Russia's Our Foe, Except For That NATO Base

Writing at the National Interest, published by the former Nixon Center, Doug Bandow critiques Mitt Romney's reckless rhetoric on Russia.

Romney Channels Gingrich

Trying to score points over Barack Obama's innocuous comment to the Russian president, Mitt Romney said that Russia is the "number one geopolitical foe" of the U.S. We have a classic great power relationship with Russia, partners in some matters, rivals in others, with generally friendly and constructive relations across the board. It used to be in presidential politics that a comment this ignorant and irresponsible would disqualify a candidate. Romney's father's prospects foundered because of a far less worrisome statement about Vietnam. I guess Newt Gingrich has lowered the bar for everyone.

Buying Abstentions

What did the Obama administration give up or promise so that Russia or China wouldn't veto the UN Security Council resolution the U.S. needed for our latest war? Some unpleasant speculation here.

You Don't Get To Decide, Unless You Must

Some excerpts from Hugh Hewitt's radio interview with George W. Bush about his memoir, Decision Points:

On faith and leadership: I think the first thing...is to understand you’re not God, and that you don’t get to decide. Secondly, I believe a faithful person is someone who fully understands his or her own inadequacies, and therefore relies upon a loving, redemptive Savior. And so it was, in one way, it was easy not to be judgmental when I’m trying to strengthen my own faith. And in the other way, though, it was easy to be judgmental when it came time to the practicalities of protecting the country. And I was very judgmental. I said these people are evil, and we will bring them to justice, because the most important job of the president is to protect the homeland.

On faith and power: [I]f you allow power to become your god, then it is corrupting. If you allow fame to become your god, it is corrupting. If you allow money to become your god, it is corrupting. And what religion helped me was to understand that that was those truths. And so power can be used effectively to help people, or it can be intoxicating, in which case it is difficult to have a proper relationship, if you’re a Christian, with Christ....

[For] American presidents...it’s hard to become so totally intoxicated with power when you’re responsive to the people. But the people that became intoxicated by power that affected me were like those idealistic souls that convinced others that their vision for the future was the right one, whether it be the folks who led the French revolution, or those who bought into Mao, or those who corrupted the Leninist movement in Russia. These are people that became so intoxicated with power that they ended up being murderers.

On meeting with grieving families: What was interesting...because we have a volunteer army, and because many of the folks who lost their life signed up after 9/11 and knew exactly what they were getting into, the parents really wanted to tell me how much that the sacrifice, how much their child really wanted to do what they were doing. And frankly, in many instances, they were there to determine whether or not I was going to make decisions based upon my own personal standing, or whether or not I was going to make decisions so that sacrifice would not go in vain. And it’s hard for people to understand this, but often times, or most of the time I met with families of the fallen, I became the comforted one. I was supposed to comfort them, and they comforted me.

On politically motivated CIA leaks in 2004: I was convinced there were some, and very few, I’m talking about a handful versus the thousands that are dedicated patriots, but they were leaking information that kept getting into the New York Times, for example, that seemed to me, and was trying to make it difficult for me to be reelected. It’s like the same thing about the leaks on some of our security programs that emanated, perhaps, out of that agency. And to me, that’s unacceptable behavior. When people get into the CIA, they have sworn to secrecy, and that their job is to provide the president with the information necessary to make tough decisions, not to try to undermine the process.

Julian Assange's Nonlinear Thinking

Julian Assange's cloudy, self-satisfied prose reminds me of the Unibomber's:

The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive "secrecy tax") and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption.

Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.

In opposing the decisions of a self-appointed know-it-all about what secrets should remain as such, I'm not expressing fear and paranoia. I'm worried about the rational conduct of the government's business and the safety of those who live under tyrannical governments and yet are willing to provide U.S. contacts with valuable information.

In view of Assange's implied desire to nonlinearly hit less open or unjust systems, I'll be looking forward to reading more news from Beijing and the Kremlin. But does Wikileaks even have sources in those governments who are willing to take the risk of nonlinearly hitting their bosses? That's why Assange's whole argument is bogus. Logic as well as Wikileaks' pattern make clear that the governments of free nations are far more likely to be the victims of leaks, which means that it's those regimes, and not authoritarian or totalitarian ones, that will experience "minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms."

