Reprinted with permission from The Realist Review.
Jonathan Mahler, a sportswriter who hit it big with his 2005 book Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City, has turned his attention to something that he probably should have been advised not to: The tangled web of US-Russian relations. It’s hard to know who still bothers to read it, but for those who don’t, sportswriting has become yet another vehicle to advance liberal cliches and pieties; athletes are held up as exemplars of teamwork and social conscience in materialistic, lazy, and, yes, irredeemably racist, America.
Mahler is undeniably a successful writer. But with his latest offering for the New York Times Magazine, ‘How the G.O.P. Fell in Love With Putin’s Russia,’ he shows himself to be woefully out of his depth. Worse, his thesis, that Trump has embarked on a deeply un-American love affair with alien, authoritarian, far-Right Russia, is deeply unoriginal.
Seven years ago I pointed out in the pages of the journal American Affairs that the US foreign policy establishment had embarked on a “cold war culture war.”
“America’s growing animus towards all things Russia is,” I wrote, “characterized by the hostility borne of a frustrated project of liberal cultural imperialism.”
…Putin’s Russia – conservative and predominantly Orthodox Christian – today serves as a kind of all-purpose bogeyman for young journalists-on-the-make and for opportunistic politicians looking to cash in on the current hysteria. Over the course of the past several months, the American media has invariably painted Russia as a kind of dark bulwark of hardline Christian Right values standing athwart the forces of light and worldwide social progress.
Mahler’s screed in the Times is only the latest manifestation of this tendency among American liberals to blame every American shortcoming and problem at Putin’s door.
Generalities being the sportswriter’s stock-in-trade, Mahler paints with a broad brush. Advocates for better relations with Russia are – they must be (!) – unpatriotic. After all, in Mahler’s telling,
…Russia has long served as much more than a geopolitical rival for America. It has been an ideological other, a foil that enabled the United States to affirm its own, diametrically different values. In the words of the historian David S. Foglesong, Russia is America’s “imaginary twin” or “dark double,” the sister superpower that the United States is forever either demonizing or trying to remake in its own image. Or at least it was. Trump’s policies and rhetoric seem aimed at nothing less than turning America’s dark double into its kindred soul.
The scholar-diplomat George F. Kennan, from whose writings Mahler might learn something, long criticized the American habit of seeing in Russia a “dark double.”
In this regard, an interview Kennan gave to the Times in 1978 is instructive:
Q: Well, if, as you say, there are, in this country, these wildly erroneous impressions about. the Russians, where do they come from’? Why are the hardliners so strong today?
A: That’s a very good question, a very good question. You know, it sometimes seems to me that people have a need for the externalization of evil. They have the need to think that there is, somewhere, an enemy boundlessly evil, because this makes them feel boundlessly good. They can’t stand life without the image of an enemy somewhere. This is the nature of the militant mentality.
That this “militant mentality” has gained wide acceptance among liberals is only too obvious. It also helps explain why the Times no longer gives space to dissident opinions such as those once expressed by Kennan.
Mahler makes a further misstep when he attempts to lump the writer Christopher Caldwell in with a group of Putin-loving American “reactionaries” and “fringe ideologues” such as Ann Coulter. I know and like Christopher Caldwell; there is no American writer on the scene today with a deeper, more nuanced understanding of European politics. The idea that he is somehow representative of “far-right” influencers who mindlessly parrot Kremlin talking points would be laughable if it wasn’t so absurd.
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This past Friday, I met with several Ukrainian women in Georgetown. They traveled to Washington to tell their stories; of the friends and family they have lost, of homes destroyed and hometowns abandoned, of husbands and friends fighting on the front lines—even now. And while their politics differed in a number of respects—a native of Donetsk will not, generally speaking, see completely eye-to-eye with a native of Lviv – they traveled to Washington with a message for American journalists and policymakers: They want the war to end, now. It seems to never occur to journalists like Mahler (and they are legion) that ending the war is also something that many Ukrainians want. Were these women also in the pocket of the Kremlin? Nothing could be further from the truth.
