244. How to Strengthen a Scofflaw, Crony-Feeding Autocrat

Say his people have a strong sense of the motherland, which, unlike yours, has been deeply invaded twice from the west, devastating the country and mowing down its people.  Say that some time after repelling the last invasion the people saw some provinces of the country break away, and one province take with it a small part of the motherland that, for administrative convenience, had been transferred to it from another province.  Say this part of the motherland had been particularly fought over, so that the people could see a lot of their blood on its ground.

Say the ruler of this country is a scofflaw, crony-feeding autocrat representing an old, objectionable political system, and that a lot of his citizens still find it objectionable.  So his position as leader is not perfectly secure.  What could you as an outsider do to strengthen his position?

Well, obviously, you've got to threaten the motherland so that he can play "guardian of his people."  Nothing plants a ruler in power more firmly.  But you can't do that just bang.  This place is far away and a lot has to have been done earlier to get close.

Say that you're lucky and that that has been done.  Your alliance, NATO, instead of breaking up when this country broke up, and was no longer the threat that NATO was formed to meet, did not break up but stayed together and continued to press.  And your predecessors in office were happy to see it press, and pressed it to press, because so many of their countrymen were pressing them to press.  (I don't know why they did this.  It seems crazy.  Was it habit?  Was it inattention?  Or did they just not know how to behave unless they had an enemy?  I mean, they'd had a really evil enemy, and then a pretty evil enemy, and then people they could plausibly call evil, all those years, and there was all this great equipment ready to use against evil enemies.  How were they going to live without an enemy?)

Anyway, your predecessors put missiles in a country very close to this motherland, and then one of them wanted to press NATO right up to the borders of the now reduced nation.  You know what that's going to do to those people with a motherland sense.  They know that NATO membership means that these nations next to them have the United States ready to go to war, obliged by treaty to go to war, for them.  They, besides feeling ignored, or taken lightly, or affronted, lovers of the motherland are going to feel endangered and be very much on edge.

OK, you've got your chance, but first you are going to have to make some preliminary moves yourself.  The ruler of this reduced country makes some gestures of cooperation, even friendship.  He goes along with what you want to do to secure yourself against Iran and, to help you retract your over-extended neck in the Syrian conflict, offers to mediate.  You've got to keep seeing these as enemy moves.  "Russia tries again to insert itself into the Middle East."  That will shut up the re-set supporters in Russia.

Now you can set your tyrant in concrete, with a marble statue to follow.   He moves to take back the part of the motherland that, with the lost province, will go over to his people's old enemies.  I mean, they think that way too.  So you (or your secretary of state) huff, puff, complain, and threaten in all the old terms, so that the tyrant can (as Putin just did, NYT 3-19-14) quote you and discredit you by showing your hypocrisy (since you have tolerated the same thing in your friends) but most of all by showing your continuing presence as a threat.

As for his big speeches, you've practically written them for him.  "Our country is cornered" (applause), "they cheated us again and again" (applause), "if you press a spring too far it will recoil" (thunderous applause), "Crimea has always been a part of Russia" (standing ovation),  "after a long, hard and exhaustive journey at sea, Crimea and Sevastopol are returning to their home harbor, to the native shores, to the home port, to Russia!"  (chants of "Russia!  Russia!").  Tears of joy, tears of approval, tears of gratitude to the guardian of the Russian people.  You couldn't lock a scofflaw, crony-feeding autocrat in office more securely.

241. Ukraine: Sam, You Made the Pants Just Right.

 

How do we tailor our response to Russia's intervention in the Ukraine?  Sam Tanenhaus, in Sunday's NYT (3 1-14), says we should follow the pattern handed down to us by Cold War presidents, who, resisting the calls for tough, forceful action, trimmed and stretched and made accommodations. 

 

Eisenhower, preferring stability to confrontation, stood by while the Soviets sent tanks into Hungary, Kennedy pulled our missiles out of Turkey in exchange for Khrushchev’s calling his back from Cuba, Nixon agreed to cut our stockpile of nuclear weapons in exchange for the Soviets' cutting theirs, and even Ronald Reagan, the great hawk hero, came to the aid of Poland's Solidarity heroes only with words, money, and equipment.

"The Cold War," Tanenhaus reminds us, "was defined from the outset less by outright confrontation than by caution," a caution that came with "adjustment, compromise, improvisation and at times retreat."  He also reminds us that it was marked by denunciations of the cautious as  "weak-willed," "soft," and "naive."

Calling any of those presidents "naive" (as just yesterday I heard somebody on Fox call President Obama for his caution) is about as double-edged a charge as you're likely to hear.  What held Eisenhower back in the case of Hungary and held Reagan back in the case of Poland was an unalterable reality: proximity to Russia and distance from us.  The world's largest standing army, the one that defeated Hitler (yes, it could have done it by itself), was right there; the smaller forces that Representative John W.  McCormack wanted to call on were, for the most part, way over here, on this side of a big ocean.  And he said the Eisenhower administration was living in "a dream world."

If McCormack and his like had in mind the use, not of our comparatively small number of soldiers but of our large number of atomic weapons, they still don't look very realistic.  To avoid "emboldening" the Russians you're going to let fly the atom bombs and start World War III?  That possibility doesn't require some caution?

OK, so what's the first thing you do in an international crisis with the Russians?  As I read Sam Tanenhaus it's simple: tune out Fox network.  Then (I would add) get down to the realities and imagine how our actions might look from their side.  What do we expect from people who, regardless of their form of government then and now, suffered 50-60 million casualties because they didn't make sure that nations on their borders were friendly to them?

What has to be fitted into this reality is our promotion of democracy and the protection of human rights.  It's a tough fit.  That's why today's presidents should do what Tanenhaus says Cold War presidents did: adjust, compromise, and improvise.  You want pants you can wear?  Go to Tanenhaus.