THE AUDACITY OF FALSE HOPETHE AUDACITY OF FALSE HOPE
Berlin is an ideal place for an American president, even a would-be president, to speak to the world about freedom and shared values. The visit of presidential candidate Barack Obama on July 24, 2008, evoked the famous speeches there by his countrymen John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, speeches that defended the line, real and metaphorical, against the Soviet Union and the tyranny it represented in Eastern Europe. Although the line, the Wall, and the USSR itself are now gone, nuclear-armed dictatorships still pose dangers, something the senator declined to mention in Berlin.
The stage for Obama’s performance had been set several weeks earlier when the Illinois senator rejected his opponent Senator John McCain’s proposal to eject Russia and exclude China from the Group of Eight. Obama’s response suggested that it was simply impossible to work with Russia and China on economic and nuclear nonproliferation issues while standing up for democracy and human rights at the same time.
Not only is this false, but it has repeatedly been shown that the exact opposite is true. Commercial agreements, arms control, and other mutually beneficial projects can be pursued without tacitly endorsing dictatorship. Senator Obama spoke of enlisting China to help write the “international rules of the road.” This is the same twisted logic that led the United Nations to place China, Cuba, Russia, and Saudi Arabia on its Human Rights Council. Do we really want to live under rules created with the approval of such regimes?
While Obama talked about the importance of receiving Russia’s help in containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Reuters reported that Tehran was acquiring advanced S-300 surface-to-air missiles from the Kremlin. If that was the level of cooperation the West earned by including Russia in the G8, it is difficult to imagine what Obama feared would occur should Russia be expelled. In a serendipitous echo, right now in April 2015, Iran’s nuclear program and Russian S-300 missiles to protect it are again in the news. Alarmingly, Obama the president doesn’t seem any more concerned about them today than he was as a candidate in 2008.
In Berlin, Obama repeatedly mentioned the 1948 Berlin airlift. And in a previous interview he had said he would like to “bring back the kind of foreign policy that characterized the Truman administration with Marshall and Acheson and Kennan.” It was a strange statement, since President Truman, a great hero in my estimation, fought against giving up even an inch to the Communists on any front around the world. And the “Man from Missouri” was facing down no less a brute than Josef Stalin, who was making no secret of his desire for global dominance. Not only did Truman save West Berlin, but South Korea, Taiwan, and Western Europe also have much to thank him for. (In the light of current events it is also worth noting that Truman also forced Stalin to end the Soviet occupation of Iran in 1946.) Contrast that hard line to Obama’s campaign advisors Madeleine Albright and William Perry, secretaries of state and defense under Bill Clinton, who also criticized McCain’s proposal to respond to human rights abuses by major powers with more than lip service.
Also in his Berlin speech, Obama asked if the West would stand for “the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe.” Commendable, but what of the political prisoner in China and the convicted blogger in Russia? Both Mugabe and Medvedev came to power in blatantly fraudulent elections. The hypocrisy of condemning weak dictatorships while embracing strong ones destroys American and European credibility and undermines any attempt at global leadership; in fact, it seems to encourage smaller autocracies to aspire to greater ambitions. Great leaders are formed only by taking on great challenges. Those of us living behind the Iron Curtain were grateful Ronald Reagan did not go to Berlin in 1987 to denounce the lack of freedom in, say, Angola.
Other than Obama’s stance on Iraq, the candidate of change sounded a lot like he would perpetuate the destructive double standards of the Bush 43 administration. Meanwhile, the supposedly hidebound John McCain wasn’t too old-fashioned to suggest that if something is broken you should try to fix it. Giving Russia and China a free pass on human rights to keep them “at the table” has led to more arms and nuclear aid to Iran, a nuclear North Korea, and interference from both nations on resolving the tragedies in Darfur and Zimbabwe. Would all of these things have occurred anyway had the United States and Europe threatened meaningful reprisals? We can’t know, but at least McCain wanted to find out.
In 2008 and today there are wheeling-and-dealing capitalists and nationalists running the Kremlin and China’s National People’s Congress instead of Communist ideologues. They do not represent the existential threats faced by Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Reagan. And yet Obama is still reluctant to confront the enemies of democracy to defend the values he touts so convincingly in his speeches. The Cold War ended and democracy became the global standard not because Western leaders merely defended their values but because they projected them aggressively.
On September 11, 1858, another Illinois politician soon to run for president, Abraham Lincoln, said, “Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere.” Not where it’s convenient. Not in countries lacking large energy reserves and nuclear weapons. Everywhere.
Obama’s biggest applause in Berlin came when he suggested that the unilateralism and military adventurism of the Bush 43 era would come to an end under his presidency. By that point in the campaign no one doubted Obama could deliver a great speech. But the reactions of the Berlin audience, and the US electorate, made it clear it was as much an anti-Bush rally as anything else. In 2008, Americans and the rest of the world were exhausted after two long military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq; campaigns without clear goals or visible finish lines.
To be fair, Obama was representing his constituents. Even the firmest supporters of the Bush 43 freedom agenda understood that their cause was severely damaged by the extraordinary cost and duration of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the never-ending nation building and security operations that followed. America’s human and financial capital had been spent, but even more importantly, so had its political capital.
The deepening catastrophe in Iraq distracted the world’s sole superpower from its wider goals and weakened the United States politically as well as militarily. With US congressional leadership threatening to make the same mistake by failing to see Iraq as only one piece of the puzzle, it was time to return to the basics of strategic planning.
Thirty years as a chessplayer ingrained in me the importance of never losing sight of the big picture. Paying too much attention to one area of the chessboard can quickly lead to the collapse of your entire position. America and its allies were so focused on Iraq that they were ceding territory all over the map. North Korea got nukes, an arms race erupted in Latin America, and the petro-dictatorships of Russia, Venezuela, and Iran were riding high on the surging price of oil. By 2006, even the vague goals of President Bush’s ambiguous war on terror had been pushed aside by the crisis in Baghdad.
