David Ignatius actually has a good column in today’s Washington Post. It’s built on two pillars. The first pillar is a look back to an interview he did with Scoop Jackson during the Iran Hostage Crisis in 1980.
The year was 1980. The Iranian revolution had toppled the shah’s regime, the Soviet Union had just invaded Afghanistan and the United States’ president, Jimmy Carter, was widely perceived as a weak leader. Looking for a sharp-edged evaluation of the situation, I decided to interview Sen. Henry M. Jackson, a leading hawk.
What Jackson (D-Wash.) said was surprising, even at a distance of nearly 35 years. Rather than demanding tougher statements or more saber-rattling, he said he worried about “overreaction” to events: “We appear to be going from one crisis to another,” with Washington dispensing “red-hot rhetoric at least once a week about the dire consequences of this or that or something else.”
“We need to be prudent,” said Jackson, who was perhaps the most prominent Cold Warrior of his day. “There is a need for the U.S. to make careful decisions, stand by those decisions, and avoid sending false or conflicting signals” to U.S. allies or the Russians.
Jackson’s message, in essence, was “cool it.”
President Carter felt sufficiently egged on in an election year that he authorized Operation Eagle Claw, with disastrous results.
Ignatius’s second pillar is a contemporary interview with Robert Gates.
Gates said that Obama is correct to avoid loose talk about military options. “I’d even be cautious about sending warships into the Black Sea,” Gates explained. “It’s a threatening gesture, but if you’re not prepared to do something about it, it’s an empty gesture.”
I asked Gates what he thought about the criticism of Obama by McCain and Graham. “They’re egging him on” to take actions that may not be effective, Gates warned. He said he “discounted” their deeper argument that Obama had invited the Ukraine crisis by not taking a firmer stand on Syria or other foreign policy issues. Even if Obama had bombed Syria or kept troops in Iraq or otherwise shown a tougher face, “he still would have the same options in Ukraine. Putin would have the same high cards.”
This got me thinking about John McCain. He has recommended using military force repeatedly in situations where force (or his recommended level of force) was not ultimately used. He urged us to war in Georgia in 2008 when Bush was still the president, and he urged us to aggressively pursue regime change in Iran (2010), for greater involvement in Libya (2011), and to fight a war Syria (2012) .
Now he argues that Obama’s (and, by implication, Bush’s) refusal to use force (or adequate force) in those situations demonstrated fecklessness and sent a signal of weakness to Vlaidmir Putin which encouraged him to invade Crimea. Robert Gates completely dismissed that argument, but we ought to try to understand how it might be that McCain is correct. If we risked World War III by intervening in Georgia, perhaps Putin wouldn’t be so bold today (assuming he, and any of us were still alive). If we caused regime change in Iran, put boots on the ground in Libya, and occupied Syria, perhaps Putin would see us as crazy enough to push NATO into Ukraine, too.
But, think for a minute about how we would be perceived by the world if we had done all those things. Think about how strong our military threat would be if we were currently occupying Libya and Syria. If we had spent the last six years acting as lawless bloodthirsty madmen, maybe our foreign policy wouldn’t be considered feckless, but it wouldn’t have made us stronger or given us more loyal allies in Europe.
cue Arthur Gilroy to tell us that we have “spent the last six years acting as lawless bloodthirsty madmen.”
2008 election made no difference.
Hey, I’ll stand in for Arthur.
Thanks.
You’re Welcome
The difference is “the least transparent administration in history” has had more broad-ranging leaks about the craziness that has been going on in the national security and intelligence communities. The Nuland-Pyatt phone call — “Fuck the EU” — was an amazing event for a diplomatic service engaged in covert operations. If you can’t fire them for the policy, at least fire them for the leak and the contempt they show in their private conversation for erstwhile “allies”.
Should we bet on it?
It is an odd transition from ‘preemptive strike Bush/Cheney’ policy to McCain’s ‘strike at anything that moves’ cheer.
Around here in the summertime we have rattlesnakes. 20 years ago, if you came upon a rattler it would coil and strike at any movement. But apparently that’s not worked well for the species as many hikers killed them. Then we noticed that they coiled and rattled to give warning. But people still killed them. Now, most rattlesnakes here won’t coil, won’t rattle but will wait for you to step on them then they’ll nail ya. The population is now growing.
John McCain forever misses his victory in Vietnam parade. He yearns for that parade his dad got.
Too many of the older neo-cons still want to punish Russia for assassinating Trotsky. And their offspring march in lockstep with their elders. Podhoretz, Kristol, Kagan–all sick with the same disease. To their mind the Soviet Union still lives in Putin.
