Return to Winter: Russia, China, and the New Cold War Against America (39 page)

All these events serve as exhibits in the argument against a fundamental American assumption: that freedom trumps all the other values holding these societies together. On the contrary, many around the world believe that order is a higher good than freedom. Chaos is the overriding enemy, and chaos is American.

Consider how the new conservatism played into Georgian Dream’s appeal. The party attracted a significant following from a broad swath of society that felt the president’s reforms had ushered in a color-blind, ethnically impartial, sexually liberated, global system of meritocracy that styled itself as a revolution—and, indeed, it was. Recall that around this
time, in Russia, the Putin government prosecuted and jailed the Russian female punk band Pussy Riot. (The last two jailed members were released in December 2013 on an amnesty measure, widely regarded as a “cosmetic measure” ahead of the Sochi Olympic Games.
²⁸
) The young women were punished not for political crimes but for trumped-up offenses against religious and social sensitivities. The prosecution was mere cover for the Kremlin to rid itself of figures who might’ve galvanized the opposition; the case stirred up countervailing popular support for Putin.

All the while, Putin had been making highly public overtures to the Russian Orthodox Church, cracking down on gay activism in the country while extolling, by example, the virtues of manliness and the nationalist traditions of Russia’s religious institutions. Putin has been building an alliance with the church for years, turning it into a de facto official religion and cracking down against rival Protestant denominations given to more liberal attitudes. He built a public alliance with the church’s leader, Patriarch Aleksei II, frequently appearing with him on Kremlin-controlled television networks. The two men share a commitment to Russian nationalism and a dedication to restoring Russia’s lost glory.
²⁹

Some perspective is in order here: As a young KGB agent, Vladimir Putin lived through the last years of Soviet power, when the Russian Orthodox Church became a formidable force against the state. A devoted child of the Soviet system, Putin witnessed how the West allied itself with Russian religious institutions by smuggling Bibles and funds to believers, helping them undermine the Soviet state. That was a lesson Putin could scarcely forget. Indeed, as he once famously said, the collapse of the Soviet system was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century—and certainly the defining disaster of his life. It shaped his worldview, and it will always be associated, in his mind, with the collapse of order.

Then, in an era when post-Soviet Russia was relatively weak—before the Iraq War spiked oil prices and pumped new blood into the Russian economy—Putin watched as pro-Western democratic revolutions overtook former Soviet republics, one by one. The Orange Revolution brought anti-Russian politicians to power in Ukraine. The Rose Revolution in Georgia ushered in the Saakashvili era. It is widely known that Putin regarded the Color Revolutions as artificial political events deliberately engineered by Western intelligence forces. Western funds came in from abroad to help protestors sustain their weeks-long occupation of central squares. Computers and Internet communications played a vital role; the way Putin saw it, these technologies were also supplied by the West for such purposes. His worldview can never credit popular feeling as genuine; dark forces must always be at work. Power, rather than ideals, drives human events.

The irony here is that, a mere generation ago, it was Russia and China espousing revolutionary systems that overturned traditions and forced people to abandon their long-held values. Now, the reality is reversed: The Axis nations have forged a new conservative ideology to counter the West’s radical values and ideas. The various forms of conservatism converge in rejecting America’s globalized immigrant state—that is, the multicultural, multi-ethnic, change-driven meritocratic system open to all comers from around the world.

The new conservative message resonates across national and cultural borders. In August 2012, Moscow even encouraged oligarchs to set up and fund a lobby in Britain called Conservative Friends of Russia. The lobby quickly set to work criticizing Pussy Riot. British people, however, felt much sympathy for the band’s predicament and admired the women’s courage; and, as the country that invented punk rock, England certainly didn’t support the Kremlin’s repression. Next, the website of the conservative lobby posted a picture of a Putin critic—a gay Briton who was a member of the European
Parliament—in underpants. Perhaps the lobby thought it could influence British politics by destroying regime critics through scandal. It miscalculated, though, and dissolved in a flurry of embarrassment in November 2012 after a number of prominent Conservative members of Parliament who had joined the lobby reconsidered and jumped ship. The lobby reconstituted itself as the Westminster Russia Forum.

