American fascism and the creeping legalization thereof

An article in the Guardian discusses some history of American fascism and how it is advancing today. The article was written by Jason Stanley, an expert on authoritarianism and propaganda. The Guardian writes in an article, America is now in fascism’s legal phase:

The history of racism in the US is fertile ground for fascism. Attacks on the courts, education, the right to vote and women’s rights are further steps on the path to toppling democracy

“Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”

So began Toni Morrison’s 1995 address to Howard University, entitled Racism and Fascism, which delineated 10 step-by-step procedures to carry a society from first to last.

Morrison’s interest was not in fascist demagogues or fascist regimes. It was rather in “forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems”. The procedures she described were methods to normalize such solutions, to “construct an internal enemy”, isolate, demonize and criminalize it and sympathizers to its ideology and their allies, and, using the media, provide the illusion of power and influence to one’s supporters.

The contemporary American fascist movement is led by oligarchical interests for whom the public good is an impediment, such as those in the hydrocarbon business, as well as a social, political, and religious movement with roots in the Confederacy. As in all fascist movements, these forces have found a popular leader unconstrained by the rules of democracy, this time in the figure of Donald Trump.

Often, those who employ fascist tactics do so cynically – they do not really believe the enemies they target are so malign, or so powerful, as their rhetoric suggests. Nevertheless, there comes a tipping point, where rhetoric becomes policy. Donald Trump and the party that is now in thrall to him have long been exploiting fascist propaganda. They are now inscribing it into fascist policy.

Hitler was a genocidal antisemite. Though fascism involves disregard for human life, not all fascists are genocidal. Even Nazi Germany turned to genocide only relatively late in the regime’s rule. And not all fascists are antisemitic. There were Italian Jewish fascists. Referring to the successful assimilation of Jews into all phases of Weimar era German life, my father warned me, “if they had chosen someone else, some of us would have been among the very best Nazis.”

During these episodes of protest and rebellion, US politicians from Barry Goldwater onwards, placing campus protests together with Black rebellion against over-policing, have encouraged harsh law and order policing and crackdowns on leftists. John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s top advisers, said that Nixon’s campaign and administration “had two enemies: the anti-war left and Black people”, and invented the drug war to target both:

“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

We are now in fascism’s legal phase. According to the International Center for Not for Profit Law, 45 states have considered 230 bills criminalizing protest, with the threat of violent leftist and Black rebellion being used to justify them. That this is happening at the same time that multiple electoral bills enabling a Republican state legislature majority to overturn their state’s election have been enacted suggests that the true aim of bills criminalizing protest is to have a response in place to expected protests against the stealing of a future election (as a reminder of fascism’s historical connection to big business, some of these laws criminalize protest near gas and oil lines).

The Nazis used Judeo-Bolshevism as their constructed enemy. The fascist movement in the Republican party has turned to critical race theory instead. Fascism feeds off a narrative of supposed national humiliation by internal enemies. Defending a fictional glorious and virtuous national past, and presenting its enemies as deviously maligning the nation to its children, is a classic fascist strategy to stoke fury and resentment. Using the bogeyman of critical race theory, 29 states have introduced bills to restrict teaching about racism and sexism in schools, and 13 states have enacted such bans.

Fascist ideology strictly enforces gender roles and restricts the freedom of women. For fascists, it is part of their commitment to a supposed “natural order” where men are on top. It is also integral to the broader fascist strategy of winning over social conservatives who might otherwise be unhappy with the endemic corruption of fascist rule. Far-right authoritarian leaders across the world, such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, have targeted “gender ideology”, as nazism targeted feminism. Freedom to choose one’s role in society, when it goes against a supposed “natural order”, is a kind of freedom fascism has always opposed.

If you want to topple a democracy, you take over the courts. Donald Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 by almost 3m votes, and yet has appointed one-third of supreme court, three youthful far-right judges who will be spending decades there. The Roberts court has for more than a decade consistently enabled an attack on democracy, by hollowing out the Voting Rights Act over time, unleashing unlimited corporate money into elections, and allowing clearly partisan gerrymanders of elections. There is every reason to believe that the court will allow even the semblance of democracy to crumble, as long as laws are passed by gerrymandered Republican statehouses that make anti-democratic practices, including stealing elections, legal.

There has been a growing fascist social and political movement in the United States for decades. Like other fascist movements, it is riddled with internal contradictions, but no less of a threat to democracy. Donald Trump is an aspiring autocrat out solely for his own power and material gain. By giving this movement a classically authoritarian leader, Trump shaped and exacerbated it, and his time in politics has normalized it.