Besides, if Assange got the secret Moscow and Beijing papers, would he have the guts to publish them? Palin and Huckabee talked about hunting him down. Putin and Hu might actually do it, and once they caught him, extradition probably wouldn't be an issue.

Obama's Biggest Foreign Policy Gamble

One of my former Nixon Center colleagues on President Obama's decision to force a vote on the strategic nuclear arms control treaty with the Russians, which Senate Republicans are opposing just because they can:

“It’s really high stakes,” said Geoffrey Kemp, a former national security aide to President Ronald Reagan and a scholar at the Nixon Center, a research group in Washington. “I would say it’s the biggest gamble he’s taken so far, certainly on foreign policy.”

I Guess The Cold War Isn't Over

Another example of journalists' obsession with process over substance is this long New York Times article about Republicans blocking a nuclear weapons treaty with the Russians in which no Republican is asked to explain why the treaty's actually a bad idea.

The Phone Company

This is the first picture I took tonight with my new iPhone 4, about 20 yards from the Apple Store in Brea. Is that he? Mr. Nixon? Sure looks like it, but how would the young people know?

I'd arrived about an hour before, breezing past a dozen sad, tired people snaking along the front window, and noted with satisfaction that the store wasn't crowded. No salesperson approached me, however. After about five minutes, I asked the guy at the cash register (how's that for a retrograde term?) what the people were in line for. "iPhone 4s," he said.

I joined the line. In the course of 20 minutes three or four people walking by in the mall asked what we were waiting for. I said to the young man behind me, who was about 30, that in Moscow in the old days, people didn't ask. Toilet paper, meat, fresh eggs -- whatever it was, they needed it, so they just joined the line.

He eyed me blankly. The Soviet Union, and by and large its state-induced shortages, had ceased to exist when my companion, a pharmacist named Dan, was a little boy. He did tell me he'd worked in southern Germany for five years. He asked if my work as a priest had taken me to Russia. I paused and was about to say I'd been three times with a former President, but I was saved from that outlandish assertion by Carlo, a young man in his early 20s in a blue Apple Store t-shirt, who shook my hand and asked if I wanted the 16GB or 32GB.

You know what I said. As his fingertips danced on the screen of his own iPhone, disentangling me from Verizon forever, I gave in to the temptation to garrulousness, which has never been my tendency. I assume no one's that interested. But I'm beginning to think the privilege comes with age. Most young people listen politely to older people. It's pretty cool.

I told Carlo and his colleague that, as an AirTouch-Verizon customer since 1999, I'd gone to the Verizon store today intent on replacing my ailing BlackBerry Storm with a Droid Incredible but hadn't been able to persuade the salesman to give me an extra four months' grace on my contract, which would've made the new phone affordable. It wasn't his fault. He was a good guy, but he didn't have the latitude. When I called to ask what my termination fee would be, I gave the operator another chance to give me the four months, but he didn't bite, either.

Verizon lost half a lifetime of business (okay, I'm being a little optimistic there) for a lousy four months. I told the Apple guys, "Going in there, it's like what dealing with the phone company used to be like." They eyed me blankly, too. Carlo's colleague said he'd been born in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell and several years after the conglomerate formerly known as today's least sought-after wireless carrier was broken up into the baby Bells, which created our raucous telecom reality.

You say "the phone company" to someone my age and we all remember when, a week after mom or dad called, the guy came by to install our new phone, choice of two designs and three colors. You say "the phone company" to the kids in the blue t-shirts at Apple, and you might as well be talking about the Inchon landing or Ozzie and Harriet.

But hey: Nixon's still cool enough for a white t-shirt at the mall. And I've got a phone that can tune my guitar and call Mars.

Salt Shaker

At the end of Phillip Noyce's rollicking thriller, as she staggers through the woods toward the sequel ("Salt II"?), Angelina Jolie (as CIA agent Evelyn Salt) has long since earned our respect for successfully mating MacGyver (she fashions a crude thermonuclear device from cleaning solvent and a plastic tube after masking the security camera with her underwear!) and Jason Bourne, conflicted but super-competent death machine.

