Enige achtergrondkennis voor nieuwkomers.
Het blad Foreign Affairs is de spreekbuis van De Macht in Amerika.
Het wordt gepubliceerd door de Council on Foreign Relations. ( CFR)
Dit is een Instituut en denktank met heel veel invloed op het beleid..
Veel top-politici zijn waren vòòr ze bijv. minister werden lid van deze CFR.
Veel kritische denkers beweren dat de ware macht in de VS bij deze CFR ligt.
In Foreign Affairs vind je artikelen die op het beleid vooruit lopen, verdedigen en verklaren.
Maar een heel enkele keer is er ruimte voor kritiek, voor een andere kijk op de zaak.
Waarom doen ze dat?
We weten het niet.
Maar we weten wel dat 'een leugenachtige voorstelling van zaken' niets te duchten heeft van een kritiek die de waarheid vertyelt, tenzij die kritici meer dan 10 % van de berichten mogen plaatsen in de MSM. Pas dàn zullen de mensen er geloof aan hechten. ( Dit is in psycholgisch onderzoek bewezen.)
Het wereldbeeld dat 'Putin de nieuwe Hitler' is, loopt dus geen enkel gevaar door deze ene publicatie.
Het betekent dus geen wending van de policy.
Volgens Gilbert Doctorow , die een heel goede inleiding op het onderstaande artikel gaf, kan het ook zo zijn dat Foreign Affairs zich indekt tegen mogelijke kritiek oplater tijdstip. Nu kan men altijd beweren dat men àlle meningen aan het woord liet. Dat men de persvrijheid in acht nam.
Doctorow's artikel bevat een video die ik hier als eerste wil plaatsen:
( Mike Maloney, 7 min)
WAAROM RUSLAND ( terecht) BANG IS VOOR (een oorlog met) AMERIKA:
Russia, Trump, and a New Détente
Fixing U.S.-Russian Relations
In his first press conference as president of the United States, Donald
Trump said no fewer than seven times that it would be “positive,” “good,” even
“great” if “we could get along with Russia.” In fact, for all the confusion of
his policies toward China, Europe, and the Middle East, Trump has enunciated a
clear three-part position on Russia, which contrasts strongly with that of most
of the U.S. political elite. First, Trump seeks Moscow’s cooperation on global
issues; second, he believes that Washington shares the blame for soured
relations; and third, he acknowledges “the
right of all nations to put their own interests first,” adding that the United
States does “not seek to impose our way of life on anyone.”
The last of these is an essentially realist position, and if coherently
implemented could prove a tonic. For 25 years, Republicans and Democrats have
acted in ways that look much the same to Moscow. Washington has pursued
policies that have ignored Russian interests (and sometimes international law
as well) in order to encircle Moscow with military alliances and trade blocs
conducive to U.S. interests. It is no wonder that Russia pushes back. The wonder
is that the U.S. policy elite doesn’t get this, even as foreign-affairs
neophyte Trump apparently does.
MEMORY LOSS
Most Americans appreciate the weight of past grievances upon present-day
politics, including that of the United States’ own interference in Iran in the
1950s, or in Latin America repeatedly from the 1960s through the 1980s. Yet
there is a blind spot when it comes to U.S. interference in Russian politics in
the 1990s. Many Americans remember former President Bill Clinton as a great
benefactor to Russia as the country attempted to build a market democracy under
then President Boris Yeltsin. But most Russians see the United States as having
abetted a decade of degradation under Yeltsin’s scandal-ridden bumbling.
Washington, they believe, not only took advantage of Moscow’s weakness for
geopolitical gain but also repeatedly interfered in Russia’s domestic politics
to back the person—Yeltsin—who best suited U.S. interests. Americans’ ignorance
of this perception creates a highly distorted picture of Russia’s first
postcommunist decade.
Russia’s misery during the 1990s is difficult for outsiders to comprehend.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia’s economy entered a sharp
slide that would continue for over eight years. Although this decline is rarely
referred to as a depression in Western media, in fact it was much worse than
the Great Depression in the United States—between 1929 and 1932, U.S. GDP fell
by some 25 percent, whereas Russia’s fell by over 40 percent between 1990 and 1998.