Christian nationalist rot in federal courts

“EVERY system for converting votes into power has its flaws. Britain suffers from an over-mighty executive; Italy from chronically weak government; Israel from small, domineering factions. America, however, is plagued by the only democratic vice more troubling than the tyranny of the majority: tyranny of the minority.” -- The Economist, July 2018

Lately, I have been urgently warning about how extremely anti-democratic, authoritarian and crackpot Christian nationalism is and its elites are. That rot is beginning to fully manifest itself in the federal courts, including the US Supreme Court. A federal trial court and a federal appeals court ruled for the authoritarians regarding the US military chain of command. Fortunately, the Supreme Court stopped this military coup attempt by Christian fundamentalist Republican Party (CNRP) politicians wearing black robes.

The bad news is that three of the six Republican CNRP Supreme Court justices just voted to assert political control of the US military from the bench. The three were Thomas, Gorsuch and Alito. Fortunately, three Democrats and the other three CNRP justices said no, the court did not have power to command the US military. So for now, this avenue of attack in the long-desired anti-democratic CNRP coup has been blocked. Vox writes:

The Supreme Court on Friday evening decided, no, it was not going to needlessly insert itself in the military chain of command above President Joe Biden.

The Court’s decision in Austin v. U.S. Navy SEALs 1-26 largely halted a lower court order that permitted certain sailors to defy a direct order. A group of Navy special operations personnel sought an exemption from the Pentagon’s requirement that all active duty service members get vaccinated against Covid-19, claiming that they should receive a religious exemption.

A majority of the Court effectively ruled that, yes, in fact, troops do have to follow orders, including an order to take a vaccine.   

But as Kavanaugh correctly notes in his concurring opinion, there is a long line of Supreme Court precedents establishing that courts should be exceedingly reluctant to interfere with military affairs.

Judge Reed O’Connor, a notoriously partisan judge in Texas who is best known for a failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, ruled in favor of the service members who refused to follow a direct order. And the conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit refused the Navy’s request to stay key parts of O’Connor’s order.

That left the responsibility of restoring the military’s proper chain of command to the Supreme Court. Though the Court’s order does not wipe out O’Connor’s decision in its entirety, it temporarily blocks that decision “insofar as it precludes the Navy from considering respondents’ vaccination status in making deployment, assignment, and other operational decisions.”

But the astonishing thing about the SEALs order is that the Supreme Court needed to intervene in this case at all.

Well, not astonishing if one just considers the political and social situation we are in. There are CNRP politicians (judges) in the federal judiciary. Everything is on the table all bets are off. We are at war.

Some thoughts come to mind. Hard core CNRP ideology is politically and socially insane, but not clinically insane. These crackpots hold beliefs that are considered by experts to be within the range of clinically normal. The CNRP ideology appears to be held by most Republican elites, donors, and maybe most of its rank and file. Collectively, they are a minority. 

In American society, it is a minority political Christian fundamentalist movement that is seeking power over an unwilling majority. In a functioning democracy, that should be politically and socially insane, but America no longer has a functional democracy or society. Both are broken. We are witnessing in real time the efforts of a radical CNRP minority to rise to power and subjugate and oppress all opposition by force in a God-sanctioned and blessed tyranny of the minority.

Note this comment in the Vox article: there is a long line of Supreme Court precedents establishing that courts should be exceedingly reluctant to interfere with military affairs. Exceeding reluctance is not a complete bar to an eventual take-over of the US military by the Supreme Court. That is the opening the CNRP needs to eventually wear down the authority of a Democratic president. This could be an avenue of CNRP attack on democracy and separations of powers that we will be seeing more of in the years to come. 

The CNRP movement is patient, persistent, creative, powerful and endlessly well-funded, increasingly via access to growing streams of tax dollars. In America, wealth = power. This political movement will not stop trying to overthrow democracy, secularism, pluralism until bigoted Christian sharia law, autocratic Christian theocracy and a Christian kleptocracy have been installed. The CNRP onslaught is now coming openly and from all directions.

Those 24 Navy SEALS who filed the lawsuit should be dishonorably discharged and put on the terrorist watch list. They knew exactly what the were doing.