Despite its quick flameout, the lobby speaks volumes about the Russian attempt to make common cause with conservatism abroad. Moscow may have overreached in this case, but we shouldn’t dismiss the audacity and scope of its plan. Social conservatism can bind diverse cultures in common cause against the affluence-producing but destabilizing system of free markets and free speech. Nowhere has Russia demonstrated that fact more powerfully than in its massive internal and external propaganda campaign against Ukraine. It is an effort fueled, says one journalist, by “a cocktail of chauvinism, patriotism, and imperialism,” and it exploits deep-seated feelings in the Russian public—from nostalgia for Soviet power to resentment of the West, from nationalistic and ethnic pride to a desire for order and authority. As
The Economist
put it: “The public seems intoxicated by victory in a war that was begun, conducted, and won largely through propaganda.”
³⁰

Any propaganda system that can achieve something like that is formidable. Indeed, the Russian propaganda model is fierce, committed, and cogent. The Western model has none of these qualities.

CONCLUSION

A central attribute of the Western ethos has always been the ability to look at issues squarely, to discuss them openly. Openness has practical benefits; it allows debate that produces solutions. Yet the huge amplification of voices produced by proliferating media in recent years—from cable TV to satellite to the Internet—has paradoxically
weakened
our advantages. Our debates have grown louder and ever more politicized and polarized, leaving leaders unable to resolve a host of major questions.

Ruling from the top down, making unilateral decisions after only minimum debate, our rivals can address questions on a range of issues: immigration, abortion, ethnic integration, curbs on globalization, the gender wars, the aging population, the contradiction between savings and consumerism, among many other vexing challenges. Despite the constant blizzard of media coming out of the United States daily, we offer fewer and fewer coherent answers to the world’s questions—especially compared with the Cold War days, when we embodied and articulated clear pathways for others to follow.

Our incoherence in the face of global challenges is also partly due to our reluctance since the Cold War to conduct ourselves as a public example to the world. The discipline imposed by those years gave way to a kind of post-triumph relaxation. We felt that our way of life had won. It spoke for itself. We no longer needed to be aware that the world was watching our every move. We didn’t need to defend our societal choices or bear ourselves consciously as role models with a stake in our own respectability.

The dislocations of the global economy, perhaps more than any other development, intervened. A long-held equation in the West, and especially in America, between freedom and prosperity broke down. Free markets in Eastern Europe and post-Soviet Russia brought wildly divergent results and made substantial numbers of people worse off than they had been before—or at least convinced that they were. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 set the United States on an incredibly ambitious global mission to stamp out terrorism—a mission that brought us into conflict after conflict around the world and convinced many that the U.S. was not an unambiguous force for liberty or even human rights. The last two decades, in short, have weakened American and
Western arguments that our form of government and political economy, wherever it is tried, is a sure bet to peace, freedom, and prosperity. Millions are now telling us:
Thanks, but no thanks. We’ll take the pieces we like and leave the rest. It isn’t doing so well for you, anyway
.

We need to recognize that the democratic revolutions of the last generation have also sparked a conservative backlash—one that sees America’s devotion to democracy as irresponsible, even reckless. We in America believe in the integrity of the process without guaranteeing the outcome. We are apparently willing to see hundreds of thousands of our own jobs go abroad because it’s only fair that harder-working populations elsewhere benefit from free-market forces. And we are willing to import millions of immigrants because they wish to work hard, pay taxes, and generate economic wealth. We believe that the free flow of capital is a crucial kind of freedom that generally benefits the most industrious and virtuous. Believing in the integrity of this process—or ideology, some would say—we are willing to sacrifice social traditions, demographic and ethnic balance, and perhaps the nation-state itself. At least, that’s how it looks to many watching from afar.

These anti-Western arguments are, of course, caricatures—but they result from a massive, decades-long communications failure. Perhaps as important as our failure to take our message to Russia and China is our failure to provide arguments to those countries that would resist the influence of Moscow and Beijing if they could. Eastern Europe and Central Asia remain within Russia’s power orbit. Some of Eastern Europe is now free from Moscow’s shadow, via European influence (and Ukraine was on the verge of making its break until Putin lured the Ukrainians back in with his $15 billion sweetener). But many parts are not—indeed, huge swaths from Belarus through Moldavia, Ukraine, and Georgia. We must give them the intellectual ammunition to resist Moscow’s overtures. People in those societies have been
through a historical cycle in which they saw the collapse of totalitarian systems and the horrors that followed. They identify these horrors as the consequence of too much freedom—which, as the Axis nations continually remind them, is an American evil.

