Montreal
I stopped reading Foreign Affairs Magazine and attending Council on Foreign Relations events in early 2017. It's simply been too painful to participate in foreign policy and national security discussions amid such suffocating moronity and buffoonery in Washington DC.
It's time to get back in the game, however, starting with Susan Glasser's thought-provoking "Putin the Great" essay in the current issue of Foreign Affairs (September/October). She reminds us of the obvious in stating how cooperative the U.S. has been in helping Putin - "a ruthless, modern tsar" who attacked our nation and is doing so again - celebrate as he did in a recent Financial Times interview "the decline of Western-style liberalism and the West's no-longer-tenable embrace of multiculturalism."
Glasser may give Putin too much credit for this outcome, though she is certainly correct in asserting that he has helped bring "about the multipolar world that he dreamed of since he took office determined to revisit the American Cold War victory." Nonetheless, Putin and Russia are too weak to have pulled this off without the willingness of a small number of Americans temporarily in power to help him and the penchant of too many of the rest of us to sleepwalk through it all. No matter the authors of Putin's progress, there is no question that his efforts are eroding an American future that should be confident, open-minded, and globally engaged.
Glasser suggests that Putin's ultimate success in continuing to harm the United States in the long term is hardly guaranteed, despite what will be four years of active White House efforts to support him. In considering Putin's ambitions and the state of contemporary Russia, Glasser gives us a heavy dose of reality in writing that, "The warning signs are all there: the shrinking economy, the shrill nationalism as a distraction from internal decay, an inward-looking elite feuding over the division of spoils while taking its monopoly on power for granted."
This reality will be key to re-engineering U.S. policy toward Putin's Russia in what one can only hope will be an American restoration beginning in 2021. If we don't start treating Putin as the cunning adversary he is, we will continue to play on his game board and pay a very high price. Yes, the overarching objective should be to achieve friendly, mutually productive relations with the great Russian people. To get there over the next generation, however, it's going to take incisive strategy and a decisive, tough-minded resolve that we've been singularly incapable of exhibiting.
I stopped reading Foreign Affairs Magazine and attending Council on Foreign Relations events in early 2017. It's simply been too painful to participate in foreign policy and national security discussions amid such suffocating moronity and buffoonery in Washington DC.
It's time to get back in the game, however, starting with Susan Glasser's thought-provoking "Putin the Great" essay in the current issue of Foreign Affairs (September/October). She reminds us of the obvious in stating how cooperative the U.S. has been in helping Putin - "a ruthless, modern tsar" who attacked our nation and is doing so again - celebrate as he did in a recent Financial Times interview "the decline of Western-style liberalism and the West's no-longer-tenable embrace of multiculturalism."
Glasser may give Putin too much credit for this outcome, though she is certainly correct in asserting that he has helped bring "about the multipolar world that he dreamed of since he took office determined to revisit the American Cold War victory." Nonetheless, Putin and Russia are too weak to have pulled this off without the willingness of a small number of Americans temporarily in power to help him and the penchant of too many of the rest of us to sleepwalk through it all. No matter the authors of Putin's progress, there is no question that his efforts are eroding an American future that should be confident, open-minded, and globally engaged.
Glasser suggests that Putin's ultimate success in continuing to harm the United States in the long term is hardly guaranteed, despite what will be four years of active White House efforts to support him. In considering Putin's ambitions and the state of contemporary Russia, Glasser gives us a heavy dose of reality in writing that, "The warning signs are all there: the shrinking economy, the shrill nationalism as a distraction from internal decay, an inward-looking elite feuding over the division of spoils while taking its monopoly on power for granted."
This reality will be key to re-engineering U.S. policy toward Putin's Russia in what one can only hope will be an American restoration beginning in 2021. If we don't start treating Putin as the cunning adversary he is, we will continue to play on his game board and pay a very high price. Yes, the overarching objective should be to achieve friendly, mutually productive relations with the great Russian people. To get there over the next generation, however, it's going to take incisive strategy and a decisive, tough-minded resolve that we've been singularly incapable of exhibiting.
Image courtesy of Radio Free Europe.