In consonance with those thoughts, consider this bit of news from the last day or two: Ginny Thomas, wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas who just voted for the CNRP attack on democracy, had said that “the Biden crime family” and “ballot fraud co-conspirators” would be “living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.” That is QAnon thinking and belief right out in the open.

That is the CNRP movement speaking loud and clear. Note that the wife of a US Supreme Court justice advocates suspending habeas corpus and the right to an open trial for American citizens. Also note that her husband, a Supreme Court justice, voted to keep his wife’s texts secret so none of us would ever know about any of this.[1] 

Two other quick thoughts. The parallels of the CNRP and Russia are glaring. No moral qualms stand in the way of the demagogue’s sacred goals. Majority opinion is irrelevant. The rule of law is irrelevant. Only power and wealth are relevant.

In the coming weeks, the CNRP Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade will come. About 25 states have passed trigger laws that automatically ban abortions if the Supreme Court ever overturns Roe. Looks like that time is at hand. The last day of the court’s term is June 30, so that could be the date the decision is handed down and made public. Immediately thereafter, the CNRP judges will get the hell out of town so they can hide from the backlash that would come. 

They will still claim and believe that they are fair and neutral. In my opinion, that level of self-delusion qualifies as clinical insanity. 

Footnote: 

1. The New York Times wrote in Jan. of 2022:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused a request from former President Donald J. Trump to block the release of White House records concerning the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, effectively rejecting Mr. Trump’s claim of executive privilege and clearing the way for the House committee investigating the riot to start receiving the documents hours later.

The court, with only Justice Clarence Thomas noting a dissent, let stand an appeals court ruling that Mr. Trump’s desire to maintain the confidentiality of internal White House communications was outweighed by the need for a full accounting of the attack and the disruption of the certification of the 2020 electoral count.

Not only did the CNRP Thomas with his blatant conflict of interest not recuse himself from voting in that decision, he alone opposed it to protect his CNRP wife. That is the moral standard the CNRP movement operates under, i.e., no moral qualms. CNRP elites fight in the name of God. All tactics, lies, corruption and moral concerns are swept into oblivion as the Christian soldiers fight on to re-establish a Christian dark ages society and law.

If it had been a Democratic judge who did the same, the entire Republican Party and its Fox News propaganda arm would be screaming bloody murder in self-righteous moral outrage. But when one of their own does it, we get silent Republican complicity. 

Christian nationalism, God’s will and the 1/6 coup attempt

Some high profile radical Christian nationalists believe that God chose Trump to win the 2020 election, which they believe he did. It was radical Democrats, communists and liberals that stole the election. Virginia Thomas, wife of a Supreme Court justice is one of those fundamentalist radicals. An opinion piece in the Washington Post comments:

Buried in the explosive news that Virginia Thomas aggressively advocated for Donald Trump’s coup attempt is a choice revelation: The spouse of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas texted with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows about Jesus Christ’s otherworldly role in delivering the election to Trump.

Meadows texted to Ginni Thomas that the “King of Kings” would ultimately “triumph” in the quest to overturn the election, which Meadows characterized as “a fight of good versus evil.” Thomas, a longtime conservative activist, replied: “Thank you!! Needed that!”

This sparked serious consternation on “Morning Joe,” with host Joe Scarborough delivering an emotional diatribe about it. “Think about the sickness of this,” Scarborough said Friday. “He summons the name of Jesus Christ for his help in overturning American democracy!”

The sentiment is understandable. But what this level of shock really indicates is this: We haven’t paid enough attention to the role of right-wing Christian nationalism in driving Trump’s effort to destroy our political order, and in the abandonment of democracy among some on the right more broadly.

In invoking Jesus’ support for Trump’s effort to overturn the election, Meadows — who handled evangelical outreach in the White House — was not merely making an offhand comment. He was speaking in a vein that has held wide currency among the Christian nationalist right throughout the Trump years, right through the insurrection attempt.

The rhetoric from the Christian right about Trump has long sounded very much like that exchange between Meadows and Thomas. In a piece tracing that rhetoric, [Sarah] Posner concludes that for many on the Christian right, Trump was “anointed” by God as “the fulfillment of a long-sought goal of restoring the United States as a Christian nation.”

In this narrative, Trump — despite his glaring and repugnant personal imperfections — became the vessel to carry out the struggle to defeat various godless and secularist infestations of the idealized Christian nation, from the woke to globalists to communists to the “deep state.”