We have not allayed these fears. Thus freedom appears in a problematic light around the world. We need to acknowledge these dislocations—which, after all, we are experiencing ourselves—while also renewing our defense of individual liberty, free markets, rule of law, and human dignity. These virtues may seem self-evident to most Americans, but around the world, as we have seen, many question them.

Our task is complex and nuanced, since what we defend is somewhat amorphous—freedom, liberty, and other abstract goods are not as immediate as blood and soil—and also because the system we espouse has had, in many respects, a rough 20 years. Compared with the eloquent, if simplistic, appeals of Russia and China, ours seems a harder sell. This is especially true because we believe in a kind of progress that derives directly from our Constitution—ever and greater freedoms and liberty to ever and greater numbers of people—and we believe that other cultures will inevitably arrive at the same outcomes. This belief is our own guiding principle, a very American one.

And yet, we’ve been down this road before—not just during the Cold War, but in World War II as well. Then as now, America faced the task of getting across its message without the benefit of a state-sanctioned media apparatus designed to do the government’s bidding, and with a message so overarching that it risked dissolution, especially in the face of crude and emotional appeals on the other side. Then as now, the American ethos of liberty and opportunity had to compete with nationalistic, ethnic, ideological appeals that spoke directly to people’s fears and resentments. At its best, America does not appeal to those instincts but rather to hope and aspiration.

We can hardly fail to do less now. But we need to sharpen our tools and our arguments, as well as our understanding of our adversaries—and why we oppose them.

CHAPTER 9

Countermoves: Some Thoughts on Fighting Back

“The problem with words is that the administration is very good with them. Words aren’t the problem here. The problem is the sizeable gap that has opened up between rhetoric and action.”

—
AARON DAVID MILLER
¹

“President Putin and his associates . . . don’t respect your dignity or accept your authority over them. They punish dissent and imprison opponents. They rig your elections. They control your media. They harass, threaten, and banish organizations that defend your right to self-governance. To perpetuate their power, they foster rampant corruption in your courts and your economy and terrorize and even assassinate journalists who try to expose their corruption.”

—
JOHN MCCAIN
²

“U.S. leadership in advancing freedom is neither an easy sell at home nor a simple undertaking abroad. But it is essential to reverse the current decline of freedom globally and turn the international order more toward U.S. values and interests.”

—
DANIEL CALINGAERT, FREEDOM HOUSE
³

“U
nited States . . . credibility is at [an] all-time low,” Syrian president Bashar al-Assad told Charlie Rose in September 2013.
⁴
One can reject the messenger while recognizing the validity of the message: The reputation of the United States internationally has suffered a
precipitous decline. An ongoing series of blundering, even humiliating, missteps by the Obama administration on Syria makes this plain to see.

Currently, the United States does not comport itself as the “indispensable nation” that former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once described.
⁵
“The real problem is this: After the Islamist wars, the United States has, as happened before, sought to minimize its presence in the world and while enjoying the benefits of being the world’s leading economy, not pay any political or military price for it,” global intelligence specialist George Friedman writes. “It is a strategy that is impossible to maintain, as the United States learned after World War I, Vietnam, and Desert Storm. It is a seductive vision but a fantasy. The world comes visiting.”
⁶

The Obama administration seems reluctant, even now, to acknowledge this lesson. As Obama’s paralysis demonstrates—from his backpedaling on Syria to his failure to stop Putin in Ukraine—the United States has wilted under shoddy leadership. Our economy at home has begun to recover, but our ability to achieve strategic goals abroad remains crippled. Our current international weakness is a result first and foremost of our departure from the mindset that guided American foreign policy through a century of World Wars, a Cold War, imperialism and decolonization, and historic technological leaps. For a century, the United States stood for an uncompromising commitment to liberal democracy, free markets, and human rights. In defense and pursuit of these goals, successive administrations, Republican and Democrat, were willing to apply, forcefully if judiciously, America’s military and economic might. Some administrations were more successful than others, some more or less staunch in their commitment to these ideas. But we submit that no administration has walked back from them as far as the Obama administration has, with the escalating consequences around the world that we have been seeing. Few today would regard President Obama’s foreign policy as a success. On the contrary, his
approach has failed strategically, militarily, in terms of nuclear strategy, and in its lack of any coherent philosophy. As David Keyes, the founder of Advancing Human Rights has noted, Obama’s approach to growing global challenges has been “to dither and appease.”
⁷
The failure is rooted in an unwillingness to embrace America’s role in the world and conduct foreign policy vigorously and with an unrelenting devotion to our national interest, our allies, and our values.

