Pitchfork Pat Buchanan is at it again: oversimplifying; finding villains in the wrong places. The latest broadside blames the United States for any renewed antagonism between us and Russia. As usual, Pat has grasped a central truth and then built a Potemkin village around that truth. From his article at Real Clear Politics, “Who Restarted the Cold War?”, this bit of truth:
At the Cold War’s end, the United States was given one of the great opportunities of history: to embrace Russia, largest nation on earth, as partner, friend, ally. Our mutual interests meshed almost perfectly. There was no ideological, territorial, historic or economic quarrel between us, once communist ideology was interred.
Fair enough. Even during cold war, it was reassuring to know that our principal enemies were ethnic Russians. Men who could be counted on to be ruthless and hard, but rational in their calculus of great power conflicts. That said, Pat’s also correct in the sense that the ethnic Russians who rule the new Russian Federation have always looked westward to Europe for their models of statecraft, not east or south.
In today’s world, we should have moved ever closer to the Russians, given that we face mutual enemies to Russia’s east (China), south and, most especially, to the ethnic minorities in the Federation who are Muslim. The Chechnya comes to mind here. But, of course, the drastically weakened post-Soviet Russia still has dreams of great power status, without the assets to make that happen.
We’ve seen Putin start acting like the commissars of old, turning into a good (bad actually) old-fashioned autocrat. Democracy is struggling in Russia, but isn’t quite dead. And there is little doubt that Putin’s Russia isn’t cooperating with us in our attempts to contain Iran. Seems they’ve too many rubles invested in Iran’s nuclear enterprise and other industries.
Pitchfork Pat is quick to assign blame…to us. Heading the list is our apparent crime of befriending former Soviet puppet states:
The United States began moving NATO into Eastern Europe and then into former Soviet republics. Six ex-Warsaw Pact nations are now NATO allies, as are three ex-republics of the Soviet Union. NATO expansionists have not given up on bringing Ukraine, united to Russia for centuries, or Georgia, Stalin’s birthplace, into NATO.
Well, one must assume that Buchanan waxes sentimental about Uncle Joe (Stalin) for some reason or another. Perhaps it was the slaughter of land-owning farmers (kulaks) or the show-trials. The problem with NATO expansion isn’t that it might include Ukraine or Georgia. The problem is that Russia, as led by Putin, perceives this as some threat to their sovereignty.
That’s their problem. Our problem is the question, to which reasonable folks may have different answers, “Is it in America’s national interest to have nations such as Ukraine or Georgia in NATO?” My personal answer would be that I would not have either in NATO — not because it would offend Russia, but because they are not our natural allies in the Atlantic context.
Buchanan also brings up our bombing of the Serbs, which I also felt was wrong, given the history of what had gone before in what became both Serbia and Croatia. Not that the Serbs who fought and massacred innocents were any better than the Croats and Muslims they fought against. That the Serbs were, and remain, tied to Mother Russia by ethnicity and religion could only be ignored by the great triangulator, Bill Clinton, who unilaterally declared war.
As usual, Pat is right for the wrong reasons. He’s an isolationist, and faults us for intervening anywhere in the world where there isn’t a smoking gun a la Pearl Harbor. But to worry overmuch about hurting Russia’s feelings? Sorry, Vladimir, but we won. Why not join us in our mutual struggle against militant Islam? And stop your whining. Nobody likes a sore loser.
