What goes around comes around. Or is it the other way around? In either case, I’m talking about bullshit. The latest in recirculated manure comes from Chris Cillizza, writing at Newsweek, It's time to admit it: Mitt Romney was right about Russia.
Back in 2012, the Mittster opined that “Russia, this is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe”, prompting snickers from the Obama administration, who then looked like idiots when Russian invaded the Crimea two years later. But Russia wouldn’t have invaded Crimea if the U.S. hadn’t pursued, for nearly two decades, a “policy” of treating Russia like a 97-pound weakling who could be ignored, belittled, manipulated, or even lied to whenever the U.S. found it convenient to do so, a point I argued pretty extensively in an oddly titled post, Terrible Dan Drezner. Terrible Dan Drezner!.
Fifteen years before Mitt, George Kennan was the one who had it “right” on eastern Europe, in an opinion piece for the New York Times, A Fateful Error, a painfully accurate title, denouncing the Clinton administration’s decision to expand NATO up to Russia’s borders. As Kennan argues, this was a disastrous policy. In fact, the whole idea of maintaining NATO post-USSR didn’t make any sense, other than to allow the U.S. military to continue to spend hundreds of billions of dollars for no good reason other than to spend it, and to cater to the Europeans’ residual fear of a revanchist Germany—for who wants to see what a 21st century version of the Wehrmacht would look like? One can hardly blame eastern European nations caught between Russia and Germany to prefer a look behind Door No. 3, but a nationalistic rather than a revolutionary Russia was simply not a significant threat to American interests.
Few in the American foreign policy commissariat wanted to listen. The “liberals” wanted to “free eastern Europe”, a laudable if impracticable goal, with the added benefit that it would give them a reason for being, while the “conservatives” simply wanted international “tension” for its own sake, to give them a reason for being. Besides, the Russians were so weak they couldn’t put up a fight, so where was the downside?
Now, of course, we’re discovering the downside. It didn’t have to be this way. Not because we didn’t listen to Mitt Romney, but because we didn’t listen to George Kennan.
Afterwords
Over at Vox, Jonathan Guyer updates Kennan’s warning, How America’s NATO expansion obsession plays into the Ukraine crisis (additional pieces here). I have frequently written about eastern European affairs in the course of criticizing, mostly, Anne Applebaum, a brilliant scholar whose idealism has a strong tendency to overwhelm her common sense.
George Kennan is often justly praised and often unjustly overpraised. A compulsive contrarian, Kennan was, one could say with little exaggeration, almost always right when on the outside and almost always wrong when on the inside. He could criticize, incisively, but he could not build. In many ways he was absurd, longing for a return to the pre-democratic, deference-based societies of the past, which disappeared after the French Revolution. Although he always fancied himself an imperturbable homme de monde in the manner of Talleyrand and Metternich, on the two occasions when he actually held “real” power, as ambassador to first the USSR, under Truman, and then Yugoslavia, under Kennedy, he almost immediately got himself declared persona non grata, literally, and then booted out the country, thanks to his compulsively undiplomatic comments. I discuss his remarkably “unreliable” memoirs in the context of discussing some pretty unreliable history from Apple Annie here.