But Jolie had already achieved elite action hero status as Laura Croft. In "Salt," she's even better acting her way through three delicate scenes. One pairs her with a little girl (played by Yara Shahidi) whom Salt encounters while escaping from cops and federal agents. They briefly commiserate about math homework, and then Jolie drops off her pet dog for safekeeping while changing into the getaway rig that all CIA agents evidently conceal in their apartments. She also has intense, quietly seductive moments with one U.S. agent she's trying to win over and another she hopes to trick so she can save the world.

I can't tell you if she succeeds in the story, because it would give too much away, and they might come for me. But she definitely succeeds on the screen. "Salt" also succeeds in establishing post-Soviet Russians as endlessly reliable bad guys, in this case Manchurian candidate indoctrinator Vassily Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski), who shows up in Washington one day pretending to be a defector just as Salt's leaving the office for an anniversary dinner with her arachnologist husband. Keep your eye peeled for one of his spiders in particular. It enables a deft plot twist that definitely stung me.

Jolie goes full Bourne after Orlov accuses her of being a Russian sleeper agent who's planning to kill the Russian president during a visit to Manhattan, an event which, we're invited to believe, would lead to a Brezhnevnik renaissance in Moscow. Which leads me to my one Salted beef (besides the characters ruining the transept of St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church on Park Ave.). It's the idea, essential to the movie's totally dopey narrative, that John F. Kennedy was shot by a member of Orlov's corps. If I favored content regulation of filmmakers, my first rule would forbid anyone from asserting or implying that the 35th president was murdered by anyone except a homegrown communist traitor acting alone. The young people are confused enough about Cold War history as it is.

The Stuff Of Nobels

Surveying the Obama administration's poor performance so far in Iran and the Middle East, Charles Krauthammer sums up Secretary of State Clinton's recent visit to Moscow, during which the Russians retreated on Iranian sanctions:

The Russian leadership, hardly believing its luck, needs no interpreter to understand that when the Obama team clownishly rushes in bearing gifts and "reset" buttons, there is nothing ulterior, diabolical, clever or even serious behind it. It is amateurishness, wrapped in naivete, inside credulity. In short, the very stuff of Nobels.

Obamellow

Playing the low-expectations game with Iran after it promises to ship its enriched uranium to Russia:

It [is], in many ways, the exact opposite of what a White House usually does after major international talks. Instead of painting lukewarm concessions as major breakthroughs and going on and on about “warm substantive” meetings, officials were treating a potentially major breakthrough as if it were a suspicious package.

If Iran has really agreed to send most of its openly declared enriched uranium out of the country to be turned into fuel, that is a significant concession, experts said, and much more than the Bush administration ever got over the years of its nonengagement dance with Iran.

Qum's The Word

Spy novel stuff in the New York Times as the Obama administration decided how to use George W. Bush-era intelligence on Iran's now-blown (only figuratively for now) outlaw nuclear facility near Qum to apply maximum leverage on the Iranians when all the leaders were together for the General Assembly opening this week:

At his meeting at the Waldorf the next morning, Mr. Obama decided that he would personally tell Mr. Medvedev, the Russian president, when they met Wednesday afternoon for a previously scheduled meeting. Mr. Obama also spoke with Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. Brown. Meanwhile, Jeff Bader, a senior White House adviser for China, informed his Chinese counterparts.

On Thursday, while Mr. Obama was leading the Security Council meeting, General Jones left his seat behind Mr. Obama, walked over to Mr. Prikhodko, the Russian national security adviser, and whispered in his ear. Mr. Prikhodko got up and followed General Jones out of the room. Minutes later, General Jones sent an aide back to get his Chinese counterpart as well.

Administration officials said they were gratified with Russia’s reaction — Mr. Medvedev signaled he would be amenable to tougher sanctions on Iran.

Does Russia Want Iran To Have Nukes?

Mark Steyn says the Russians are dissing us:

Moscow has concluded that a nuclear Iran is in its national interest — especially if the remorseless nuclearization process itself is seen as a testament to Western weakness. Even if the Israelis are driven to bomb the thing to smithereens circa next spring, that too would only emphasize, by implicit comparison, American and European pusillanimity.

Everybody Has To Ride The Peace Train

Stumbleupon took me to this moving slide show of everyday scenes in Iran, with Yusuf Islam singing his classic "Peace Train." I assume it was made as sabers were being rattled against Tehran in 2007 and early 2008. Leaving aside the unlikelihood of President Obama attacking Iran (Israel is its more likely adversary), there remains the impossibility of Iran possessing nuclear weapons while its president boasts about the impending destruction of Israel (or any nation). Perhaps some of those pictured here tried to do something about it in the recent election only to be muzzled by their government, which remains the largest stumbling block to peace because of its hatred of Israel and Cold War-style fear of the U.S.