It was time to recognize the failure of America’s post-9/11 foreign policy. Preemptive strikes and deposing dictators may or may not have been a good plan, but at least it was a plan. If you attack Iraq, the potential to go after Iran and Syria must also be on the table. Inconsistency is a strategic deficiency that is nearly always impossible to overcome. The United States found itself supervising a civil war while helplessly making concessions elsewhere. This dire situation was a result of the only thing worse than a failed strategy: the inability to recognize, or to admit to yourself, that a strategy has failed.
Within four years after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, North Korea tested a nuclear weapon. Iran was openly boasting of its uranium enrichment program while pouring money into Hezbollah and Hamas. A resurgent Taliban was on the rise in Afghanistan. Nearly off the radar, Somalia was becoming an al-Qaeda haven. Worst of all, America was failing at its basic mission, the mission at the root of all these engagements: to make its people safer than they were before.
As is often the case, the seeds for this widespread catastrophe were sown in the one real success the West had. The attack on the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan had succeeded so well in its original goal of routing al-Qaeda and its Taliban sponsors that the United States and its allies failed to understand all the reasons why. Almost every player on the world stage benefited from the attack on Afghanistan. The rout of the Sunni Taliban delighted Iran. Russia and China had no love for religious extremism near their borders. India was happy to see the US launch a direct attack on Muslim terrorists.
Only Pakistan was put under uncomfortable pressure, although even there President Musharraf was able to play both sides well enough to appear to be an essential ally to the West while terrorists and arms crossed his borders freely. Musharraf perfected the formula of holding himself up as the last defense against the extremists in order to gain immunity for his dictatorship, a ploy used by many Arab autocrats as well.
Not only was there a confluence of world opinion aided by sympathy for the United States after 9/11, but the proverbial bad guys were undoubtedly bad, and we knew where they were. As subsequent events showed, effectively bombing terrorists is a rare opportunity.
The allies fell victim to what I call the gravity of past success. Learning from our defeats is obvious, but too often we fail to appreciate the reasons for our successes; we take them for granted. The US charged into Iraq without appreciating the far greater difficulty of the postwar task there and how it would be complicated by the increasingly hostile global opinion of America’s military adventures. What would have been relatively easy in 1991–1992 was much harder twelve years later without united global support.
This is the lesson of the initiative. The saying in chess is that if the side that has the initiative—the attacking momentum in the position—fails to use it, then the other side’s counterattack is inevitable and will be very strong. The free world had overwhelming momentum after the fall of the USSR in every conceivable way, especially psychologically. Had the freedom promotion agenda of George W. Bush existed from 1992 to 1999, when the bad guys were already in disarray, it would have had a tremendous positive effect.
By 2008, Obama’s promises to bring the troops home, and keep them home, was only telling the American people (a majority of them, anyway) what they wanted to hear. This of course is a small part of a politician’s job description, but these days it is actually the only relevant part of a candidate’s job description.
There is no doubt the election of Barack Obama as the new president of the United States had a real impact on how many in the rest of the world perceived America. Obama represented a new generation of leadership and he both sounded and looked very different from his predecessors.
In Russia, Obama’s appearance—he became the first black leader of any world power, not just America—got the most attention. His victory marked the end of the view of America still promoted by many in Russia, a line used in the Soviets’ patented what-aboutism to counter accusations of repression. “Ah, but in the US they lynch Negros!” It is practically conventional wisdom, and not just in Russia, that “in America the rich WASPs and Jews exploit the poor Blacks and Latinos.” Suddenly it was as if everyone could see that the world was undeniably round.
The window of opportunity Obama had to take advantage of the world’s curiosity and goodwill was very small. The crises we faced in 2008 were too big to give the new president much of a grace period.
Obama’s other advantage was simply not being George W. Bush who, rightly in some cases and wrongly in others, had come to symbolize every problem anyone had ever had with America, Americans, and American power in the world. The clichés about Bush personally were a bouquet of American stereotypes, the ones much of the world loved to hate: rich, inarticulate, uninterested in the world, stridently religious, and hasty to act. Obama exploded these stereotypes, but as I wrote the day after his victory over McCain, “The world’s multitude of grievances with Bush will quickly be laid on Obama’s doorstep if he fails to back up his inspiring rhetoric with decisive action.”
Even with front-page issues like the financial crisis, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan facing the incoming president, he still had to find the time and the courage to deal with a certain nuclear-armed autocracy that controlled much of the world’s oil and gas. In my article I asked the new president to “make it clear he does not consider the people of Russia to be the enemy of the United States.” As in most authoritarian states, the Putin regime does not represent the interests of a majority of its citizens. (If it did, it wouldn’t have to be authoritarian to stay in power.) Kremlin propaganda works hard to present America as Russia’s adversary. With his fresh start, Obama had the opportunity to strike a blow against that image by speaking out against our dictatorial leader in Russia and making common cause with the people Putin was oppressing.
Of course there were complex issues around how Obama dealt with Russia’s official president, Dmitry Medvedev, and Russia’s real leader, Vladimir Putin. But the central choice was a straightforward one. Obama could treat them like fellow democratic leaders or he could be honest. He could take strength from the fact that he had received nearly 70 million votes while Medvedev had needed only one, that of Putin. Had Obama labeled the Putin dictatorship clearly and openly from the start he might have helped bring hope and change to an entirely different constituency: 140 million Russians.
The first international crisis Obama had to respond to actually came a few months before the election, when Russian and Russian-backed forces in the Georgian breakaway region of South Ossetia finally succeeded in provoking a shooting war with Georgia. Having prepared for this moment for months, Russian ships blockaded Georgian ports and Russian forces sped into Georgia and occupied several cities. It was far beyond the Kremlin’s claim that they were involved only in enforcing the peace and it looked like Russian forces might go all the way to the Georgian capital of Tbilisi.
The initial responses to the violence by the 2008 candidates on August 8 could not have demonstrated their differences more clearly. Obama condemned the violence and pleaded, “Now is the time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint.” McCain: “Russia should immediately and unconditionally cease its military operations and withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgian territory.” After media fallout over Obama’s timid remarks and more evidence that Russia was the aggressor, Obama hastily issued another statement to upgrade his language and condemn Russia’s “aggressive action.”
