I want to commend to your attention an address by Henry Kissinger published at CapX. The address takes as its point of departure an address given by Margaret Thatcher in 1996, itself inspired by Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech from 1946. Mrs. Thatcher’s speech asked the following questions:
- Should Russia be regarded as a potential threat or a partner?
- Should NATO turn its attention to “out of area†issues?
- Should NATO admit the new democracies of Central Europe with full responsibilities as quickly as prudently possible?
- Should Europe develop its own “defense identity†in NATO?
which Dr. Kissinger attempts to reconcile with today’s needs and concerns. I found this observation by Dr. Kissinger about Russia particularly insightful:
Putin’s view of international politics is often described as a recurrence of 1930s European nationalist authoritarianism. More accurately, it is the heritage of the worldview identified with the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, as exemplified in his 1880 speech at the dedication of a monument to the poet Pushkin. Its passionate call for a new spirit of Russian greatness based on the spiritual qualities of the Russian character was taken up in the late 20th century by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Abandoning his exile in Vermont to return to Russia, Solzhenitsyn, in his book On the Russian Question, called for action to save the Russian people who had been “driven out†of Russia. In the same spirit, Putin has railed against what he has interpreted as a 300-year-old Western effort to contain Russia. In 2007 in a Dostoevskyan-like outburst at the Munich Security Conference, he accused the West of having unjustly exploited the troubles of post-Cold War Russia to isolate and condemn it.
Rather than attempting to consider Putin through an American, German, or Soviet prism, I believe that he needs to be understood in the Russian context. He is genuinely popular in Russia because he addresses Russian concerns in terms that are well understood by Russians.
Read the whole thing.
I confess that I don’t understand our foreign policy and haven’t for some time. I don’t know why we’ve gone out of our way to antagonize Russia; I don’t know why we’re worried about greater Chinese interconnectedness in the world; I don’t know why we support the policy goals of either Iran or Saudi Arabia. My preferred policy approaches would be to cooperate with Russia where it’s in our interest and otherwise to ignore them when we can which is most of time; encourage greater Chinese responsibility and interconnectedness—it will benefit all of us; and discourage Middle Eastern adventurism whether it’s ours, Iran’s, or Saudi Arabia’s. We don’t want either one of them to succeed; that’s a formula for Middle Eastern upheaval.
The Russian Question
I think the title was a little cheeky of Mr. Solzhenitsyn. Since at least Peter the Great but more likely back to the first Czar, the Russians have been trying to reconcile their national identity and place in the world.
It is really rather tragic, and I doubt the question has been answered.
When it was the Soviet Union, the Left could not be more fawning and obsequious. I guess as plain ol’ Russia it will take a much higher body count to get a little love from the Left.
Remember those fine folks back in the Bush administration who explained to stupid newsmen that reality was the movers and shakers in Washington wanted it to be? And that from time to time we just had to pick up some small country and bash it against the wall just to show the world we could do such a thing?
Figure there are still a batch of them running around. Russia and China and India and so on … those places don’t amount to much, they never will. The US — wealthy white males with Ivy League educations, anyhow — runs the world and this will never change.
YMMV … mine too.