Over at Andrew Sullivan’s substack blog, the Weekly Dish, Andy has a strange post, strangely titled The Strange Rebirth Of Imperial Russia, expressing bewilderment over the fact that Russian bad ass Vladimir Putin actually seems to be longing for the good old days, when Imperial Russia styled itself the “Third Rome”, independent of, and superior to, the decadent West.
Well, to my decadent mind, that seems to have been news to precisely no one who’s been sentient for the past dozen years or so, but I guess Andy’s “different”. What was really “different”, and what has really prompted this post, however, is Andy’s second error, regarding the “error” of the U.S. in handling the one-time U.S.S.R.’s collapse circa 1991, to wit:
Take away a totalitarian ideology in an instant, and a huge vacuum of meaning will open up, to be filled by something else. We once understood this. When Nazi Germany collapsed in total military defeat, the West immediately arrived to reconstruct the society from the bottom up. We de-Nazified West Germany; we created a new constitution; we invested massively with the Marshall Plan, doing more for our previous foe than we did for a devastated ally like Britain. We filled the gap. Ditto post-1945 Japan.
But we left post-1991 Russia flailing, offering it shock therapy for freer markets, insisting that a democratic nation-state could be built — tada! — on the ruins of the Evil Empire. We expected it to be reconstructed even as many of its Soviet functionaries remained in place, and without the searing experience of consciousness-changing national defeat. What followed in Russia was a grasping for coherence, in the midst of national humiliation. It was more like Germany after 1918 than 1945. It is no surprise that this was a near-perfect moment for reactionism to stake its claim.
What makes me want to respond to Andy here is that a lot of people think that what we did in Germany and Japan after WWII was really not that big a deal, and could have been repeated just about anywhere—like Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Libya, for example—and, despite the fact that those three excellent adventures proved to be total horror shows for everyone involved, Andy still doesn’t get the picture. Well, if Andy doesn’t get the picture, it’s a pretty good bet that a lot of other people won’t either, which makes me think it’s worth a few pixels to explain why both Germany and Japan were pretty much one ofs.
First of all, Andy is totally off base in thinking that after 1991, the U.S. could simply have moved in and run Russia for five or ten years with no input from the Russians themselves! How would that work? We hadn’t defeated them, after all. The U.S.S.R. had just imploded. In the case of Germany and Japan, on the other hand, we had crushed them both, extracting explicit pledges of unconditional surrender after pounding both nations for the concluding years of the war with a destructive fury unprecedented in the history of the human species.
In addition, postwar Germany and Japan had no friends. All of their neighboring nations hated them and only wished that the U.S. would sit on them for, practically, forever. The two countries could expect, and of course received, no assistance from anyone.
The humiliation of defeat, and the sense of being utterly unable to determine one’s future surely weighed heavily on both the Germans and Japanese. But, aside from these emotional burdens, which must have been considerable for both peoples, life was better. The war, with all its constant destruction from the air, rained on helpless civilians both night and day, and the nightmare of combat for the soldiers, was over. After the first few chaotic years immediately following 1945, life in its material aspects was better than it had been for years, particularly for the Japanese, who had been living under a harsh “war economy” for almost a decade.
Finally, and most important, both the Germans and Japanese wanted us to be there, to protect them from the Soviets, and we wanted to be there too, to protect ourselves from the Soviets. U.S. presence in both nations would surely have declined far more quickly than it did absent the Soviet menace.
The next time someone uses the example of the German and Japanese success stories to advocate a similar effort somewhere else, whether they’re urging us to “take over” Russia or China or Monaco, think about these things. Because their suggestions are totally wrong.
