Why Does She Bother?
Anne Applebaum’s latest Slate column on Russia comes with a may-jor caveat:
the word superficial is worth repeating here […].
As in, Applebaum concedes that her whole column is strung together in a half-assed tissue of bad rhetoric and overcooked innuendo:
The Russian state’s open hostility, not only toward Georgia but also toward Ukraine and the Baltic states, is, in this sense, partly ideological. Genuine elections have taken place in all these countries; people who have not been preselected by the ruling oligarchy sometimes gain wealth or power. Georgia’s Rose Revolution and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution even involved street demonstrations that helped unseat more-oligarchic regimes. Thus it is not pure nationalism, nor mere traditional great-power arrogance, that makes the Russian leadership disdainful of Georgia and Ukraine: It is also, at some level, fear that similar voter revolutions could someday challenge Russia, too.
The whole business hinges on these bad-habitual fudge words that we hobble around on like intellectual cripples: ‘in this sense’, ‘at some level’. IN WHAT SENSE? AT WHAT LEVEL? Only by answering those questions is commentary taken from the realm of talking points in lousy drag to real analysis.
As it happens, Applebaum is right so far as the ‘sense’ she means is ‘in a very small and insignificant sense’ and the ‘level’ she refers to is ‘vanishingly inconsequential’. The Russian leadership has no interest in True Democracy within its own borders. Obviously. But Saakashvili’s capacity to irritate the Russians only grew with his own slide into vain authoritarianism, and I guarantee you that Moscow would be equally annoyed by the independence of the Baltic States if those countries were run by chintzy local dictators. This zany idea of a Concert of Autocracies is simply not borne out in history; the last, and maybe really the only, time it happened with any consequence was during the Cold War, and even then the Sino-Soviet split was prompt and unforgiving, and most of what remained was the direct result of (clumsy and costly) Russian puppetude. Applebaum is simply wrong to emphasize so strongly this supposed Russian fear of democracies — and then to cop to the move so guiltlessly!
Like Kagan at his worst, it’s all thematic fanfare — the devil take the details — in preparation for the big policy takeaway:
The critical question now is whether the West is prepared to behave like the West, to speak with one voice and create a common trans-Atlantic policy.
Depends on the voice, one is inclined to say; if America wants to play this game fair and square, America must be willing at least sometimes to lend its pipes to a voice that is not entirely its own. Another alternative is to stop obsessing over the questionable value of Western solidarity. These things happen naturally enough, for reasons that have little to do with feelings and a lot to do with the prudence and costs of various policies within shared institutions. Turns out this is already happening, without any of the froth and fervor that’s typified the hectic reaction among anti-Russians right and left. The anti-Russia crowd is so very overworried about differing visions among ‘Old Europe’, ‘New Europe’, and America. Applebaum shivers at the sight of Old-Euro turncoats:
In recent years, Russia has preferred to deal with Western countries and their leaders one by one. Just last week, an affiliate of Gazprom, the Russian state-dominated gas company, added a former Finnish prime minister to its payroll—which already includes former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. If we hang together instead of allowing Gazprom to pick us all off separately, there is at least a chance that this minichill won’t last another 40 years.
I don’t know about this Finnish guy, but if anyone knows a thing or two about improper closeness with the Russians, it’s the Finns. And why has Applebaum ignored outright the way that Germany recoiled en masse when Schröder’s inappropriate move was made public? Perhaps because it lets all the wind out of her sails? Hark back:
Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democrats have called on Mr Schröder to resign. “He’s done grave damage to Germany’s reputation. Unless he quits, his job will look like a reward for his efforts [as chancellor],” Christian Wulf, the minister-president of Lower Saxony, told Bild yesterday.
“It stinks. It looks to me like sheer cronyism,” said Richard Bütikofer, the co-leader of Germany’s Greens. Even Mr Schröder’s old cabinet colleague Peter Struck, Germany’s former defence minister, expressed doubts. “I wouldn’t have done it,” he said.
Russia hasn’t pried the West apart, and it isn’t going to happen anytime soon — if the West stops trying to pry itself deeper and deeper into the former Soviet Union. This is the only point on which the US and Europe really differs — at least now, and at least officially.
But perhaps the main takeaway here is that, contrary to Disney lore, the behavior of violent actors is not explained by the truism that we hate what we fear, and we fear what we do not understand. The Russian regime is not laboring under false consciousness; its critics — who see in Putin a paranoid freak worried about being run out of his dacha by a mob of Kasparovites, instead of one of the world’s most diabolically successful and popular leaders — may well be.
Indeed, what possible gain from pulling Ukraine and Georgia firmly into the West could justify such a thrombo as Applebaum & Co.’s — if not the gain of actually, one fine day, triggering regime change in Russia? You’re not paranoid if they’re really out to get you….