The differences were dramatic and would only get bigger. As it appeared in Politico on August 9, “Obama’s statement put him in line with the White House, the European Union, NATO and a series of European powers, while McCain’s initial statement . . . put him more closely in line with the moral clarity and American exceptionalism projected by President Bush’s first term.”
Just two days later it was clear that McCain’s moral clarity had been accurate while Obama’s position was embarrassing no matter how “in line” it was with others. Putin issued similar statements calling for both sides to show restraint and cease hostilities while his troops raced into Georgia and provided cover for his South Ossetian allies to wipe out ethnic Georgians from the region. On August 11, both candidates issued longer statements. Obama’s was essentially an admission that he had gotten it wrong the first time, although the friendly media didn’t portray it that way. And even while he did pin the blame on Putin for the escalation, his conclusion was not about what America’s role should be, but Russia’s:
“Let me be clear: we seek a future of cooperative engagement with the Russian government, and friendship with the Russian people. We want Russia to play its rightful role as a great nation, but with that role comes the responsibility to act as a force for progress in this new century, not regression to the conflicts of the past. That is why the United States and the international community must speak out strongly against this aggression, and for peace and security.”
Incredible. And remember, this was the tougher statement he made after being bashed as soft on Russia for two days. Russia’s “rightful role as a great nation”? Putin was rolling tanks through a European country as Obama spoke in Hawaii about a KGB dictator acting as a force for progress.
John McCain had long been a staunch supporter of Georgia’s shift toward Western-leaning democracy during and after the Rose Revolution in 2003 and the election of US-educated reformer Mikheil Saakashvili to the presidency. The Republican nominee minced no words in his more extensive August 11 statement, embracing the opportunity to flex his foreign policy credentials and to use the conflict to expose Obama’s conciliatory approach toward foreign policy as naïveté. McCain did an excellent job putting Georgia into the big picture of why the United States should care about this tiny country in the Caucasus:
“The implications of Russian actions go beyond their threat to the territorial integrity and independence of a democratic Georgia. Russia is using violence against Georgia in part to intimidate other neighbors such as Ukraine for choosing to associate with the West and adhering to Western political and economic values. As such, the fate of Georgia should be of grave concern to Americans and all people who welcome the end of a divided Europe and the independence of former Soviet Republics.”
McCain also correctly diagnosed the Russian invasion as a consequence of Western hesitancy: “NATO’s decision to withhold a membership action plan for Georgia might have been viewed as a green light by Russia for its attacks on Georgia, and I urge the NATO allies to revisit the decision.” McCain finished his statement powerfully: “We must remind Russia’s leaders that the benefits they enjoy from being part of the civilized world require their respect for the values, stability and peace of the world. World history is often made in remote, obscure countries. It is being made in Georgia today. It is the responsibility of the leading nations of the world to ensure that history continues to be a record of humanity’s progress toward respecting the values and security of free people.”
Can anyone read those statements and not believe that the world would be a safer, more democratic place today had John McCain been elected three months later? Or doubt that Obama’s evident timidity encouraged Putin’s attack on Ukraine? Of course we have no way of knowing, but I would be willing to bet anything that in the universe where McCain is president, Putin does not invade Ukraine. McCain is often painted as a warmonger in the United States, but calls for friendship don’t deter someone like Vladimir Putin, they encourage him. It’s a tragedy that thousands of Ukrainians, as well as many Russians, are suffering today because the Obama administration failed to learn that lesson.
Obama also failed his first test in the “3:00 A.M. phone call” department as president when the citizens of the Islamic Republic of Iran erupted in protest in June 2009 and the “Green Revolution” participants risked their lives to defend their votes. It was a remarkable moment. Putin and the other members of the “axis of autocrats” were closely watching events in Iran and the Western response. They wanted to know if there would be penalties of any significance for the use of lethal force against nonviolent protestors. Surprisingly, European leaders showed unusual assertiveness in harshly condemning the Iran regime’s actions, while the initial response from the other side of the Atlantic was not encouraging.
Only in his second statement, a week into the Iranian uprising, did President Obama realize it was important to speak up for justice and nonviolence, even while he declined to directly express support for the thousands of Iranians who were risking their lives to defend those ideals. I understood Obama’s reluctance to provide the Iranian regime with the opportunity to smear the protestors with the brush of American support. But could the leader of the free world find nothing more intimidating than “bearing witness” when it was evident that Ayatollah Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could not care less who was watching?
Senator Richard Lugar and Fareed Zakaria on CNN, among others, defended Obama’s extreme caution. Zakaria even compared the situation to how George H. W. Bush responded timidly to the impending collapse of the USSR and its hold on Eastern Europe in 1989. But when has a dictatorship ever used violence as a reprisal to public remarks from a foreign leader? Dictators make their calculations based on force and its likely consequences, not on the genteel bickering of politicians. President Eisenhower said nothing in 1956 and that certainly did not hold back the Soviet tanks that were rolling into Budapest. Little was said in 1968 and the vicious Soviet crackdown in Czechoslovakia still ran its bloody course. Regardless of what Obama or anyone else had said, the Iranian regime would have used all the force at its disposal to keep its grip on power.
On July 7, 2009, Obama gave a speech at the New Economics School in Moscow. It was, of course, a very good speech. Aside from his natural gifts in that department, Obama had several knowledgeable and savvy Russia hands on his team, including future ambassador to Russia Mike McFaul, whom I had known for several years and held in esteem for his support of the color revolutions.
Obama’s speech was strong and he gave a consistent message. I said in a press conference after Obama met with me and other opposition leaders that the speech was “less than what we wanted but more than what we expected.” He repeatedly emphasized that the important relationship between America and Russia was about the people, not their regimes, which was exactly what I had hoped for. Obama opened direct lines of communication instead of dealing only with official Kremlin channels.