This culminated with the effort to overturn the election and the lead-up to the Jan. 6 rally that morphed into the mob assault. As Posner documents, Christian-right activists developed a “bellicose Christian narrative in defense of Trump’s coup attempt,” investing it with biblical significance and casting it as “holy war against an illegitimate state.”

That illegitimate state, of course, is our democracy. And so, when Thomas and Meadows text about the religious dimensions of the coup attempt, they’re echoing much of what we’ve long heard from the Christian right about it.

“Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs,” Meadows texted to Thomas. “Do not grow weary.”

That speaks for itself. 

In a different article the WaPo wrote on this matter:

Meadows’s attorney, George Terwilliger III, confirmed the existence of the 29 messages between his client and Thomas. In reviewing the substance of the messages Wednesday, he said that neither he nor Meadows would comment on individual texts. But, Terwilliger added, “nothing about the text messages presents any legal issues.”

Nothing to see here, democracy is just fine. Move on, please move on. 

So once again, the Republican Party leadership was aware of anti-democratic authoritarianism and crackpot treason in its leadership and among its elites. They keep these things secret from the American public for partisan political advantage. If they were proud of this, they would share it with all of us. There are goods reasons that Republican elites and leadership a hide this sort of sentiment from the American people.

The story of a US ex-marine fighting with Ukrainians: The three-to-one advantage

Marine fleece

US Marines insignia patch

This is an interesting account of the war near Kyiv. It cannot be verified according to the reporter, Elliot Ackerman, who spoke with a volunteer US fighter. Ackerman was a US marine himself and believed that what he was told was genuine. The Atlantic writes:

I also noticed his fleece. It had an eagle, a globe, and an anchor embossed on its left breast. “You a Marine?” I asked. He said he was (or had been—once a Marine, always a Marine), and I told him that I’d served in the Marines too.

He introduced himself (he’s asked that I not use his name, so let’s just call him Jed), and we did a quick swap of bona fides, exchanging the names of the units in which we’d both served as infantrymen a decade ago.

.... he explained that since arriving in Ukraine at the end of February, he had been fighting as a volunteer along with a dozen other foreigners outside Kyiv. The past three weeks had marked him. When I asked how he was holding up, he said the combat had been more intense than anything he’d witnessed in Afghanistan. He seemed conflicted, as if he wanted to talk about this experience, but not in terms that could turn emotional. Perhaps to guard against this, he began to discuss the technical aspects of what he’d seen, explaining in granular detail how the outmanned, outgunned Ukrainian military had fought the Russians to a standstill.

First, Jed wanted to discuss anti-armor weapons, particularly the American-made Javelin and the British-made NLAW. The past month of fighting had demonstrated that the balance of lethality had shifted away from armor, and toward anti-armor weapons. Even the most advanced armor systems, such as the Russian T-90 series main battle tank, had proved vulnerable, their charred husks littering Ukrainian roadways.

When I mentioned to Jed that I’d fought in Fallujah in 2004, he said that the tactics the Marine Corps used to take that city would never work today in Ukraine. In Fallujah, our infantry worked in close coordination with our premier tank, the M1A2 Abrams. On several occasions, I watched our tanks take direct hits from rocket-propelled grenades (typically older-generation RPG-7s) without so much as a stutter in their forward progress. Today, a Ukrainian defending Kyiv or any other city, armed with a Javelin or an NLAW, would destroy a similarly capable tank.

If the costly main battle tank is the archetypal platform of an army (as is the case for Russia and NATO), then the archetypal platform of a navy (particularly America’s Navy) is the ultra-costly capital ship, such as an aircraft carrier.[1] Just as modern anti-tank weapons have turned the tide for the outnumbered Ukrainian army, the latest generation of anti-ship missiles (both shore- and sea-based) could in the future—say, in a place like the South China Sea or the Strait of Hormuz—turn the tide for a seemingly outmatched navy. Since February 24, the Ukrainian military has convincingly displayed the superiority of an anti-platform-centric method of warfare. Or, as Jed put it, “In Afghanistan, I used to feel jealous of those tankers, buttoned up in all that armor. Not anymore.”

This brought Jed to the second subject he wanted to discuss: Russian tactics and doctrine. He said he had spent much of the past few weeks in the trenches northwest of Kyiv. “The Russians have no imagination,” he said. “They would shell our positions, attack in large formations, and when their assaults failed, do it all over again. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians would raid the Russian lines in small groups night after night, wearing them down.” Jed’s observation echoed a conversation I’d had the day before with Andriy Zagorodnyuk. After Russia’s invasion of the Donbas in 2014, Zagorodnyuk oversaw a number of reforms to the Ukrainian military that are now bearing fruit, chief among them changes in Ukraine’s military doctrine; then, from 2019 to 2020, he served as minister of defense.