The late Russian scholar (and former colleague of Kennan’s), Stephen F. Cohen, once wrote that, “Patriotism is never having to say you didn’t know.” In that sense we critics of American policy in Eastern Europe can never fairly be accused of unpatriotic disloyalty, because taking the time to know and to understand what role our government played in bringing about the catastrophe that is modern-day Ukraine is the essence of patriotism. Patriotism is about more than slapping a yellow and blue flag on your bumper, dialing up the latest installment of Pod Save Whatever or voting BLUE no matter who.
Are there a few fringe characters on the American far-right who fetishize Vladimir Putin and all his works? Probably, yes. Does their influence explain Trump’s overtures to Moscow? That would be a stretch. In fact, Trump’s outreach to Russia is not dissimilar to the policies pursued by other Republican administration over the past 75 years.
Anyone with even a cursory familiarity with the history of American foreign policy since 1950 (and it is clear Mahler does not) will recognize that it has been the Republicans that have acted as the party of dialogue and diplomacy when it comes to Russia, beginning with the first postwar Republican administration under Dwight Eisenhower. His Democratic successor, during an all-too-brief 13 month period following the Cuban Missile Crisis, attempted to put an end to what was then a decade and a half of Cold War. But, as it happens, Kennedy’s was the last Democratic administration that took seriously the imperative of establishing normal, reciprocal relations with Russia.
Presidents Nixon and Reagan, each in their own ways, pursued a policy of detente – a policy Nixon and Kissinger borrowed from the conservative French president, Charles de Gaulle, as well as from the social democratic German chancellor Willy Brandt.
George H.W. Bush warned against the danger of unleashing the demons of parochial nationalism (such as were unleashed during the 2014 Maidan revolution) in the post-Soviet space. After 9/11, Putin helped to facilitate both the establishment of US military bases in Central Asia and the Northern Distribution Network which provided US cargo planes overflight rights over Russia to supply American troops in Afghanistan. Such was the extent of Russia’s willingness to cooperate with Bush after 9/11 that Brookings Institution scholar Fiona Hill noted in June 2002,
…When Russian President Vladimir Putin picked up the phone to express his sympathy to President Bush in the aftermath of September 11 and then followed up by providing concrete assistance to the campaign in Afghanistan and quickly acquiescing to U.S. plans to establish bases in central Asia, Washington policymakers and analysts concluded Putin had made a strategic, even historic, choice to align Russia’s foreign policy with that of the United States. It was a reasonable conclusion to make.
From the beginning of his presidency in January 2000, Putin pushed the idea of a concerted campaign against terrorism with American and European leaders. He was one of the first to raise the alarm about terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and to warn of linkages between these camps, well-financed terrorist networks, and Islamic militant groups operating in Europe and Eurasia.
Bush’s approach to the 2008 Russo-Georgian war (set off by Washington’s client, then-Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili, who shelled Russian peacekeepers in Ossetia – a fact confirmed by a subsequent EU report on the matter) was not to portray the Russian move on Georgia as a metastasizing cancer on the “Free World,” as Biden did with Ukraine. Instead Bush explicitly ruled out military support for Georgia – and Saakashvili was quietly, behind the scenes told to cool it – which is exactly what Obama should have told the Ukrainians during the Maidan coup.
So what changed in the intervening two decades? Part of the answer has to do with the cold war culture war (of which Mahler’s essay is a prime example) which has marginalized and stigmatized dialogue, diplomacy and cooperation with Russia.
Given what America is and what it is in the process of becoming (i.e. the world’s northernmost banana republic), the motive for normalizing relations with Russia has little if anything to do with culture. The administration’s parley with Moscow has to do with security. Mahler seems blissfully unaware that Russia is a nuclear superpower with 4,477 nuclear warheads; has an army of 1.5 million active duty soldiers; and has deep bilateral relations with China and Iran.
In the end, power is what matters. The US has it. Russia has it. China has it. Trump, whatever his faults, understands this – and his policy toward Russia isn’t some kind of aberration; it is a reversion to common sense.
James W. Carden is the editor of The Realist Review. He is a columnist and former adviser to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the U.S. Department of State. His articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications including The Nation, The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, The Spectator, UnHerd, The National Interest, Quartz, The Los Angeles Times, and American Affairs.