A vigorous American foreign policy in the service of our ideals would actively advocate our values, deter states from violating norms, and punish those that do. A focused doctrine of coercive diplomacy would restore the dignity and vibrancy of American policy abroad. In order to fully leverage its strength on the international stage, the United States must demonstrate again that America’s friendship is worth courting and maintaining. Our alliances emerged from shared values and a shared vision of a peaceful, prosperous, and free world. We must show our troubled allies that America still cares about this vision by containing and confronting the international provocateurs in Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and elsewhere.

America no longer needs to prepare for a ground war in Europe, but we must retain a robust and diverse set of capabilities to support our objectives, particularly in the Middle East and East Asia. Many of our allies have found ways to slim down their militaries without compromising effectiveness, but American policymakers who also wish to pare down the military must begin by examining which systems we no longer need—not by setting arbitrary and potentially catastrophic budget targets, as we have been doing for years and are now doing even more aggressively thanks to the destructive budget sequester. As Russia, China, and their allies field new systems with an eye to conflict with the United States, we cannot compromise the ability of our military to project power and provide our diplomats with the blunt martial instrument they sometimes need to succeed.

In previous chapters, we have attempted to chronicle how serious the situation has become vis à vis Russia and China across multiple vital areas—whether military or nuclear security, the economy, or intelligence and communications. Yet we have also tried to remind readers that, for all of our setbacks, we continue to hold powerful advantages of our own. And we still have time—not nearly so much as we’d like, but time yet, to reverse the negative trends and take the struggle to our adversaries. In this chapter, we offer some thoughts on how to shore up our weaknesses and prevail in this new cold war. Underpinning our analysis is the fundamental need to understand the nature of the conflict. Until we do, we cannot hope to formulate the necessary responses.

THE IMPORTANCE OF COERCIVE DIPLOMACY

In September 2013 as the Obama administration tried to rally support for military strikes on Syria, Secretary of State John Kerry gave a press conference in London. Describing the strikes, he said, “That is exactly what we’re talking about doing—an unbelievably small, limited kind of effort.”
⁸
His words caused confusion and were met with widespread derision. Senator John McCain tweeted, “Kerry says #Syria strike would be ‘unbelievably small’—that is unbelievably unhelpful.”
⁹
President Obama didn’t do any better. Throughout the Syrian crisis, he was consistently lackluster, deficient in conviction, strategic clarity, and political will. No wonder Bill Clinton, who has been a staunch defender of the president’s, warned months before that Obama risked looking like a “wuss” on Syria. At a McCain Institute event in June 2013, the former president discussed how “lame” it would have been if he hadn’t gone into Kosovo because “the House of Representatives voted 75 percent against it.”
¹⁰

The contrast with his adversary in Moscow is stark. At the height of the Syrian crisis in September 2013, Vladimir Putin authored an
op-ed in the
New York Times
. The piece ran the morning after Obama delivered a speech on Syria from the East Room of the White House. Putin wrote:

       
From the outset, Russia has advocated peaceful dialogue enabling Syrians to develop a compromise plan for their own future. We are not protecting the Syrian government, but international law. We need to use the United Nations Security Council and believe that preserving law and order in today’s complex and turbulent world is one of the few ways to keep international relations from sliding into chaos. The law is still the law, and we must follow it whether we like it or not. Under current international law, force is permitted only in self-defense or by the decision of the Security Council. Anything else is unacceptable under the United Nations Charter and would constitute an act of aggression.
¹¹

In response to Putin’s management of the Syria crisis, Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, said on September 11, “Putin probably had his best day as president in years yesterday.”
¹²
Despite being Assad’s strongest and most powerful ally, Putin seemed to transform himself into the voice of reason. Suddenly, he appeared as an international peacekeeper whose deep opposition to a U.S. military strike made him seem more rational than all the rest. Of course, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Even as Putin was authoring his op-ed, Assad’s elite military team, Unit 450, was in the process of scattering its chemical weapons to as many as 50 sites, making them more difficult for international inspectors to track.
¹³