Compared with the Great Depression, Russia’s collapse of the 1990s was nearly
twice as sharp, lasted three times as long, and caused far more severe health and mortality crises. The public health disaster reflected Russia’s prolonged agony:
stress-aggravated pathologies (suicide, disease caused by increased alcohol and
tobacco use) and economically induced woes (poor nutrition, violent crime, a
crumbling public health system) combined to cause at least three million “excess deaths” in the 1990s.
Faith in free markets, and admiration for the United States, fell sharply
in Russia in the 1990s. The failures of “shock therapy,” or the rapid
transition to a market economy, made such alienation inevitable, as the rush
toward privatization and slashing of the state led not to self-regulating
growth and broad prosperity but to a pillaging of national wealth by rapacious
oligarchs, who flourished under Yeltsin. Worse, American talk of a Marshall
Plan for Russia proved empty, and U.S. aid—particularly in the critical first
years of transition—was a paltry $ 7 billion. Much of
that was in the form of credits that came attached with strings requiring the
purchase of U.S. goods or the hiring of U.S. consultants. Also hurting
America’s image were much-publicized cases of corruption on the
part of some Americans, involving insider trading, money laundering, and
similar scandals.
In 1993, hyperinflation and poverty led to protests, and the Russian
parliament passed legislation attempting to block Yeltsin’s reforms. Yeltsin
responded by deciding to close the legislature and redesign the political
system to concentrate power in his hands. This, however, was blatantly
unconstitutional, and many deputies refused to disband. Some turned to violent
resistance and were crushed by the army. The Clinton administration regretted
the bloodshed but blamed it on the opposition, while ignoring the illegality of
Yeltsin’s power grab. And the United States supported Yeltsin again two months
later, when a referendum on a “super-presidential” constitution passed in a rigged vote.
In 1996, there was more U.S.-assisted mischief on the part of Yeltsin. The
worst incident was the “loans for shares” scandal, a crooked privatization
scheme in which Yeltsin sold Russia’s most valuable natural-resource firms to
oligarchs by way of fraudulent auctions—a fraud that was matched by that of the 1996 election, when
Yeltsin won his second term. The United States was again tarred by complicity,
by winking at such electoral violations as state media working to elect Yeltsin
or the gross violations of campaign spending limits, and even by sending U.S.
advisers to help Yeltsin’s stumbling campaign.
The Clinton administration tolerated Yeltsin’s regime in part to gain
Russia’s compliance on global issues, including NATO expansion. But even this
was shortsighted as well as hypocritical. George Kennan, author of the Cold War
containment policy, warned that pushing NATO toward
Russia’s borders was “a strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions,”
which was likely to provoke an anti-Western backlash. Other experts, such as
intelligence veteran Fritz Ermarth, issued warnings at the time over the United
States’ complicity in Russia’s domestic corruption. “We have largely lost the
admiration and respect of the Russian people,” Ermarth wrote. “Think how
[U.S. policy] must look to Russians: you support the regime’s corruption of our
country on the inside so it supports you in your humiliation of our country on
the outside. One could not concoct a better propaganda line for Russia’s extreme
nationalists.”
ALTERNATIVE REALITY ABOUT RUSSIA
Few Russians who endured this corruption and humiliation have much sympathy
with U.S. anger over Russian meddling in the 2016 election. And with any
perspective on the 1990s, it is hard to fault them. Yet such perspective among
Americans is rare, in part because the Western media often adopted the Clinton
administration’s cheery narrative, downplaying negative phenomena as bumps in the road toward a democratic Russia. And despite
subsequent revelation of so many scandals from the 1990s, Putin’s “autocracy”
is still contrasted with Yeltsin’s “golden era of democracy,” ignoring the fact
that it was Yeltsin’s team who perfected such tactics as 110 percent turnout in
remote precincts, and whose oligarchs used their media empires as lobbying
firms while brazenly buying parliamentary votes (to create personal tax
loopholes). Many myths about the Yeltsin years persist. A recent National
Geographic article by Julia Ioffe, for instance, attributes Russian growth under Putin to “tough economic reforms adopted by Boris Yeltsin” and
describes Putin as “coasting on historically high oil prices and economic
reforms implemented in the Nineties.”