Gates was surprisingly loyal to his most recent boss, given Gates’s resume. And he’s right. The analogy of threatening Sevastapol to the threat that Soviet missiles in Cuba were in 1962 is not far off. Russia is not going to allow Sevastapol to become a NATO base (unless Russia itself becomes part of NATO, and then what’s the point of the alliance).
There’s a huge sense of anachronism in the way the propaganda on Ukraine has been pushed from both sides, and the actions from Victoria Nuland’s shop.
You know, I’ve been seeing many references to this Nuland person, apparently a neocon holdover at State. I have to say I wonder exactly how exactly the (Kerry) State Department, to say nothing of the WH, could have been “tricked” into some neocon Ukraine policy that turns out not to have worked so well.
One would have to think that whatever our Ukraine policy was to be, it would have to have been approved at higher level(s) than Ms. Nuland, no?
Nuland is not a holdover. She was appointed by Obama in 2011 (the year after the Tea Party takeover) and during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State. What gets approved at higher levels might not the specifics that Nuland (and likely John Brennan as well) carried out. And Brennan is a true holdover.
The President depends on trusting his direct reports for information and advice. They trust their direct reports all the way down into the civil service level of government. Reporting in any organization is often incomplete with people working their own agendas within perceive limits of tolerance of the boss.
Because of the power that the attempt at bipartisanship has given Republicans, the President is more tolerant of fuck-ups than he should be. For example, Brennan’s intransigence on declassifying the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on torture should long ago have cause Brennan’s firing for cause….But Benghazi…You see how the nonsense works politically.
Obama is not a foreign policy expert. And those who are have recommended the staffing he has. The problem is that the US foreign policy institutions including elite academic institutions have self-selected for Realists and neo-conservatives for sixty-eight years. And the notion that Russia is an enemy has been a foundational belief for sixty-seven years. And these same folks have been captivated by Rudyard Kipling’s notion of the Great Game for sixty years. (Stephen Kinzer’s The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War tells about Allen Dulles’s captivation with Kipling’s Kim. Like J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, Allen Dulles shaped the institutional culture of the US intelligence community.
One has to look at the words that were brought to be approved or the framing of the President’s or Secretary of State’s decision in order to know to what extent plausible deniability gave people a free hand to operate outside of Presidential authority. See how the hall of mirrors works in covert ops?
Better yet, why is Nuland still there since anyone paying attention knows she’s a Darth Cheney moll.
I’m quite sure that the Soviet Union lives in Putin’s dreams. He’s subverted the Russian Constitution to make himself President for Life, he’s used gas shipments to coerce Europe. He’s invaded Georgia. Now he’s taken Crimea, next probably the rest of the Ukraine. After that? Lithuania? Poland? No one can stop him except China. I see he doesn’t send “peacekeepers” into disputed regions that border China.
I was surprised at the strong pro-Russian sentiment here. I should have been after all the anti-Israel sentiment. The Left has gone back to the 1970’s when anything American was bad and anything Russian was good. That, along with Carter’s economic ineptitude was what ushered in Reaganism.
You don’t have to be pro-Russian to see that it is very dangerous to threaten the primary southern naval base that Russia retains. Suppose there was a government that came to power in Germany that threatened US presence in Ramstein when the US was determined to stay? Do you think that the US would settle for occupying the Rhineland-Palatinate state of Germany?
Putin’s a Russian nationalist because economic tough times bring nationalists to power because an external enemy is a great diversion. Under the circumstances Soviet nostalgia is preferable to outright fascism, which exists in the nationalist parties in the Duma. And Putin has taken pains to avoid war in Syria and avoid war in Crimea.
You don’t have to be pro-Russian to notice that the Nuland-Pyatt conversation was arrogant, scheming, and reckless. Says Nuland, “Fuck the EU.” In her opinion, the US is going this alone.
You don’t have to be pro-Russian to understand that Right Sector and the Svoboda parties are the counterparts of Golden Dawn in Greece and that nationalist parties in bad time can destroy the peaceful unity that US policy has worked sixty years to institutionalize.
None of that leads to a peaceful world and a reduction of armaments and militaries worldwide.
You don’t have to be pro-Russian to notice that Nuland-Pyatt’s gambit comes exactly as the Obama administration is talking about reducing military budgets and troop size.
But focus on “crazy Putin” as the US media have framed the situation.
Because a neo-con program whose purpose was not the interests of the Ukrainian people but to bite Putin’s butt came close to backfiring.
