Ace:
Well, if it weren’t already apparent, I’d say that neocon idealism is officially dead.
Many people — especially those on the left, of course, plus those who are bewitched by sharply-creased trousers — call Obama’s foreign policy “realist.” It is nothing of the sort. It’s the left’s version of idealism.
For 50 years, the left endeavored to defend Soviet aggression by constantly casting it as defensive in nature. Read Howard Zinn, or listen to Oliver Stone’s simpering apologism, and you’ll hear the same claim a dozen times: Every evil, murderous act committed by the Soviets was caused by justifiable fears of US aggression.
Of course, we should note this fear-of-the-aggressor apologism is highly selective; Zinn, Stone, and fellow travelers never offer a defense of the United States based on the US’ quite-legitimate fear of Soviet aggression. They excoriate the US, for example, for attacking the Taliban, despite the rather ample evidence of justified US fear of the Taliban and their guests, Al Qaeda. Thus, the Soviet Union is relieved of responsibility for brutally crushing the Czechs in the Prague Spring of 1968 — an invasion of 200,000 Soviet troops with 20,000 tanks — but America receives no such dispensation on the basis of the 3000 murdered Americans of 9/11.
If this pro-Soviet agitation were limited to the pages of The Nation, it would not be cause for great alarm. The problem is that Obama is so steeped in this Zinnian narrative that he conceives of virtually every dictator’s viciousness of being, somehow, the product of American Imperial Sin, and has therefore cast his entire foreign policy as one of No Threatening Moves.
From the “Russian Reset” to blocking Polish anti-ballistic-missiles, Obama’s Plan A for the defense of the United States is little more than “don’t scare the Russians,” or “don’t scare the Iranians,” or don’t scare any country or non-state actor which is, itself, scary.
There’s an inch of truth in the idea that countries act out of fear, just like there’s an inch of truth in virtually everything. But Obama seems to read the Russian/Soviet narrative, issuing from its state propaganda organs and relentlessly re-transmitted by its reliable toadies in the US and Europe, as if is an honest account of Soviet/Russian intention. In fact, 90% of it is false. As Hillary Clinton recently observed, Hitler’s pretext for invading Czechoslavakia was to save the German ethnics of the Sudetenland from the predations of ethnic Czechs and theuntermenschen Slavs.
People are rarely honest about their actual motivations for committing horrific acts, and few are more dishonest than tyrannical politicians backed by a state media and a totalitarian system of punishing internal dissent.
So sure, some amount of Russian foreign policy is based on fear, and some of that fear can even be credited as rational; but so is part of the American foreign policy, and so is the foreign policy of the UK, and France, and Australia, and India and every other country on the face of the earth.
But most of Russian foreign policy is rooted in simple Want. Putin Wantssomething resembling the Soviet Union back. Putin Wants to surround his country with satellites and satrapies.
And the way to keep someone from acting on his more repulsive Wants is to assign a cost to achieving those Wants such that he will restrain himself from acting on every Want.