High oil prices, yes. But had Putin merely coasted on the policies of
Yeltsin, there would have been little tax collected on the
oligarchs’ profits to pay for pensions, rebuild infrastructure, and create
reserve funds. And there would have been no agricultural revival, because
private land tenure would have remained illegal. In his first few years in
office, Putin passed tax and banking reform, bankruptcy laws, and other
pro-market policies that Yeltsin hadn’t managed in a decade. Denying Putin
credit in this way is typical. Paul Krugman recently argued in The New York Times, for instance, that growth under Putin “can be explained with just one
word: oil.” But note that in 2000, when Putin became president, oil stood at
$30 per barrel and petroleum accounted for 20 percent of Russia’s GDP. But in
2010, after a decade’s rise pushed oil over $100 per barrel, petroleum had
nevertheless fallen to just 11 percent of GDP, according to the World Bank.
Thus as oil boomed, Russian agriculture, manufacturing, and services grew even
faster.
Krugman’s fellow columnist Thomas Friedman similarly decried Russia’s low
life expectancy over a period “that coincides almost exactly with Putin’s
leadership of the country … the period of 1990–2013,” while blaming Putin for
“slow gains in the life expectancy of an entire nation.” In fact, the first half of this period coincides almost exactly with
Yeltsin’s leadership, when male life expectancy fell by over six
years—unprecedented for a modern country in peacetime. Under Putin, both male
and female life expectancy have made rapid gains, and their combined average
recently reached 70 years for the first time in Russian history.
VLADIMIR THE TERRIBLE
Distaste for many aspects of Putin’s harsh rule is understandable. But
demonization that veers into delusion by denying him credit for major progress
(and blaming him for all problems) is foolish. Foolish because it widens the
gulf between U.S. and Russian perceptions of what is going on in their country,
with Russians rating Putin highly because they value the stability and pride he
has revived. Foolish because it encourages the illusion that everything bad in Russia
flows from Putin, so that if only Putin were removed then Russians would elect
another liberal like Yeltsin. And foolish simply because that is how American
leaders look when they mock Russia’s prospects, as former U.S. President Barack Obama did when he said, “Russia doesn’t make anything. Immigrants aren’t
rushing to Moscow in search of opportunity. The population is shrinking.”
In fact, Russia’s population has been growingsince 2010, and the country
has one of the higher birth rates in Europe. Russia is the world’s
third-largest immigrant destination in the world, behind only America and
Germany. And Russian products include the rockets that ferry U.S. astronauts into space. Both Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were given to
careless quips about Russia. Both mocked Putin, and Clinton compared him to Adolf Hitler—a comparison that would be laughable were they not so offensive to
Russians, who lost 26 million countrymen in World War II. It was also reckless,
given Putin’s broad popularity in Russia. But when confronted with this
popularity, Obama replied, “Saddam
Hussein had a 90 percent poll rating.” He explained, “If you control the media
and you’ve taken away everybody’s civil liberties, and you jail dissidents,
that’s what happens.” This view is deeply mistaken.
There is, of course, much to fault in Putin’s Russia, and both Obama and
Clinton were subject to nastiness from Moscow. But it is undignified and unwise
for a U.S. president to disparage not just a foreign leader but his entire
country in the way that Obama did. The urge to answer taunts in kind cannot
overpower regard for Russian public opinion, and so confirm the Russian media’s
portrayal of America as ignorant and arrogant. It seemed clever when Hillary
Clinton pounced on Trump as “Putin’s puppet.” But apparently it didn’t resonate
much with ordinary Americans, who elected Trump, and neither does the pettiness
and demonization of Putin resonate with ordinary Russians.
These ordinary Russians are the forgotten people—the hard-working teachers,
doctors, and mechanics whose savings, careers, even health were destroyed by
the catastrophe of the 1990s. They are the fledgling voters who saw their new
democracy bought and sold by Yeltsin and his cronies, and the onetime admirers
of the United States who longed for a leader to restore their pride in Russia
after a decade of humiliation. Under Clinton, the United States treated Russia
like a defeated enemy and capitalized on its weakness to expand NATO. Claims
that this was merely a defensive expansion were belied by NATO’s bombing of
Serbia, a Russian ally, in 1999. Under President George W. Bush, the United States further intimidated Russia by abrogating the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, imposing punitive
tariffs, launching a reckless invasion of Iraq, continuing to expand NATO, and
further encircling Russia by cozying up to Georgia and Ukraine.
It is thus unsurprising that in 2008, Russia hit back, answering a Georgian
strike in the disputed region of South Ossetia (which killed some Russian
peacekeepers) with a crushing counterblow. For
finally pushing back, Putin’s approval rating soared to nearly 85 percent—the
highest it would reach until Crimea’s annexation in 2014.