Ideally he would have named names, of course. Obama made some strong statements about the failure of totalitarianism and pointed to the solution of democracy; in fact, he made far stronger statements regarding Putin’s Russia than anything we had heard from the two administrations before him. But he avoided criticizing the track records of Putin and Medvedev, the architects and wardens of our dictatorial system. Of course, as their guest in Russia Obama could hardly insult his hosts, but remarking on the anti-democratic trend of the previous nine years would have made the point. Nor did Obama mention Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose jailing by Putin and continued imprisonment by Medvedev exemplified everything Obama was criticizing about authoritarian states.
But Obama didn’t give anything up, either, which impressed me and likely came as a surprise to Putin, who probably expected the young new American president to be eager to make deals to have a big Russian success to report back home. Obama surprised some Republicans in the United States as well. Before he started his trip, several conservative GOP members wrote an open letter to Obama with recommendations: not linking missile defense to nuclear arms reduction, defending the rights of Ukraine and Georgia, and meeting with the opposition. From what I could tell, Obama followed each one.
In my statement to Obama at the meeting, I emphasized that all the conjecture about the power structure of the government in Russia at that time was a terrible waste of time, and that what mattered was that it was anything but a democracy.
My statement went on, “The Russian constitution describes three branches of government. Unfortunately, all three are now contained between the walls of Mr. Putin’s office. To all of President Medvedev’s talk of liberalization, I can say only that talk is cheap. We have seen no meaningful policy changes in the past year to indicate a new course.”
In a reverse mirror image of Reagan’s custom with Soviet leaders, I presented the American president with a list of Russian victims of state oppression at the end of the meeting. But I was under no illusion that Obama would ever toss it on Putin’s desk.
In a sentiment soon to be shared by many Americans, Russians quickly felt let down after a great Obama speech. The strong rhetoric about democracy and shared values faded into a bureaucratic jumble that accompanied Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s gaffe-filled “Reset” meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov earlier in the year.
For just one example, the first meeting of the loftily named US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission’s Civil Society Working Group took place in Washington, DC, on January 27, 2010. Top Russian administration official Vladislav Surkov was the group’s co-chair, despite a letter of protest signed by seventy-one members of the US Congress pointing out that Surkov was “one of the masterminds behind Russia’s authoritarian course.” The letter also urged President Obama to boycott the meetings until Surkov was replaced, perhaps by someone who hadn’t spent his career actively destroying the sort of civil society the working group was intended to promote.
Another potentially awkward part of the DC meeting involved a presentation by the head of Transparency International, the corruption watchdog that on its latest list ranked Russia as number 146 of 180 nations listed, between Kenya and Sierra Leone and by far the lowest of the leading industrialized nations. But Surkov and his Kremlin kin felt no embarrassment. It’s even possible they considered that ranking a form of recognition of how far from the path of lawfulness they have succeeded in pulling Russia under Vladimir Putin.
That this ineffectual working group convened at all showed that the Obama administration was placing form over function. Obama’s speech in Russia in July raised expectations that his administration would look at the Kremlin’s record of brutality at home and transgressions abroad and attempt to ally with the beleaguered Russian people instead of our repressive government. But instead of lines in the sand we got words in the air, with dozens of these commissions established on the American president’s initiative, each more wretched and moribund than the last. This one on civil society was simply insulting.
Putin’s functionaries were happy to pass the time in the world’s capitals being treated as equals instead of being berated for rigging elections and shamed for the growing list of dead Russian opposition figures. But why should the United States provide credentials of legitimacy and good faith by sitting down at the table with such people?
Meanwhile, just a week earlier, an advisory panel set up by Russian president Dmitry Medvedev released a report full of grand liberalization ideas. As positive as this may sound, the institute’s chief, Igor Yurgens, then admitted in an interview that in the end “Putin will make any decision he likes” and that “free elections are impossible in Russia today because the Russian population is politically ignorant, passive, and dislikes democracy.” His conclusion was that therefore “Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev should decide” who was to be president! This was Surkov’s design for “sustainable civil society”: a Pinochet with a law degree.
These silly commissions only demonstrated that the Obama administration was engaged in a campaign to make people believe problems could and would be solved eventually instead of actually taking the tough steps required to solve them. It was a pattern that would come to dominate his foreign policy. It is true that doing what must be done can be a thankless task and that telling the truth does not always poll well. But promises are for candidates. Fulfilling promises is for leaders.
America may be the world’s only superpower, but since we often hear that Russia is Europe’s problem, let’s check in on how they were doing while Obama was busy retreating on every front. Early in 2011 I was invited to contribute an essay to a European publication on the topic “Russia in Europe: Partners or Challengers?” I almost thought they were joking, but it’s a good example of the self-deluded and self-destructive state of mind that gripped Europe at the time when it came to Russia.
In August 2008, Russian tanks crossed an international border in Georgia and a chill ran down the collective spine of all of Europe, especially the former Soviet Bloc nations. Just one month earlier, Russia had threatened a “military-technical response” against Poland and the Czech Republic, including targeting nuclear weapons, when a US missile defense plan was announced. In January 2009, Russia cut off natural gas supplies to hundreds of thousands of people in half the countries of Europe. The bear was back and the bear was hungry.
With just those very recent events in mind, the question proposed by the editors for the title of the essay seemed preposterous. A partner is usually defined as someone with mutual interests, if not actual friendship or affinity, and who shares in your successes and your hardships. In case after case, for over a decade, the Putin regime that ran the Kremlin—and that does still, as if there were any doubt—took a bluntly adversarial position with Europe and the rest of the Western world. By 2011, however, the Kremlin’s most effective weapons were banks, not tanks. The money flow out of Russia was coming close to conquering more of Europe than the twentieth century’s most feared strongmen ever did.
For most of the decade, most of Europe’s leaders pretended that they could do business with Russia while half-heartedly protesting Putin’s demolition of our fragile democratic institutions and the overall crackdown on human rights. Other leaders simply dispensed with the token hypocrisy and embraced the “strong” and “popular” Putin in the hopes of achieving more favorable deals. That Faustian bargain enriched a small circle of elites in both Europe and Russia while Putin steadily turned Russia into a KGB police state.