In reaction to Putin’s op-ed, Senator Bob Menendez said, “I almost wanted to vomit.” And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid joked, “I think he’s just looking for a chance to show off his Super Bowl ring,” referring to an accusation that Putin had stolen a Super Bowl ring from
New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.
¹⁴
Unsurprisingly, McCain had the most spirited reply: an op-ed in the Russian Web newspaper
Pravda.ru
entitled “Russians Deserve Better Than Putin.” McCain argued that Putin was not pro-Russian; he was more interested in preserving his power. He did not respect human dignity or the right to self-determination, because, worst of all, he didn’t believe in his own people. Addressing his words to ordinary Russians, McCain wrote:

       
I believe you should live according to the dictates of your conscience, not your government. I believe you deserve the opportunity to improve your lives in an economy that is built to last and benefits the many, not just the powerful few. You should be governed by a rule of law that is clear, consistently and impartially enforced and just. I make that claim because I believe the Russian people, no less than Americans, are endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

              
A Russian citizen could not publish a testament like the one I just offered. President Putin and his associates do not believe in these values. They don’t respect your dignity or accept your authority over them. They punish dissent and imprison opponents. They rig your elections. They control your media. They harass, threaten, and banish organizations that defend your right to self-governance. To perpetuate their power they foster rampant corruption in your courts and your economy and terrorize and even assassinate journalists who try to expose their corruption.
¹⁵

If only these words had come from the White House. McCain’s impassioned defense of liberty and democracy made a stark contrast with the Obama administration’s mealy-mouthed, indecisive pronouncements. Many Obama critics have written over the years that the president’s vaunted eloquence fails him when it comes American
exceptionalism, human rights, and the promotion of democracy abroad—among other principles. Critics have cited his failure to promote these principles as proof that Obama does not believe in them. Rather than try to enter into the president’s head, though, we’d offer a more modest, if equally damning, critique.

At minimum, what the Obama administration’s treatment of the Syria and Ukraine crises—and this applies to its foreign policy generally—lacks is a mastery of coercive diplomacy, which combines the threat of force with strong diplomatic and bargaining efforts. To be sure, the president did threaten to use force against Assad, and, as several commentators pointed out, it was only the credible threat of force in Syria that brought any progress at all. But that threat came only after years of standing on the sidelines, and even then it came in tandem with a series of breathtaking missteps that made even the administration’s defenders questions its competence. Obama delayed addressing the Syrian situation until almost the very last moment; put himself out on a limb with his “red line” comments in 2012; began mobilizing the military for action even as it became clear that he had little public or congressional support; and all along promised, with John Kerry, to conduct such a limited operation that even supporters of force were left wondering how the strikes could possibly achieve anything. No wonder Julia Ioffe wrote in the
New Republic:
“Obama Got Played by Putin and Assad.”
¹⁶

If anything, Obama’s response in Ukraine was even more lackluster, with no serious discussion of military aid for Kiev. America had pledged to support Ukraine’s sovereignty in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, said, “The United States cannot simply walk away from the plain meaning of the Budapest Memorandum and leave Ukraine in the lurch.” Yet as this book went to press, it seems that we will wind up doing exactly that. No wonder James Bruno wrote in a
Politico
headline, “Russian Diplomats Are Eating America’s Lunch.”
¹⁷

Ironically, one of coercive diplomacy’s champions was once a member of the Obama cabinet: former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Throughout her tenure in the administration, Hillary consistently took a harder line than her boss. Unlike the president, she has an appreciation for coercive diplomacy, and she is willing to defend the principle, even retrospectively, in cases where her judgment didn’t work out as well as she had hoped. During a 2008 primary debate in California, for instance, Clinton defended her vote in favor of the Iraq War:

       
I did an enormous amount of investigation and due diligence to try to determine what if any threat could flow from the history of Saddam being both an owner of and a seeker of WMD. The idea of putting inspectors back in was a credible idea. I believe in coercive diplomacy. You try to figure out how to move bad actors in a direction that you prefer in order to avoid more dire consequences. If you took it on the face of it and if you took it on the basis of what we hoped would happen with the inspectors going in, that in and of itself was a policy that we’ve used before. We have used the threat of force to try to make somebody change their behavior.
¹⁸