HOW NOT TO PROMOTE DEMOCRACY
This is the Russia that Obama inherited in 2009: prideful, angry, and in no
mood for the sanctimony that came with the new administration’s stress on
democracy promotion. They had seen Bill Clinton ally with a corrupt Yeltsin to
make a mockery of their new democracy. They had fumed as Vice President Dick
Cheney faulted Russian democracy while praising that of Kazakhstan. And they
heard their country criticized for interfering in the affairs of weaker neighbors,
even as NATO was expanding right up to Russia’s borders, and the United States
was launching an invasion of Iraq in the name of democracy promotion that would
set the Middle East aflame. Not surprisingly, the Russian media ever more
frequently paired the term “double standard” with America.
Thus it may have been unwise for the Obama administration to pursue
democracy promotion as brashly as it did, criticizing Russian elections and
encouraging Putin’s opposition. This carried a whiff not only of hypocrisy but
of danger, too, appearing, as it did to many within Russia, as a threat to
destabilize Putin’s rule. Democracy promoters may draw a distinction between
policies aimed at advancing NATO and those aimed at advancing political
liberalization in Russia and other former Soviet states—emphasizing that Obama
enacted the latter but not the former. But Putin’s skepticism was easy to
understand given the West’s record of undermining Moscow’s allies, as in
Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine, and then seeking to anchor their new regimes in
the Western political and military blocs. As a senator, too, Obama was an early
supporter of Ukraine joining NATO, and preparations for Ukraine’s integration with NATO continued throughout his presidency. Hillary Clinton also advocated a
NATO "open door" for Ukraine, and then incurred Putin’s wrath by
pushing humanitarian intervention (which soon turned into regime change) in
Libya. So her demand for “a
full investigation of all reports of fraud and intimidation” in Russia’s 2011
elections was most unwelcome. Michael McFaul, an expert on democracy promotion
and longtime critic of Putin, was a particularly provocative choice for
new Obama’s ambassador to Russia in 2012.
Neither should righteous indignation at Putin’s post-election crackdown
prevent rethinking of the targets as well as the tools of American public
diplomacy. Some fault the focus on Russia’s liberal opposition, a small number of Moscow-centered activists who best reflect U.S. values.
Many of them are discredited in the eyes of the Russian majority: for their
earlier support of Yeltsin’s regime, for their disparaging of the widely
admired Putin, and for their reflexive backing of U.S. policies—such as NATO
expansion—even when they clash with Russian interests. They appear, in a word,
unpatriotic. They are earnest, articulate, and highly admirable. But even if
they weren’t stigmatized by Putin—or tarred by identification with the
1990s—they embody liberal-cosmopolitan values alien to most
conservative-national Russians. And while this makes them appealing to the
West, it also makes them a poor bet as the focus of democracy-promotion.
Consider the case of Pussy Riot, the feminist-protest
rock group, some of whose members were convicted of hooliganism in 2012 for
staging a protest in Moscow’s Church of Christ the Savior—profanely mocking not
only Putin but also the Russian Orthodox Church and its believers. Both activists
and state officials in the United States praised Pussy Riot and demanded their release. Yet basic decency—and regard for the
values and traditions of others—would suggest that hailing Pussy Riot as
champions of free speech was disrespectful of Russia. It was also insensible if the United States is interested in cultivating
sympathy among Russians, some 70 percent of whom identify as Orthodox believers. Russia is a conservative society that viewed the years
of Yeltsin’s rule, and its onslaught of pornography and promiscuity, with
horror. In polls, only seven percent of Russians said that political protest
was permissible in a church, and only five percent agreed that Pussy Riot
should be released without serious punishment. Surely the sensibilities of
ordinary Russians deserve as much regard as those of a minority of cosmopolitan
liberals. And hectoring by the West will hardly ease traditional Russian homophobia. Indeed, the outcry on behalf of Pussy Riot likely strengthened popular
support for the notorious 2013 law against “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations.”