Then the “Arab Spring” upheaval at the end of 2010 provided Putin with more good news on multiple fronts. To the obvious first: a rise in the price of oil is always the Kremlin’s top priority. Years of hoping for an Israeli military strike on Iran that would send oil to $200 a barrel gave way to quietly celebrating the uprisings that Putin hoped would achieve the same price target. Russia’s interests in Libya may not have been served by abstaining from the UN Security Council vote on military action, but Russia’s ruling junta’s cash interests were very well served.
The other bright spot for the Kremlin was the feeble Western reaction when the Saudis sent troops into Bahrain to help quash the rebellion there in March 2011. Unarmed protesters were shot at close range just days after Obama’s defense secretary Robert Gates met with the Bahraini monarchy. The United States eventually condemned the violence and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton politely asked the Gulf regimes that the US arms and supports, to “show restraint” in demolishing peaceful protests.
The European Parliament did slightly better, condemning the violent repression of demonstrators, but did so in a nonlegislative resolution with no hint of sanctions or other action. Putin had long wondered how far he could go in repressing domestic opposition without causing a significant backlash. In 2011 he learned there was no limit at all, and that live ammunition against Russian protesters was a viable option.
The Western intervention into the Libyan civil war had lessons for other rogue regimes as well. To Iran it said, “Hurry up!” Gaddafi had publicly given up his nuclear ambitions years ago, to much global acclaim. Meanwhile, Kim Jong-il could kill thousands, do whatever he liked, but was untouchable because the North Koreans had ignored all of the “Unacceptable!” cries from the rest of the world and detonated a few buckets of nuclear slop.
In John le Carré’s famous novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, spymaster George Smiley cautions an agent on dealing with the KGB: “The only problem arises when it transpires that you’ve been handing Polyakov the crown jewels and getting Russian chicken-feed in return.” The crown jewels of the West are democracy, human rights, and transparency. By cozying up to Putin, Europe betrayed those once sacred contracts for the chicken feed of oil, gas, and everything from automobiles and football teams to actual chickens.
“But wait,” I hear the so-called pragmatists say, “oil and gas are hardly trinkets, and anyway, isn’t economic engagement the best way to improve the Russian standard of living and, eventually, the state of its politics?” This line of thought has been discredited so many times that by now it is obvious that its proponents use it only as a way to avoid admitting they do not have the courage to stand up to a strongman. But let me discredit it one more time.
First, while the Kremlin has shown a willingness to freeze innocent people to death over a contractual dispute, Russia needs Europe’s consumers as much as Europe needs the oil and gas. The pipelines are in place and cannot be redirected. The main alternative client, China, has already driven very favorable long-term deals for cheap Russian energy, so selling there isn’t nearly as profitable as selling to Europe. Putin and his cronies know they have a limited window to pocket as much money as they can and they are not going to risk their precious cash flow, not that they have to take any risks when Europe’s leaders capitulate preemptively.
As for the second argument, just the phrase “economic engagement” should by now leave a bitter taste in the mouth of anyone with a genuine interest in the advancement of human rights. Russia’s elites profited mightily as the price of oil skyrocketed and industries were consolidated into the hands of Putin loyalists. Autocracies share the profits of engagement only as much as necessary to avoid mass societal unrest. When dictators do invest the money they don’t steal into the country, it goes into the security forces and propaganda machine, not liberalization of civil society.
The real impact economic engagement had was the reverse of the effect its apologists defend, namely the export of corruption from Russia to its “partners” in the free world. All that oil money has done its job abroad as well, buying respect where it cannot be earned. The Winter Olympics were purchased for Putin’s beloved Sochi—the security nightmare and environmental catastrophe of such an event in the small subtropical resort in the Caucasus somehow escaped the International Olympic Committee’s eagle-eyed evaluation teams. Then the World Cup was checked off Putin’s shopping list, though it’s hard to say which side is the less transparent, the Kremlin or FIFA.
I did not use the word “mafia” in a casual way in chapter 8. It is simply a more accurate way of defining the Putin regime than traditional political terms. The boss is the man who can provide protection, who can make deals with the authorities and keep the money flowing in. In this picture, Europe and America are the authorities, the only ones that could stand up to the mafia. But the boss, Putin, has them in his pocket and as long as he keeps the money coming in he will stay right where he is.
It is barely worth mentioning the attempt by some in the West to revive the old sport of Kremlinology by conjecturing on the balance of power between Medvedev and Putin. What matters is that the policies did not change, regardless of the nameplates on the office doors. At no point during Medvedev’s presidency was there ever a sign of the cherished liberalization that even some naïve Russians were anticipating.
The final nail in the coffin of the liberalization myth was pounded home by a Moscow judge’s gavel at the end of the second trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in December 2010. In January 2011, yet more protestors were jailed in Moscow for participating in a rally in defense of free assembly, including former Yeltsin deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov. The rally was part of Strategy 31, which held sanctioned events every thirty-first day on the calendar to protest the Putin government’s unwillingness to grant the rights that are so clear when read in our constitution.
The one European stalwart that seemed to have a bit of backbone was the UK, but the new Tory government was strangely eager to let bygones be bygones. The first case of international nuclear terrorism, the November 2006 murder of British citizen Alexander Litvinenko with the radioactive isotope polonium-210, chilled relations between Britain and a Russian government that quickly gave safe harbor to the prime suspect in the killing. In 2008, the chief executive of the TNK-BP joint venture, a union of flagship UK and Russian companies, fled Russia after a humiliating defeat in a battle for control.
The same man, Robert Dudley, then became CEO of British Petroleum. Just a few weeks after the Khodorkovsky verdict, Dudley, surrounded by representatives of the new Cameron government, proudly announced a stock swap and Arctic exploration deal with Rosneft. Perhaps it was just a cruel accident of timing, but Rosneft is the Russian state company that was the beneficiary of the seizing and looting of Khodorkovsky’s company Yukos after he was jailed. It is only a small stretch to suggest that BP was therefore in possession of stolen goods. But cold cash washes away a multitude of sins.