The US is likely to get most of the Ukraine available for ties to Western Europe. The Ukrainian people are going to be saddled with neoliberal policies and IMF loans. No one will be “able to afford” resealing the sarcophagus that enclosed the Chernobyl meltdown and another radiation leak will join Fukushima in poisoning the environment.
Russia is likely to hold Sevastapol and Crimea, thus holding both banks of the Dnieper River.
Southern and eastern Ukraine will either be areas of conflict or not depending on the agreement that the US-EU and Russia come to.
Neo-cons will claim that Russia has been rewarded for aggression because of Obama’s weakness.
Lefties will claim that the US after starting a coup attempt in Venezuela had a successful coup in Ukraine.
Why is no one looking at what’s going on in Thailand with the attempt to overthrow Yingluck Shinawatra, a populist prime minister accused of corruption? Because it neither involves Russia nor China, the two dark beasts of US neo-con enmity. But it does involve the business classes seeking complete control over the government.
Starting to think nepotism in punditry is worse than nepotism in politics. Which would make it pretty bad indeed.
Because punditry is where the opposition party waits for its next chance at power, they are no different.
In McFool’s world, the US won in Vietnam, the Chinese and the Soviets always back down (especially on their own doorsteps), Iraq was a Glorious Victory and the Ayatollahs abandon their theocracy becuz Imperial Soldiery to the “rescue”.
If one wants to talk about the World’s Greatest Bloviator, Pinhead Palin’s running mate is the Real Deal…basically as stupid as they come. The two of them together don’t equal one average intellect, Jeebus. He (and she) are the perfect representatives of the Imbecile American, those who never fail to see the US military as the “answer” whatever the question may be. This is what we are shackled to….
McCain’s greatest value is the Colonel Klink factor—he CANNOT be correct about a single matter of foreign policy, which is valuable to know. At this point in his useless career, Senator Strangelove is a generator of perpetual satire, made all the more absurd by his obliviousness to the fact.
Think about the US economy if under McCain we’re entering a new war every two years and occupying all countries we invaded in the previous 10.
War rescues economies. Because, ya know, WWII ended the Great Depression and not FDR and his team of liberals, socialists, Frances Perkins, Marriner Eccles. And the US economy boomed when it went to the bestest war McCain has ever seen.
In McCain’s world, peace = economic depressions because he lives in some imaginary place in some imaginary time.
Our allies in Europe do not seem particularly inclined to act well, like allies at the moment.
They would act more like allies if the war the saber rattlers want were projected to take place on US soil and not on soil too close to them for comfort. They still have a living memory of a big war in their midst and have no appetite for another sequel. Such memories are long gone in the US — but the South has yet to rise again.
Likely. Basic strategy to fight on someone else’s territory. But there’s a difference between doing effectively nothing and pushing for war.
It has been interesting to see what the markets have accomplished. Economic bullets work well.
I’ve read that McCain’s idol is Theodore Roosevelt, which is strange because this whole “Speak softly but carry a big stick” thing seems to have gone right over his head. He seems to have heard “Carry a BIG FUCKING STICK and USE IT!”
And ironic because our stick with Russia is pretty damned small.
That’s his advice to others. In his own conduct as senator or presidential candidate it’s wave around any stick you can find and make as much noise as possible.
If we had kept troops in Iraq, involved ourselves more heavily in Syria and gone hog wild supporting the street protests in Iran, all over Russia’s objections, they would probably be more agressive in setting up Putin’s Eurasian zone right now, not less. It would be an urgent matter to seal off Ukraine once and for all from the West.
And they could be agressive. Because we wouldn’t have the resources to offer any credible threat.
They would have no reason to believe that we would keep our word about anything, since no matter what our adversaries offer us to sit at the table, we’d be invading them anyway. We’d be lucky if anyone would take us seriously at all accept as an out of controll agressive country.
I noted back in the 90s that Ollie North was working in support of Operation Eagle Claw at a base in Turkey.
I wouldn’t suggest treason…
I see where Russia already has a pipeline under the North Sea and is building one under the Black Sea, which would make the pipeline through Ukraine to be superfluous. That means that Russia will be able to supply energy to Europe without having to deal with Ukraine.
That would reduce Ukraine to merely being a fascist sinkhole to irritate the Russians.
Considering the Cold War ended twenty years ago, why is NATO still in existence? Let me see, oil in Libya, pipelines in Georgia. Proposed pipeline in Afghanistan. Oil in Iraq. Proposed pipeline in Syria.