supported by their children or nephews/nieces’ families living in the local towns, in the district capital of Gatchina 50 km away, or even in St Petersburg.  In return, these relatives visit in the summer to spend some days of vacation and take advantage of the large lake on the edge of the hamlet, which is lovely for swimming or boating when the weather is cooperative.

The notion of subsistence farming also suggests tough practicality.  But making good use of the land does not exclude aesthetic pleasures, and every parcel of land in the hamlet is decorated by flower beds showing great ingenuity and effort.  Similarly, in the last year the Orlino farmers have all gone the way of their brethren across Russia and invested in greenhouses made of pre-formed polycarbonate walls, most commonly resembling hoops in profile.  Here they put in tomatoes, cucumbers and other highly prized vegetables for their dining table which do not do well in the short growing season of the North, and in the very adverse climatic conditions which were exemplary this year in terms of cool temperatures and incessant rains.  Given the expense of these greenhouses, the investment is not so much economically justified as it is a point of pride in self-sufficiency and green-thumb skills.

Electricity is the only utility that spells dependency for Orlino residents.  Otherwise, each household has its own well, its own septic tank system, its own gas cylinder for the cooking stove and its own supply of birch logs for a wood burning stove that is the mainstay of heating.

Many households have cars.  The most recent arrivals, being by far the most prosperous, often have four-wheel drive utility vehicles. This is a valuable benefit given the deplorable condition of many local roads.  But then there are a significant minority who depend on the local bus system to get around. It is cheap, runs to schedule and gets you from point A to point B without fuss. 

The hamlet has a couple of grocery stores, so that staples are always available within easy walking distance. For luxuries, there is the town of Siversk 10 km away.  Numbering perhaps 10,000 it is the local economic hub, with several factories, including a manufacturer of good quality upholstered furniture. Siversk has a train station with hourly connections to Gatchina and St Petersburg.  It also has several supermarkets run by major national retail chains, so that you will find exactly the same product assortment as in St Petersburg or Moscow. And there are a number of high quality specialty food stores and at least one bakery which is indistinguishable from what you might find in Vienna or Frankfurt

In the not so distant past, even urban Russians had not much interest in salads or in fish. Chicken legs or sausages or pork  cutlets for the barbecue were what folks shopped for as main courses.  Now even our Siversk stores offer pre-packaged mixed lettuce salads or rucola coming from greenhouse complexes in Greater St Petersburg.  And for its part, the leading fish store offers not only salmon steaks from Scandinavian producers, but several varieties of delicacy fish from Europe’s largest fresh water lake, situated 50 km to the east of Petersburg. Still more impressive is the assortment of fish coming down each day from Murmansk: excellent flounder and superb gorbusha, a wild salmon usually considered to be a Pacific Ocean variety but also available in the waters north and west of Siberia. And for those with deeper pockets, the fish vendor in little Siversk occasionally offers a fresh sterlet, the magnificent 1 kg size representative of the sturgeon family that is farmed on the Volga in Astrakhan, far to the South.

I offer these observations from shopping to make the following point about the Russian country life as I see it:  a lively economy with a population growing ever more sophisticated and aspiring to the good life.

When I shared these thoughts with my friend in France, he shot back:  what about the lower strata of society? How are they faring?

My ready response draws on my 5 year acquaintance with our “average Joe” neighbor in Orlino,  Sergei. When we settled here five years ago, he drilled our artesian well, installed the electric pump and all sanitary plumbing in our house. Now he winterizes the house each year and keeps an eye on the property when we are away, for compensation to be sure, but more out of friendship, because he has other, more lucrative sources of income as a subcontractor or day worker on local construction projects. There is a lot of work of this kind now that Orlino’s fallow fields are slowly being converted into housing estates.  Sergei is a master of several building trades. He also drives a tractor. He is mechanically gifted.

Sergei is about 55, the father of a grown son and daughter, the grandfather of two. When we first met, he was living in an apartment in a multi-unit wooden house dating back 60 or 70 years that was neither comfortable nor attractive. In the past three years he has realized a long time dream and built for himself a two-story cement block house, now clad in siding. The interior space is perhaps 250 square meters. When you pass it from the road, in a row of several other very substantial recent houses, you would place it as solidly upper middle class.  And next to his house Sergei has put up a very fine and large greenhouse. Beyond that is an extensive field of splendid potatoes and vegetables.

To be sure, the second story of Sergei’s house still needs work and he and his wife live now only on the ground floor.  Moreover, the investment of all spare cash into the house has scuttled other needs. When Sergei’s ancient Toyota pick-up finally rusted into irreparable condition, he found himself without motorized transport. Until further notice, until he can put together the down payment for a new vehicle, he gets around town on a bicycle.

Sergei is no fool. He gripes about local corruption and terrible roads.  But on the whole he is satisfied with his lot and optimistic about the future. Any belt-tightening that has been made necessary by Western sanctions he takes in his stride. He is resolutely patriotic.

I realize full well that the observations taken from my personal experience of the Russian countryside and from the experience of close friends is anecdotal and so not statistically significant.  But then neither are the observations of The New York Times reporter. Russia is a vast land and you can pretty much find what you are looking for there.  Nonetheless, the gross economic statistics published by Rosstat are upbeat and fully contradict the notion of a country in decline, including its rural component.

 

 

 

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2017

 

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Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. His latest book Does Russia Have a Future? was published in August 2015. His forthcoming book Does the United States Have a Future? will be published in the autumn of 2017.

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