It is hard to say if BP was so eager to cozy up to the Kremlin because the company was having such a rough time on the other side of the Atlantic, where former CEO Tony Hayward was pilloried for the massive Louisiana oil spill. The Americans, at least, looked closely at the BP-Rosneft deal, with US congressman Ed Markey memorably referring to BP as “Bolshoi Petroleum.” Meanwhile, Gazprom and Shell announced a joint alliance for exploration. I was only waiting for a proud David Cameron to return from Moscow waving a sheaf of contracts and announcing, “Profit for our time!”
Europe was always quick to criticize Alexander Lukashenko, famous as “the last dictator of Europe,” which must get a laugh from the Kremlin. There is little on Lukashenko’s résumé of repression that would shame Vladimir Putin, but I suppose huge reserves of oil, gas, and cash can do a lot for one’s image. Perhaps if a major oil field were discovered near Minsk, Lukashenko would also be invited to sing karaoke with Hollywood stars and go to parties with Silvio Berlusconi the way Putin was.
It is not impossible to imagine Europe as an equal partner with Russia and not just a necessary evil. While that will never happen with Putin in charge, there are ways Europe’s leaders could both stand up to the Kremlin and promote regime change. In a mafia, loyalty matters, but only as long as the boss can guarantee that the money will keep flowing and that he can protect his loyal soldiers. Staying on good terms with Western Europe and America, where Putin’s oligarchs also prefer to spend their time and their wealth, is therefore essential. After all, why become a Russian billionaire if you are confined to the shell of a country you looted to become one?
A small circle of oligarchs control Russia and the caste of former and current state security service operatives, known as the siloviki, who occupy most of the power centers. Holding that group accountable on a personal level—digging into the legality of their investments, cancelling their precious Schengen visas—would send the message that Putin is no longer so influential, that he can no longer guarantee his allies’ fortunes and easy access to the good life abroad. It is a way of targeting Putin and his regime without punishing the Russian people.
I had been promoting such a course of action for many years on both sides of the Atlantic, at least as far back as 2007, when it suddenly began to look like a real possibility in 2011. This was good news, but the reason was rooted in tragedy.
Senate 1039, the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2011, was designed to go after the visas and financial assets of those responsible for the “detention, abuse, or death” of Sergei Magnitsky, the whistle-blowing young lawyer who died in Russian police custody in 2009 after exposing hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud by Russian officials. The act could also be expanded to cover individuals implicated in similar cases of fraud and human rights abuse. It owed its existence to the astonishing campaign of the indefatigable Bill Browder, Magnitsky’s former employer, and “a few good men” in Congress, especially its sponsor, Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland.
The version of what everyone called the “Magnitsky Act” finally came out of Congress as the “Russia and Moldova Jackson-Vanik Repeal and Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012.” It was the very rare piece of US legislation with overwhelming bipartisan support, so it was curious that the Obama administration seemed bent on thwarting it. (It passed the House on November 16, 2012, with a 365–43 vote and the Senate three weeks later with a 92–4 vote.) After trying to stop it from getting out of Congress for over a year, Obama signed it into law on December 14, 2012.
Apparently the White House was worried about disturbing its cozy relationship with the Putin dictatorship and so had the State Department create its own list of banned Russian officials from the Magnitsky case, but without releasing the names on it. Of course publicizing the names was the entire point. “Secret deterrent” is an oxymoron.
Or perhaps Obama, who managed to keep it in Congress and off his desk until just after his reelection, was afraid to lend credence to the words of his 2012 opponent, Mitt Romney, who in a March interview on CNN had said of Russia, “Without question our number one geopolitical foe. They fight every cause for the world’s worst actors. The idea that he has some more flexibility in mind for Russia is very, very troubling indeed.” Obama ridiculed Romney for the remark, even preparing a debate zinger about how the “1980s want their foreign policy back.”
You may remember that Romney’s shot at Obama’s flexibility targeted a “hot mic” moment Obama had had a few days earlier at a summit in South Korea. Obama was overheard telling President Medvedev that “on all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it’s important for him to give me space. This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.” (The “him” was of course Putin.) Equally revealing was Medvedev’s robotic reply: “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”
Since Putin invaded Ukraine in early 2014, the phrase “Romney was right” has become a motto among those wanting to bash Obama’s foreign policy. Romney was right, certainly, and he followed it up with an article in Foreign Policy magazine detailing how Obama had dropped the ball on Russia. An excerpt:
Without extracting meaningful concessions from Russia, [Obama] abandoned our missile defense sites in Poland. He granted Russia new limits on our nuclear arsenal. He capitulated to “Russia’s” demand that a United Nations resolution on the Iranian nuclear-weapons program exclude crippling sanctions. Moscow has rewarded these gifts with nothing but obstructionism at the United Nations on a whole raft of issues. It has continued to arm the regime of Syria’s vicious dictator and blocked multilateral efforts to stop the ongoing carnage there. Across the board, it has been a thorn in our side on questions vital to America’s national security. For three years, the sum total of President Obama’s policy toward Russia has been: “We give, Russia gets.”
Bingo. I’ve added to that fine list here already and so, as with McCain in 2008, you can guess where my US presidential election sympathies lay in 2012. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but in researching for this book I found a passage in Romney’s 2010 book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, that I would like to share because it mirrors some of the thoughts on evil that I wrote in the introduction:
Evil has been with us from the beginning of time, and it is not going away. Indeed, technology means it is very close. Today, the available means of creating horror are even more deadly than ever before. I submit that it is vital to believe in evil—it is neither confused nor deterred by vacuous introspection. We should study what is said and written by evil men, and take them at their word. Adolf Hitler told the world exactly what his aspirations were in Mein Kampf and in his speeches, but at first the world dismissed his claims as political bluster.
This is very true, and I particularly appreciate the part on taking evil men at their word, as it is something I have been saying for years about Putin. Almost since he came into office Putin has spoken forthrightly about his goals. Yes, he also blatantly lies about some things when it’s convenient, but on the big issues like centralizing power and his contempt for democracy and civil rights, he speaks plainly and has a good track record of backing up what he says.
