Obama and Putin: A Match Made in Hell

Filed under: Russia

An extraordinary repetition of history may now be underway in the United States. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, no doubt, is salivating just as Leonid Brezhnev likely was in 1976.

Just over three decades ago, James Earl Carter swept into the Oval Office on a tide of revulsion over the alleged corruption of two-term Republican Richard Nixon. Carter's party, the Democrats, rode the tidal wave of anti-Republican sentiment to achieve 60% majorities in both houses of Congress. It was hard to argue with those who saw a sea change in American politics towards the left and heard the death knell of conservatism.

But four years later, Republican Ronald Reagan ousted Carter by a margin of over 8 million votes, leaving Carter with a puny 41% of the ballot. Republicans experienced a net gain of 12 seats in the Senate and the Republicans retook control of that body. Reagan was reelected in a landslide in 1984, then, after serving two complete terms and still alive, his vice president was elected to succeed him -- something that hadn't happened since Martin Van Buren succeeded Andrew Jackson in 1837.

This Republican victory happened mostly because of Carter's sensational failures on the international scene. His limp-wristed response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (all he could think to do was boycott the Russian Olympiad., this after kissing Soviet premier Brezhnev full on the lips) and his failure to resolve the Iranian hostage crisis, combined with a downturn in the economy, made Americans wonder whether he understood the threats they faced and could protect them.

The parallels to 2008 are striking.

We may well see two-term Republican George Bush, at least as unpopular as Nixon if the polls are to be believed, instigate another epic rout of his party, handing dominant control of both houses of Congress and the presidency back to the Democrats. And Democrat Barack Obama gives every indication of adopting the same sort of baroque naivete in the face of what can only be called a "neo-Soviet" state in Russia, ruled by a proud KGB spy. Iran, too, poses a vivid threat to American security, just as it did in Carter's time. And if some economic prognosticators are to be credited, the nation may plunge headlong into a significant recession in the first year of an Obama first term. With Obama already significantly weakened by polarizing racial scandals that Carter never had to contend with, we could see an even more spectacular meltdown of an Obama presidency.

As if the parallels to Carter were not already obvious enough, in attempting to develop his Russia policy Obama is working closely with Carter's own former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who endorsed Obama in August of last year, of all places on Bloomberg Television's "Political Capital With Al Hunt."

Not one but two recent books entitled The New Cold War having been published by Russia correspondents from major publications (Edward Lucas of the Economist and Mark MacKinnon of the Globe & Mail), yet neither was written by an American. This fact nicely illustrates the lack of American leadership on Russia policy which has persisted ever since President Bush looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes, glimpsed his soul and declared him trustworthy early in his first term. Recent events in Russia indicate that the upcoming election presents a crucial opportunity to reinvigorate that leadership, or see the situation deteriorate still further.

Putin would go on after looking deeply into Bush's eyes to initiate a relentless series of flyovers of Western targets by creaking Soviet-era nuclear bombers, forcing America and its allies to scramble fighter jets for the first time since the USSR collapsed. He would plant the Russian flag on the Artic sea floor, claiming ownership, and he would aggressively seek to destabilize former Soviet colonies of Russia like Georgia and Ukraine, first with energy blackmail and then with open military provocation. He would revive the practice of military parades through Red Square, and bring back the Soviet national anthem, a melody written to glorify the dictator Josef Stalin.

And most sensationally, he would reverse all the gains in civil society Russia had tried to claw back from the Soviet past. He would abolish the election of local governors, replacing them with hand-picked flunkies. He would wipe out opposition political parties in the parliament, and deny all opposition challengers a place on the presidential ballot. He would install KGB subordinates throughout the Kremlin's halls of power, and he would rapidly squeeze the life out of the Russian media establishment, particularly television. Russia's leading independent journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, would be shot and killed.

The Politkovskaya killing was only the most recent in a long line of political killings that begins almost as soon as Putin arrives in the Kremlin to take up his first position as Boris Yeltsin's Deputy Chief of Staff in March 1997. After only a year in that position, Putin was suddenly named boss of the KGB, and within four months of taking his new job Galina Starovoitova, Russia's leading human rights activist and opposition figure, had been shot and killed under circumstances eerily similar to those under which Politkovskaya would fall less than four years later. In neither case has anyone who allegedly ordered the killings ever been arrested, much less put on trial.

