Jedimentat44
Contemporary American media is filled with sensationalist articles and accusations directed against Russia and its President Vladimir Putin. The current fixation with Russian aggression is one indication of a dangerous deterioration in bilateral relations, which is being taken advantage of by hawkish politicians to fuel a new arms race and Cold War.
Into this overheated foreign policy landscape comes From Cold War to Hot Peace (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2018), a memoir by Michael McFaul, a former ambassador to Russia.
According to McFaul, Putin is an authoritarian leader reminiscent of some of the worst traditions of Russia’s past. He has not only trampled on freedom in Russia, but antagonized the West through election hacking and the carrying out of military aggression in Eastern Ukraine and Syria.
But McFaul’s book presents a misreading of Russia that will make future relations only more challenging. Unfortunately his view is one that predominates in the mainstream and left media as well as the Democratic Party.
McFaul was the U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012-2014, a key period in the deterioration of U.S.-Russian relations. He previously worked for the U.S. National Security Council as Special Assistant to President Obama, and senior director of Russian and Eurasian affairs.
Central to McFaul’s worldview is the notion that economic liberalization will inevitably pave the way for political democratization and reform, and that a democratic Russia would never go to war with the United States (the democratic peace theory holds that two democracies will never go to war with each other).
McFaul was part of a coterie of Quiet Americans who descended on Russia in the 1990s infused with a missionary like zeal to export liberal economic systems and democracy. He was a protégé of George P. Shultz, Reagan’s Secretary of State. He participated in Russia’s anti-communist revolution, believing, as he writes in his book, if “we could forge deep political, economic, and security relationships with a democratic Germany or democratic Japan after World War II, why couldn’t we do the same with a democratic Russia at the end of the Cold War?”
McFaul’s analysis of Russian politics repeats historical tropes about a democratic West and autocratic East. He gives especially short shrift to the economic hardship facilitated by the neoliberal shock therapy policies imposed on Russia by Ivy League types like himself and the vast corruption that ensued—undermining his theories. He in turn misses a key factor underlying support for Vladimir Putin, who went after predatory Western financial interests and oligarchs that weakened Russia in the 1990s.
During the Russian presidency of Dmitry Medvedev from 2008 to 2012, the Obama administration successfully initiated a “reset” policy that resulted in foreign policy breakthroughs such as the 2010 new START treaty mandating a reduction of nuclear weapons, and ensured cooperation in fighting the War on Terror and a number of other issues.
According to McFaul, Putin’s re-election in 2012 brought back old Cold War animosities. Putin, in McFaul’s estimation, needed to create a menacing United States to justify his power and crackdown on domestic liberties, and nothing the U.S. could do would change that.
McFaul’s narrative fails to take into account why Putin is actually quite popular in Russia.
McFaul’s narrative fails to take into account why Putin, despite his autocratic proclivities, is actually quite popular in Russia. Putin presided over a period of economic growth and successfully prosecuted oligarchs like Mikhail Khodorkovsky who had exploited privatization initiatives during the 1990s. By pushing economic integration with other Central Asian states in forming a Eurasian power bloc, Putin has also prevented Russia’s disintegration.
McFaul also leaves out the role that the United States played in provoking many of Putin’s foreign policy actions, including the U.S.-NATO invasion of Libya, which even Medvedev, who initially supported it, considered a mistake. He fails to discuss how American economic incentives, such as control over Central Asian oil and gas resources, have fueled geopolitical rivalry.
McFaul also underplays the importance of NATO’s expansion towards Russia’s borders. His version of events about the conflicts in Ukraine leave out U.S. and European Union support of the Maidan protests in February 2014, which brought down the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych and provoked civil war.
McFaul claims that he helped engage both the government and the demonstrators “to try and find a peaceful way to defuse the crisis.” However, evidence shows that U.S. politicians not only egged the protesters on, but also were priming for the imposition of Arseniy “Yats” Yatsenyuk, a neoliberal technocratic who they believed would open Ukraine’s economy to the West.
Though claiming to champion human rights, McFaul has nothing to say about the neo-Nazi presence among the protesters and the shelling of villages in Donetsk as part of counter-terrorism operations pursued against Eastern Ukrainian rebels. Nor does he write about the vast displacement and torture carried out by the Ukrainian military and its proxy militias financed by the United States.
McFaul’s misleading depiction of the war in Ukraine fits with a broader pattern of omissions. He waxes hysterical about the annexation of Crimea following the Ukrainian coup, without acknowledging that a large majority of Crimeans supported a referendum on the annexation, and that Crimea has strong historical ties to Russia.
Putin takes all the blame for backing the despot Bashar al-Assad and prolonging the war in Syria, as another example, but McFaul is silent on the United States arming of jihadists opposition forces who are equally reprehensible.
In an interview in Moscow in early May, Alexey Pushkov, a Russian Senator and former head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the state Duma, told me that since the United States had fueled instability in Iraq and Libya, Russia felt it had to become more involved in Middle Eastern affairs to prevent further chaos. He said he was intent that Syria would not become another failed state and haven for jihadism like Libya.
While Russia may also be seeking the maintenance of its naval base in Tartus, Pushkov has a valid point which McFaul’s narrative fails to consider.
According to Pushkov, Russia naturally seeks friendly neighbors and was concerned by outside interference or the presence of hostile regimes or Islamic extremists in its geopolitical neighborhood.
The Russian military budget, furthermore is far less than that of the United States, which hosts at least 800 overseas military bases worldwide, when Russia has only about a dozen, mostly near its border.
A key turning point in U.S.-Russia relations was the passage of the Magnitsky Act in 2012 which levied sanctions on Russian officials who had allegedly covered up the murder of whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky after he had exposed a Russian government scam to rob American investor William F. Browder, the head of Hermitage Capital, of $230 million.
In his book, McFaul repeats this version of events, despite the fact that more recent evidence has cast serious doubt on this story. For example, Magnitsky was not a lawyer, as McFaul suggests, but a tax accountant, and he may have been a party to the tax evasion scheme Browder himself perpetuated.
In a book about the deception used to sell intervention in World War I nearly a century ago, journalist George Abel Schreiner urged people “not give too much heed to the drivel one finds in the books of diplomatist-authors.” Historians and the public should indeed read McFaul’s words with caution, and be conscious of the tradition in which he writes.
The true history of U.S.-Russian relation in the last decade is one of lost opportunity for cooperation and tragedy.
His agenda becomes apparent in light of his role as an informal advisor to the Hillary Clinton campaign on Russia. In that capacity, McFaul advocated for a strategy of greater resources and soldiers for NATO in the Baltics, more economic and military support for Ukraine, new sanctions on Russia, the creation of no-fly zones in Syria, and more expansive efforts to push back Russian propaganda in the world. This program was a recipe for the continuation of Cold War hostilities which threaten world peace.
The true history of U.S.-Russian relation in the last decade is one of lost opportunity for cooperation and tragedy, which the United States and its diplomatic representatives must take important responsibility for. The media demonization of Vladimir Putin is being used to re-invoke Cold War imageries of Russian subversion.
If the first cold war was a tragedy, the second one is playing out as farce, and McFaul’s new book is part of the charade.
Jeremy Kuzmarov is author of The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce (Monthly Review Press, 2018) among other works on U.S. foreign policy.