This "Asia Times" article is a good primer on the current situation. Though still hopeful that his outreach to Iran will work, Obama is being pressured by Israel as well as U.S. politicians and organizations to step up sanctions against Tehran. So far Iran's trading partners and friendly rivals in Moscow have made a united front impossible. More about Russia's unhelpful current opposition to sanctions is here.

Some experts believe that Iran could be ready to make a nuclear device by the end of next year. The slide show quotes former Reagan defense official and Iraq war promoter Richard Perle as acknowledging that means other than war might have been just as effective against Saddam Hussein. If so, there would have needed to be a consensus in the international community that his tyranny had become intolerable. The same may also be true to avoid a military conflict with Iran. If Obama doesn't want to have a war, he'll have to be a relentlessly effective diplomat. To really be that, of course, he has to be willing to have a war if necessary (or at least able to convince others that he is).

Hey, Where're You Putin Those Bombs?

Creepy news about a publisher suppressing its own expose of Russian PM Vladimir Putin -- and, if it's true, creepy news about Putin:

The article, "Vladimir Putin's Dark Rise to Power" by veteran war correspondent Scott Anderson, quotes a former KGB official on the record and at length implicating Russia's shadow leader in a string of Moscow apartment bombings that killed hundreds in 1999 and were officially blamed on Chechen terrorists. The wave of fear created by the attacks played a critical role in launching Putin to power.

Good Sense Will Hunting

I read George Will's column about Russia three times and couldn't figure out what it means. Then I realized that he doesn't know what it means, either. He accuses President Obama of being nostalgic for the Nixonian era of U.S.-Soviet detente by making the blunder of proposing arms control negotiations with Moscow. Without meaning to do so, he then shows why Obama is right.

Reprising arguments he made two generations ago from the Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic Party, Will says that arms control wasn't the ticket for combating rampant Soviet militarism. Ronald Reagan's tough policies were. Will's setup prepares the reader for the argument that Obama is overlooking the threat that Putin's Russia still poses to U.S. interests. Instead, marshaling his usual flurry of statistics, Will argues that Russia, drowning in vodka and stunted by declining fertility rates, is dying as a great power. He enumerates no threats posed by Russia to U.S. interests except one: The nukes that Obama's policy is aimed at reducing:

Today, in a world bristling with new threats, the president suggests addressing an old one -- Russia's nuclear arsenal. It remains potentially dangerous, particularly if a portion of it falls into nonstate hands.

But if it's dangerous to have several thousand thermonuclear devices aimed at us by a crumbling nation (which I would think Will would accept as an axiom), and if Obama can achieve reductions in their number at no risk whatsoever to our interests, why is it a bad idea to have arms control negotiations?

It's not Obama who's nostalgic for the Nixon era (which he barely remembers, of course). It's Will, who embarks on the same anti-arms control column he would've written back then, even though he ends up proving (in spite of himself) that U.S.-Russian arms control today makes abundant good sense. If things are really so bad for Russia, perhaps we'd even be doing it, and the stability of the Asia-Pacific region, a favor by helping relieve it of the cost of maintaining its arsenal.

Russians Were Expecting A Space Station Visit

Evidently Moscow lost Secretary Clinton's "reset" button after the North Koreans pressed their "fire" button. New York Times:

Igor N. Shcherbak, the Russian deputy envoy, said that his country did not think it was a violation of the resolutions banning ballistic missiles, but he added that Russia was still studying the matter.

Hibernating Bear

Interviewed by "Christian Century," Walter Russell Mead reminds idealistic U.S. policy makers that some nations are better equipped for political modernization than others -- and he's not talking about Iraq:

[O]ne can't be deterministic about who is and who isn't able to change. Look at Russia: In some ways it is still struggling with the basic issues about liberal democratic capitalism that it was struggling with 100 years ago, before the Soviet takeover.

Putin Up With It

In Russia, no justice yet for a murdered journalist.

To Russia With Respect

Sending Henry Kissinger to Moscow, Barack Obama exhibits a realist's instincts.