In between, as Putin's popularity dipped below 50% in reaction to the bloody military conflict he initiated in Chechnya after being named Yeltsin's successor in December 1999, Putin's critics begin dropping like flies.

(1) April 2003, Sergei Yushenkov is shot and killed. He was investigating allegations that Putin had ordered the bombing of apartment buildings in Russia so he could blame Chechen rebels and justify invading the breakaway republic.

(2) July 2003, Yuri Shchekochikhin is poisoned. He was a second member of the same investigation team.

(3) October 2003, Mikhail Trepashkin, a third member of the team, is arrested on obviously political charges and sentenced to years in prison. That same month Putin's chief rival for the presidency, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is also arrested, and remains in prison to this day.

(4) June 2004, Nikolai Girenko, leading human rights activist, is shot and killed.

(5) July 2004, Paul Klebnikov, a journalist who was investigating investigating a complex web of money laundering involving a Chechen reconstruction fund, reaching into the centers of power in the Kremlin and involving elements of organized crime and the KGB, is shot and killed.

(6) September 2004, Viktor Yushchenko, anti-Russian candidate for the presidency of the Ukraine, is poisoned by Dioxin.

(7) September 2006, Andrei Kozlov, First Deputy Chairman of Russia's Central Bank, who strove to stamp out money laundering (basically acting on analyses like that of reporter Klebnikov), the highest-ranking reformer in Russia, is shot and killed in Moscow

(8) November 2006, Andrei Litvinenko, a KGB defector who had written a book about the Yushenkov investigation, is fatally poisoned with radioactive toxins just a month after Politkovskaya was gunned down.

In a final indignity, rather than leaving the Kremlin upon the expiration of his second term as the spirit of the Russian constitution requires, Putin simply donned the "Prime Minister" hat and remained in power, to all appearances indefinitely, with a figurehead president masking the neo-Soviet proceedings.

How would a President Obama respond to all this? Would he prove more resolute than Carter was when faced with a challenge from Russia? Or would he be flummoxed by neo-Soviet sleight of hand, as Carter (and indeed Bush) tragically were?

The signs are not encouraging. While his opponent John McCain has called for Russia's ouster from the G-8 group of democracies, to be replaced by India or Brazil, and other vigorous moves to signal our discontent to Putin and his KGB cadre, Obama has been almost entirely mum on his Russia policy. He seems to palpably share the attitude of Carter and FDR (and Bush) that he need only get himself into the same room with Putin, look him in the eye, dazzle him with his "truth force" and then all will be well. This, it seems, makes him seem quite attractive to the Russians.

A pro-Kremlin propaganda blog called "Russia Blog" and operated by one Yuri Mamchur, a Russian citizen who works for the Discovery Institute and in collaboration with "Russia Today," the Kremlin's perverted answer to Voice of America, has said that the Russians themselves are pulling for Obama (much as Castro, Quadafi, Hamas and even Kim Il Jong have done as well). Mamchur states: "After presenting the question to nearly 50 Russians, the answer is clear: one hundred percent of our not-so-random sampling said Senator Barack Obama is their first choice."

Writing in the Russian newspaper Kommersant Konstantin Kosachev, Chairman the Duma Foreign Affairs Committee, had the same view. He states: "Barack Obama looks like the candidate that can be expected to take the greatest strides toward Russia, since unlike McCain, he's not infected with any Cold War phobias, and unlike Clinton, he won't be tied down by the old habits of his advisers."

With Kremlin sycophants slobbering all over Obama, its hard to put much faith in the hope expressed by some that another Obama Russia advisor, Michael McFaul of the Hoover Institution and Stanford University, may help him see the light. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was also a Hoover and Stanford affiliate, but that didn't help her help her president to keep from being hypnotized by Mr. Putin. True, McFaul has recently issued some stern criticism of the Kremlin, including an impressive essay in Foreign Affairs arguing that the Russian economy would be much better off but for Putin's anti-democratic moves. But McFaul hasn't succeeded, if he's even tried, in getting Obama to lay out a specific plan of action for beating back the advances of dictatorship under Putin, much less in getting justice for Putin's litany of victims. And it’s not clear to me whether McFaul himself has any such plan.

This may be another reason why those within the Kremlin find Mr. Obama so appealing.