This is why it was so frustrating to watch the Obama administration, first through Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then via her successor, John Kerry, continue to treat Putin as if he would reform his wicked ways if only they treated him kindly enough and offered enough concessions. It turned out Obama would need all of his advertised flexibility in his second term, because he would no longer be able to transmit messages to Vladimir via carrier pigeon Medvedev. He would have to do it in person. Two thousand twelve was an election year in Russia, too.
The adjective “Orwellian” has become cheap currency in modern political discourse. Liberals and conservatives alike in democracies like the United Kingdom and the United States enjoy using the term to describe nearly any infringement on civil liberties by the state. Video cameras to deter crime, wiretaps of suspected terrorists, and security checks at airports—all have been deemed worthy reference to Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984. I too sense the importance of protecting personal freedoms, even in a democracy, but those of us who have lived in actual police states would prefer to keep certain words in our lexicon that can describe our far more dire circumstances.
The most powerful theme in Orwell’s book is not that of the all-seeing Big Brother, but that of the control and distortion of language, especially in the form of “newspeak.” Words take on inverted meanings, words expressing unapproved ideas are eliminated, and human thought itself is curtailed through the reduction and simplification of vocabulary. This attempt to warp reality via information control is not science fiction to anyone brought up reading Pravda in the Soviet Union, or anyone living in Putin’s Russia today.
And so, the presidential election of March 4, 2012, the most fraudulent in Russian history, was proclaimed “fair and clean” by the state-controlled media. Peaceful civilian protests were dubbed “extremist provocations,” and the OMON riot police who brutally suppressed the protestors were “maintaining order.” The public outcry and huge protests over fraud in the December 4, 2011, parliamentary elections were answered by even greater corruption and the preordained reinstallation of a KGB lieutenant colonel who clearly aims to be dictator for life.
I would be a poor patriot if I did not point out that 1984 was modeled on the totalitarian state in the dystopian Russian novel We, written by Evgenij Zamjatin in 1921 and, of course, banned in the USSR until 1988. There are still elections in Zamjatin’s futuristic universe and each year “the Benefactor” is reelected unanimously. Disturbingly familiar.
You might not think that they are banning or burning many books in Putin’s “dictatorship-lite,” which attempts to mime the functions of an open society and to keep the most clichéd oppression behind the scenes as much as possible. This is partly true, if only because the authorities realize that big piles of burning books look particularly bad on YouTube. Instead, they simply confiscate the books as “extremist materials,” as was done in 2012 with 250,000 copies of former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov’s book detailing Putin’s corruption.
The blatant fraud of the December 4 elections was still apparent three months later. In what we call a “carousel” in Russia, herds of voters were moved from polling station to polling station in quantities large enough to clog the center of Moscow with dozens of buses. Fake polling stations appeared just a few days ahead of the election and collected thousands of votes. Threats went out to CEOs, school administrators, and many others directing them to get out the vote for Putin or suffer cuts in funding or worse.
The regime had to adapt to the awareness of the hundreds of thousands of protestors who had taken to the streets in December, much to the surprise of the government and the opposition alike. Webcams were installed in every polling station and tens of thousands of observers arose from the outraged citizenry. This forced Putin’s election commission leader Vladimir Churov to rely on tricks that could be performed behind the curtains. Supplementary voter rolls, intended for those who need to vote away from where they were registered, swelled to incredible size. Unsurprisingly, in the precincts where numbers were available, Putin received a much higher percentage of votes cast from the supplementary rolls than in the regular ones. Absentee ballots were also in high demand all of a sudden, as were the services that allow the infirm to vote from home.
Even all of Churov’s wizardry could not get Putin over the 50 percent mark in Moscow, where the official number was just 47 percent even though there were no credible candidates on the ballot. (Our calculations estimated that his real percentage in the capital was closer to 35 percent.) The candidates were all Kremlin approved, from the tired old Communist and Nationalist leaders to the new face of billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, a Putin creature installed on the ticket to syphon away protest votes. The global media descends only on election day and leaves soon afterward, ignoring the root and branch corruption and repression that is the real story.
As Russians tired of Putin, it remained to be seen if the rest of the world would continue to pretend he was the elected ruler of Russia. President Obama waited a few days but eventually called Putin. The modern dictatorship was taking place behind the scenes, but the performance of a democracy was continuing on stage, and Obama played his part.
This was no surprise, as I had received a preview of the Obama administration’s deluded hopes earlier in 2011. Vice President Joe Biden had come to Moscow in March 2011 for talks and he later spoke with me and other opposition members. When Biden arrived he was quite excited after a personal meeting with Putin, saying he’d gone off-script and pressed Putin not to run for the presidency again, saying that it would look terrible and hurt Russia’s constitutional integrity. From Biden’s proud demeanor and the look on the face of incoming Ambassador McFaul, it was clear this had not been part of the White House’s intended message.
I raised my hand to speak and said, “Mr. Biden, you do understand that compared to Putin you and Obama are beggars? You have to go to the Hill for every million while Putin can spend a billion on bribes without signing a piece of paper!” That the Americans still thought Putin cared about what they said or how his actions looked to them or to anyone was, and remains, terribly disappointing.
The Russian protest movement had been transformed at the end of 2011, or so we hoped, after Duma elections that demonstrated a shocking level of fraud even for Russia. Ordinary urban Russians who had done all right under Putin and mostly kept their mouths shut could not accept this latest assault on their dignity. Everyone knew the elections were a joke, and that they had been a charade since 2000. But this time Putin’s party, United Russia, had gone too far. The blatant vote rigging pushed hundreds of thousands of Russians into the streets with a unified anti-Putin, anti-United Russia message. It was a beautiful sight to behold.
There were flags from across the political spectrum, which validated my original 2005 protest concept of accepting anyone who would march against Putin, regardless of ideology. The majority, however, had no real political affiliation at all. They were marching against corruption, against impunity, and against Putin. The mask was all the way off, and Putin made it obvious he was no longer interested in pretending to be a democrat. People were simply sick of him.
