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发帖数: 38600 | 1 http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/03/01/putin-smas
Battle for UkrainePutin Smashes Washington’s Cocoon
A Politico report calls it “a crisis that no one anticipated.” The Daily
Beast, reporting on Friday’s US intelligence assessment that “Vladimir
Putin’s military would not invade Ukraine,” quotes a Senate aide claiming
that “no one really saw this kind of thing coming.”
Op-eds from all over the legacy press this week helped explained why.
Through the rose tinted lenses of a media community deeply convinced that
President Obama and his dovish team are the masters of foreign relations,
nothing poor Putin did could possibly derail the stately progress of our
genius president. There were, we were told, lots of reasons not to worry
about Ukraine. War is too costly for Russia’s weak economy. Trade would
suffer, the ruble would take a hit. The 2008 war with Georgia is a bad
historical comparison, as Ukraine’s territory, population and military are
much larger. Invasion would harm Russia’s international standing. Putin
doesn’t want to spoil his upcoming G8 summit, or his good press from Sochi.
Putin would rather let the new government in Kiev humiliate itself with
incompetence than give it an enemy to rally against. Crimea’s Tartars and
other anti-Russian ethnic minorities wouldn’t stand for it. Headlines like
“Why Russia Won’t Invade Ukraine,” “No, Russia Will Not Intervene in
Ukraine,” and “5 Reasons for Everyone to Calm Down About Crimea” weren’t
hard to find in our most eminent publications.
Nobody, including us, is infallible about the future. Giving the public your
best thoughts about where things are headed is all a poor pundit (or
government analyst) can do. But this massive intellectual breakdown has a
lot to do with a common American mindset that is especially built into our
intellectual and chattering classes. Well educated, successful and
reasonably liberal minded Americans find it very hard to believe that other
people actually see the world in different ways. They can see that Vladimir
Putin is not a stupid man and that many of his Russian officials are
sophisticated and seasoned observers of the world scene. American experts
and academics assume that smart people everywhere must want the same things
and reach the same conclusions about the way the world works.
How many times did foolishly confident American experts and officials come
out with some variant of the phrase “We all share a common interest in a
stable and prosperous Ukraine.” We may think that’s true, but Putin doesn
’t.
We blame this in part on the absence of true intellectual and ideological
diversity in so much of the academy, the policy world and the mainstream
media. Most college kids at good schools today know many more people from
different races and cultural groups than their grandparents did, but they
are much less exposed to people who think outside the left-liberal box. How
many faithful New York Times readers have no idea what American
conservatives think, much less how Russian oligarchs do? Well bred and well
read Americans live in an ideological and cultural cocoon and this makes
them fatally slow to understand the very different motivations that animate
actors ranging from the Tea Party to the Kremlin to, dare we say it, the
Supreme Leader and Guide of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
As far as we can tell, the default assumption guiding our political
leadership these days is that the people on the other side of the bargaining
table (unless they are mindless Tea Party Republicans) are fundamentally
reasonable people who see the world as we do, and are motivated by the same
things that motivate us. Many people are, of course, guided by an outlook
not all that dissimilar from the standard upper middle class gentry American
set of progressive ideas. But some aren’t, and when worlds collide,
trouble comes.
Too much of the Washington policy establishment looks around the world and
sees only reflections of its own enlightened self. That’s natural and
perhaps inevitable to some degree. The people who rise through the
competitive bureaucracies of American academic, media and think tank life
tend to be those who’ve most thoroughly absorbed and internalized the set
of beliefs and behavioral norms that those institutions embody and respect.
On the whole, those beliefs and norms have a lot going for them. It would
not be an improvement if America’s elite institutions started to look more
like their counterparts in Russia or Zimbabwe.
But while those ideas and beliefs help people rise through the machinery of
the American power system, they can get in the way when it comes to
understanding the motives and calculations of people like President Putin.
The best of the journalists, think tankers and officials will profit from
the Crimean policy fiasco and will never again be as smug or as blind as so
much of Washington was last week. The mediocre majority will go on as before.
The big question of course, is what President Obama will take away from this
experience. Has he lost confidence in the self-described (and self-deceived
) ‘realists’ who led him down the primrose path with their empty happy
talk and their beguiling but treacherous illusions? Has he rethought his
conviction that geopolitics and strategy are relics of a barbarous past with
no further relevance in our own happy day? Is he tired of being humiliated
on the international stage? Is it dawning on him that he has actual enemies
rather than difficult partners out there, and that they wish him ill and
seek to harm him? (Again, we are not talking about the GOP in Congress.)
Let’s hope so. There are almost three years left in this presidential term,
and they could be very long ones if President Obama chooses to stick with
the ideas and approaches he’s been using so far. |
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