Russian doctrine relies on centralized command and control, while mission-style command and control—as the name suggests—relies on the individual initiative of every soldier, from the private to the general, not only to understand the mission but then to use their initiative to adapt to the exigencies of a chaotic and ever-changing battlefield in order to accomplish that mission. Although the Russian military has modernized under Vladimir Putin, it has never embraced the decentralized mission-style command-and-control structure that is the hallmark of NATO militaries, and that the Ukrainians have since adopted.

“The Russians don’t empower their soldiers,” Zagorodnyuk explained. “They tell their soldiers to go from Point A to Point B, and only when they get to Point B will they be told where to go next, and junior soldiers are rarely told the reason they are performing any task. This centralized command and control can work, but only when events go according to plan. When the plan doesn’t hold together, their centralized method collapses. No one can adapt, and you get things like 40-mile-long traffic jams outside Kyiv.”

The individual Russian soldier’s lack of knowledge corresponded with a story Jed told me, one that drove home the consequences of this lack of knowledge on the part of individual Russian soldiers. During a failed night assault on his trench, a group of Russian soldiers got lost in the nearby woods. “Eventually, they started calling out,” he said. “I couldn’t help it; I felt bad. They had no idea where to go.”

When I asked what happened to them, he returned a grim look.

Instead of recounting that part of the story, he described the advantage Ukrainians enjoy in night-vision technology. When I told him I’d heard the Ukrainians didn’t have many sets of night-vision goggles, he said that was true, and that they did need more. “But we’ve got Javelins. Everyone’s talking about the Javelins as an anti-tank weapon, but people forget that the Javelins also have a CLU.”

The CLU, or command launch unit, is a highly capable thermal optic that can operate independent of the missile system. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we would often carry at least one Javelin on missions, not because we expected to encounter any al-Qaeda tanks, but because the CLU was such an effective tool. We’d use it to watch road intersections and make sure no one was laying down IEDs. The Javelin has a range in excess of a mile, and the CLU is effective at that distance and beyond.

I asked Jed at what ranges they were engaging the Russians. “Typically, the Ukrainians would wait and ambush them pretty close.” When I asked how close, he answered, “Sometimes scary close.” He described one Ukrainian, a soldier he and a few other English speakers had nicknamed “Maniac” because of the risks he’d take engaging Russian armor. “Maniac was the nicest guy, totally mild-mannered. Then in a fight, the guy turned into a psycho, brave as hell. And then after a fight, he’d go right back to being this nice, mild-mannered guy.”

I wasn’t in a position to verify anything Jed told me, but he showed me a video he’d taken of himself in a trench, and based on that and details he provided about his time in the Marines, his story seemed credible. The longer we talked, the more the conversation veered away from the tangible, technical variables of Ukraine’s military capacity and toward the psychology of Ukraine’s military. Napoleon, who fought many battles in this part of the world, observed that “the moral is to the physical as three is to one.” I was thinking of this maxim as Jed and I finished our tea.

In Ukraine—at least in this first chapter of the war—Napoleon’s words have held true, proving in many ways decisive. In my earlier conversation with Zagorodnyuk, as he and I went through the many reforms and technologies that had given the Ukrainian military its edge, he was quick to point out the one variable he believed trumped all others. “Our motivation—it is the most important factor, more important than anything. We’re fighting for the lives of our families, for our people, and for our homes. The Russians don’t have any of that, and there’s nowhere they can go to get it.”

Acknowledgement: Thanks to dcleve for bringing this article to my attention.

U.S. policy misfires in dealing with Russia

We misunderstood him

Since we're facing a possible Armageddon event flowing from the Ukraine war in the coming months, this topic is timely. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published a detailed analysis of US-Russia relations dating back to the start of the cold war. That is when mistakes started to be made. The analysis includes these observations and arguments:

Getting Russia right—assessing its capabilities and intentions, the long-term drivers of its policy and threat perceptions, as well as its accomplishments—is essential because the alternative of misreading them is a recipe for wasted resources, distorted national priorities, and increased risk of confrontation.