As the protests continued through December, reaching over one hundred thousand people on December 24, 2011, the protesters were also marching for a relatively new face at the front of opposition marches, Alexei Navalny. He had been arrested at an earlier march and his release was anticipated by huge crowds. In repressive regimes like that of Vladimir Putin there is a constant struggle between the dictatorship and those who oppose it to restrict, or liberate, vital information. Navalny was the vanguard of the “data dissidents.” He built a network to reveal the corruption of the Putin regime, relentlessly documenting the kleptocracy case by case, with popular outrage as the result.
Navalny’s rise to prominence in the opposition movement was no accident, however. He had worked hard for many years as an organizer and activist. Apart from his persistence and skill, Navalny also possessed the more subtle requirements for leadership in the modern age. His charisma is complemented by a sardonic sense of humor that is ideal for puncturing the propaganda of the gray and humorless Kremlin. His knack for phrasing branded Putin’s United Russia as “the Party of Crooks and Thieves” for all time.
Navalny mastered the blogging and social networks that the opposition depends on since we are banned from the mainstream media. As had already been seen in other countries, groups could organize public protests very quickly online. Of course this did not mean you would not be beaten or arrested when you showed up, as many were. I was hardly an expert on flash mobs or even Twitter back then, but I was happy to march with Navalny on several occasions and work together with him and opposition activists old and new.
Navalny and his new breed of followers were largely undeterred for over a year, and we regularly scheduled large sanctioned protests as Putin’s formal return to the presidency arrived on May 7, 2012. The refreshed opposition movement was symbolized by white ribbons, noted by Putin with his typical vulgarity: “I thought they were condoms.”
The May 6 protests in Bolotnaya Square the night before Putin’s inaugural address were the first to be interrupted with serious violence, as the police intentionally shifted the barriers to create bottlenecks and then attacked protesters who were squeezed outside of them. There were over four hundred arrests, including those of organizers Navalny, Nemtsov, and Udaltsov, and over a hundred people with serious injuries.
I was not scheduled to speak that day because the theme of the rally was to provide an opportunity to the activists and speakers who had come from all over the country to be there. And so after reaching the police cordon at around six o’clock in the evening I passed through and headed for my scheduled appearance on Echo of Moscow to discuss the protest and Putin’s return. I also had a guest in tow that day, the American political consultant Frank Luntz, who was startled to get an up-close view of Russian democracy in action. He called in to Fox News that evening with his impressions.
“The government we remember of the Soviet Union, of the 80s, appears to be back now,” Luntz said. “People are scared. . . . It’s frightening to think, but it was almost as though the police wanted to have this confrontation, that they wanted to send this message, 24 hours before Putin comes back into office, that dissention and disagreement is not going to be allowed. They certainly didn’t have to do it violently, they certainly did not have to attack. There was no justification whatsoever. . . . I marched in the entire parade and there was a gentleness, there was singing, and chants. These were docile people and they were attacked unfairly.”
I watched the entire catastrophe erupt on the live feed from the Echo of Moscow studio. I had been planning to do my spot and return to Bolotnaya to hear the speakers and meet some colleagues, but the entire square had turned into chaos by six thirty. The entire city had been turned into a fortress to prepare for Putin’s inaugural the next day and the police were obviously intending to send a message, as Luntz astutely pointed out. The tsar was back and anyone who wanted to march against him had better be prepared to have his skull cracked.
The new crackdown did not end in the streets. The regime targeted the entire Coordination Council of the opposition movement, raiding their homes and even their offices and families’ homes. Leaders were called in for interrogation over and over. Even more new anti-protest laws were passed to allow for much higher fines and up to thirty days in prison for a minor civil offense. It was not a headless movement; it required coordination and communications work to bring fifty thousand or more people to the streets. That was still plenty to put the lie to Putin’s approval ratings, but it was not enough to topple the regime. There were a few more fairly large rallies up until the May 6, 2013, Bolotnaya anniversary rally that brought tens of thousands of Muscovites out.
On July 18, 2013, Navalny was sentenced to five years in prison on concocted embezzlement charges typical of the kind used to persecute opposition figures. This happened after he had registered the day before as a candidate for the Moscow mayoral race. A bizarre cat-and-mouse sequence then ensued. Navalny was shockingly released, probably for the dual purpose of avoiding making him a martyr and to add some needed quasi-legitimacy to the mayoral election. He was allowed to appear on the ballot and campaign, although of course the Kremlin candidate, incumbent mayor Sergey Sobyanin, had the innumerable advantages of state power and media. Another likely reason why Navalny was released and allowed to run was as a way for the Kremlin to keep the ambitious Sobyanin in his place. Without Navalny on the ballot Sobyanin’s result would have surpassed Putin’s national 63.6 percent and dwarfed Putin’s 47 percent in Moscow. It shows how subtle and dangerous modern dictatorships are that they can employ democratic structures and tools in this way.
Navalny duly finished a distant second and continued his life as a marked man with his convictions and new charges constantly hanging over his head. His last conviction, in December 2014, left Navalny under house arrest and his brother Oleg in jail, a standard hostage-taking maneuver of the KGB old school. They are both prisoners of conscience. Navalny was helping organize a new march on March 1, 2015, when our colleague Boris Nemtsov was murdered on February 27. The march was turned into a memorial parade for our friend.
It is difficult to say what could have gone differently for the public protest movement in that period. If a real revolution was to occur it needed to be early, before the regime formulated a response. Perhaps the huge demonstration on December 24, 2011, on Sakharov Avenue was the best chance if there was one. I was there with nearly every other member of the opposition and there must have been at least thirty other speakers. Navalny came tantalizingly close by saying what many of us had thought for so long:
I can see that there are enough people here to seize the Kremlin and the White House [federal government building] right now. We are a peaceful force and will not do it now. But if these crooks and thieves try to go on cheating us, if they continue telling lies and stealing from us, we will take what belongs to us with our own hands!
What might have happened had we marched on the Kremlin and the Duma that night? If we had established a camp in Red Square one hundred thousand strong and prepared battlements? Would the people have followed us? Would the thousands of police have opened fire? Would we now be free, or dead?