Russians see a double standard in U.S. judgments about
their country—a prosecutorial stance that criticizes Russia for behaviors that
go unnoticed in other countries. For example, The Washington Post has
closely covered Russia’s anti-LGBT policies but has paid scant attention to the
same in countries such as Lithuania, Georgia, and Ukraine, and when it has it
has suggested that Russia is to blame for exporting its anti-gay beliefs. Since 2014, the Western media has
similarly reported on Moscow’s alleged propaganda onslaught, while largely
ignoring the brazen purchase of positive publicity by countries such as
Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. This is not the usual lobbying or public
relations but the funding of ostensibly independent research on a country by
that country itself—paying for upbeat election reports and other assessments by such groups as the Parliamentary Association of the Council of Europe.
Americans rarely hear of such activity, even as alarm
over Moscow’s subversion nears hysteria. A recent U.S. intelligence report on Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S.
presidential election warned of “a Kremlin-directed campaign to undermine faith
in the U.S. government and fuel political protest.” Yet a key culprit is the
news channel RT (which has a miniscule share of the U.S. audience), on the grounds that it runs “anti-fracking
programming highlighting environmental issues” and “a documentary about the
Occupy Wall Street movement [that] described the current U.S. political system
as corrupt.” In fact, unlike the 2014 Maidan occupation in Ukraine, which was
actively supported by some U.S. and EU officials, Russian diplomats carefully
kept their distance from the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests.
WILL THE
REAL VLADIMIR PUTIN PLEASE STAND UP?
A
diplomatic breakthrough between Russia and the West on Ukraine—or on Syria, or
other major issues—will also require firm agreement on non-interference in each
other’s domestic affairs. Such diplomacy would test the mettle of the Trump
administration’s foreign-affairs neophytes, but the greater unknown is Putin. A
majority of the U.S. political elite believes that no deals are possible
because Putin is irremediably hostile. Whether they attribute that hostility to
ideology (an ingrained KGB worldview) or corruption (an illegitimate regime
that needs a foreign enemy to distract its people from domestic woes), many
American policymakers believe that Putin simply has no interest in peace with
the West. In their view, he is bent on expansion and will gladly endure
sanctions as the price of fomenting discord in the West.
Another
group of policymakers is also skeptical of Putin, but do not blame him alone
for the deterioration of relations. Many of these analysts opposed NATO
expansion from the outset, for the same reasons that Kennan did—because it
would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. These experts also criticize the
United States’ misadventures in Iraq and Libya, failure to respect Russia’s red
lines on expansion into Georgia and Ukraine, and petty demonization of Putin.
Yet they mainly stand with the first group now in believing that containment,
not cooperation, is what the West must practice, because Putin’s recent actions
threaten the postwar liberal order.
A third group of analysts—the realists, who make up a minority of the
foreign-policy establishment—reply that Putin does not threaten the entire
postwar liberal order but only challenges the post-Cold War U.S.-dominated
order that consistently ignores Russia’s interests. They wonder how some can admit
the folly of NATO’s continual expansion and fault the many double standards in
U.S. policy but not agree that America must meet Russia halfway. Like realists
such as Kennan or Hans Morgenthau, who early warned against the folly of
Vietnam, they are sometimes derided as weak (or Putin apologists) for cautioning against inflating foreign threats while ignoring the United States’
domestic weaknesses.
These
realists argue that the early Putin prioritized market economic reforms and
good relations with the West, yet saw his open hand met by the clenched fist of
the George W. Bush–era neoconservatives. And Obama, reset or no, continued
efforts to expand the Western economic and military blocs that had started
under Clinton in the 1990s. In other words, for over two decades, whether
motivated by residual Cold War mistrust or post–Cold War liberal hegemonism,
America has steadily pushed Western military and political-economic power
deeper into Russia’s backyard. If history teaches anything it is that any great
power will, when facing the continued advance of a rival, eventually push back.
And much as Obama-Clinton defenders dislike being reminded of it, any chance of
America’s post–Cold War power being seen as uniquely benign ended in Serbia,
Iraq, and Libya.
It may be
that both sides are correct—that two decades of ignoring Russia’s interests
have abetted Putin’s embrace of a deep-seated anti-Americanism and that a new
détente is impossible. Or it may be that Putin is not innately hostile, but
rather a typical strongman: proud and spiteful, but not uniquely corrupt or
cruel, and capable of embracing a cooperative position if he finds a partner
skilled enough to forge a deal respecting both U.S. and Russian vital
interests. The only thing not in doubt is that both America and Russia—indeed,
Europe and the wider world—badly need that détente.
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