A critical examination of U.S. policy misfires in dealing with Russia and its intentions and capabilities over the past several decades is long overdue. Three factors largely account for this problem. All of them continue to affect contemporary policymakers’ approach to a deeply troubled relationship with Moscow. By unpacking the analytical assumptions that underlie these misconceptions, President Joe Biden’s administration and other important policy players will be better equipped to ensure that U.S. policy going forward is grounded in the most realistic understanding of the challenge that Russia poses and the right kinds of tools that the United States should use to contend with it.

The first factor is the lingering euphoria of the post–Cold War period. For many Western observers, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the implosion of Russian power demonstrated the permanent superiority of the United States. The perception that Russia’s decline was so deep and irreversible that it would no longer be able to resist Western initiatives made it difficult to accept Moscow’s pushback against Western policies. This was a particular problem when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) pursued several rounds of enlargement in the 1990s and early 2000s under U.S. leadership. U.S. leaders ignored Russia’s objections and underestimated the lengths to which Russian counterparts were prepared to go to secure the homeland against perceived threats.

Second, American policymakers and experts have long paid too little attention to the drivers of Russia’s external behavior. Russian threat perceptions are part of an inheritance heavily shaped by geography and a history of troubled relations with other major European powers. They are compounded by the trauma of the loss of its empire, the lingering ideology of greatness, and a sense of entitlement based on its sacrifice in World War II. President Vladimir Putin stokes all of them for domestic political gain.

Third, U.S. policymakers have not fully internalized the lessons of the two biggest crises of the Cold War—the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and the Euromissile crisis of the early 1980s. In both cases, the Soviet Union went to great lengths to counter what its leaders perceived was a unilateral U.S. threat to the Soviet homeland that could not be tolerated. In 1962 they almost triggered a nuclear war. In 1987, they agreed to eliminate an entire class of intermediate-range nuclear weapons to secure the homeland from U.S. missiles. In both situations, U.S. missiles deployed in Europe would deny the Kremlin the advantage of strategic depth and decision time in a crisis. The lessons of those crises were ignored as anachronisms when NATO embarked on its eastward expansion on the assumption that it would no longer need to worry about, let alone maintain the necessary capabilities for the territorial defense mission. After all, Russia was permanently weakened. When Russia proved otherwise, the alliance was caught by surprise.

In another surprise for the United States and its allies, Russian foreign policy has become increasingly assertive, adversarial, and ambitious over the past decade. In the post-Soviet space, the Middle East, Latin America, and parts of Africa, Russia has deployed a diverse tool kit rich in hard, soft, and gray zone power instruments to assert itself as a global power. Russian foreign policy agility and even daring have repeatedly caught the West by surprise and sparked fears of its return as a major threat to Western interests. In reality, Russian gains and tools used to accomplish Moscow’s objectives have not been all that impressive. But Russia has made up for it by capitalizing on mistakes made by the United States and its allies or moving into power vacuums left by them.

The continued tendency to dismiss Russia as a “has been” or declining power whose bark will always be worse than its bite can lead to the United States overextending itself, making unrealistic commitments, and risking a dangerous escalation with the one country that is still its nuclear peer competitor. The push to expand NATO without taking into account the possibility of Russia reemerging as a major military power was an example of such thinking, which is to be avoided in the future.

At the same time, the scope and scale of the threat that Russia’s global activism poses to U.S. interests will depend largely on how Washington defines those interests in regions where Russia has expanded its footprint over the past decade. Absent a sober assessment of Russia’s gains and tools for power projection, the United States will position itself to needlessly chase after the specter of Russian expansionism in distant corners of the world where major U.S. interests are not at stake. 

This paper makes four central arguments: 

• First, in proceeding with NATO enlargement in the 1990s and early 2000s under U.S. leadership, the alliance ignored key lessons of the Cold War and the long-term drivers of Russian policy—namely, threat perceptions and the lengths to which its leaders were prepared to go to secure the homeland. 

• Second, outside Europe, which is the principal theater of East-West confrontation, Russia’s gains have been considerably less significant than commonly portrayed. 

• Third, while Russia’s global activism is a challenge to U.S. interests, the scale of that challenge is determined largely by how narrowly or expansively the United States defines its interests in those regions where Russia has expanded its footprint over the past decade. 

• Fourth, for the foreseeable future Russia will remain a top tier challenge on the national security agenda of the United States and must be dealt with by the president and his most senior national security officials.

Misconstruing Russian motivations and capabilities is especially dangerous when the “correlation of forces” on the ground favors Russia rather than the United States. The U.S.-led effort to extend NATO membership invitations to Georgia and Ukraine in 2008 did not take into account either the strength of Russia’s opposition to this or its capabilities for preventing the two countries from joining the alliance. The result has been a situation in which the United States has overpromised and demonstrated its inability to deliver on the pledge for well over a decade.

It is an open question as to whether the Biden administration is up to the job of competence in dealing with Russia. Just as open are questions of whether it can also deal competently with China, the environment, insane fiscal policy, erosion of the rule of law and other important issues at the same time. 

One of the few things that is fairly certain in politics is this: If Trump had been re-elected, none of those questions would be open, especially questions about the environment, China and the collapse of the rule of law. The US and its interests would be significantly worse off on all of those matters.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for bringing this analysis to my attention.

Hurt feelings and Armageddon

Just a test

Maybe hurt human feelings can cause Armageddon. The Guardian wrote this in 2016:

The current level of hostility in US-Russian relations was caused in part by Washington’s contemptuous treatment of Moscow’s security concerns in the aftermath of the cold war, a former US defense secretary has said.

William Perry, who was defence secretary in Bill Clinton’s administration from 1994 to 1997, emphasised that in the past five years it has been Vladimir Putin’s military interventions in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere that have driven the downward spiral in east-west relations.

But Perry added that during his term in office, cooperation between the two countries’ militaries had improved rapidly just a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union and that these gains were initially squandered more as a result of US than Russian actions.

“In the last few years, most of the blame can be pointed at the actions that Putin has taken. But in the early years I have to say that the United States deserves much of the blame,” Perry said, speaking at a Guardian Live event in London.

“Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction was when Nato started to expand, bringing in eastern European nations, some of them bordering Russia. At that time we were working closely with Russia and they were beginning to get used to the idea that Nato could be a friend rather than an enemy ... but they were very uncomfortable about having Nato right up on their border and they made a strong appeal for us not to go ahead with that.”

In his memoir, My Journey at the Nuclear Brink, Perry writes that he argued for a slower expansion of Nato so as not to alienate Russia during the initial period of post-Soviet courtship and cooperation. Richard Holbrooke, the US diplomat, led the opposing argument at the time, and was ultimately supported by the vice-president, Al Gore, who argued “we could manage the problems this would create with Russia”.  

Perry said the decision reflected a contemptuous attitude among US officials towards the troubled former superpower.

“It wasn’t that we listened to their argument and said he don’t agree with that argument,” he said. “Basically the people I was arguing with when I tried to put the Russian point ... the response that I got was really: ‘Who cares what they think? They’re a third-rate power.’ And of course that point of view got across to the Russians as well. That was when we started sliding down that path.”  

The third factor that Perry pointed to in the poisoning of US-Russian relations was Washington DC’s support for pro-democracy demonstrators in the “color revolutions” in former Soviet republics including Georgia and Ukraine. Perry agreed with the ethical reasons for backing such revolutions but noted their severely damaging effect on east-west ties.

“After he came to office, Putin came to believe that the United States had an active and robust program to overthrow his regime,” the former defense secretary said.

“And from that point on a switch went on in Putin’s mind that said: I’m no longer going to work with the west ... I don’t know the facts behind Putin’s belief that we actually had a program to foment revolution in Russia but what counts is he believed it.”

That highlighted paragraph, that is obvious arrogance. IMO, it amounts to professional political malpractice, not just excusable incompetence. Things like this: Perry agreed with the ethical reasons for backing such revolutions but noted their severely damaging effect on east-west ties, are what requires professionalism, experience, intelligence, tact and pragmatism over ideology to deal with. The blunderbuss tactics of American politics have badly failed and betrayed us.

Clearly Gore was wrong. We could not manage the problems we created. As the popular but only mildly effective deflection goes, “mistakes were made.”  

Our two-party system is not working at all now. Arguably it has been a mess for decades. Between arrogant ideological blindness, distrust of government and expertise, gross incompetence and other ridiculous stupefying factors, it seems that we are in a deep hole we helped dig.

Whatever this horror is, it could get most all of us killed fairly soon. One can only hope the odds of that are extremely low. But with all the incompetence, stupid demagoguery and moral rot going on in American politics, the odds might not be aren't low enough for comfort. Now we get to contemplate an unknowable possibility of nuclear Armageddon. 

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for pointing this article out.

Maybe a surprise coming to a city near you