thegreatdivide wrote on Feb 23
rd, 2022 at 5:35pm:
Frank wrote on Feb 23
rd, 2022 at 1:27pm:
Back in 2000, Putin repeatedly petitioned for Russia to be admitted to Nato, according to private conversations he had with the former head of the alliance and ex-Labour minister George Robertson, and again in interviews with the American filmmaker Oliver Stone. Putin was told that his country should ‘apply’ to join — there’s that contempt again — and he replied with the deliciously Putinesque response: ‘Well, we’re not standing in line with a lot of countries that don’t matter.’
He was not the first Russian leader to have made such overtures. Boris Yeltsin proposed Russian membership in 1991 and the year before Mikhail Gorbachev had ventured the possibility to the then US Secretary of State, James Baker, only to be told that it was merely a ‘dream’. Rather than grasp an opportunity which 30 years later would be to our enormous advantage in dealing with China and radical Islam, the suggestion was dismissed out of hand.
Instead, western countries sent to Moscow scores of free-market ‘consultants’ to oversee the privatisation and massed asset stripping of the formerly state-controlled Soviet industries which led directly to two catastrophic depressions, enormous unemployment and the creation of a semi-criminal or simply criminal oligarchic elite. No wonder that by the end of the 1990s the notion of ‘western democracy’ was viewed by the general population with scorn verging on loathing: a superpower reduced to impotence and penury. It is not difficult to see how the appetite for Vladimir Putin was fostered.
Remarkably, even the Soviet Union, during the most fraught early moments of the Cold War, had asked to be allowed to join Nato. A year after the death of Stalin and a few months after the sidelining of Malenkov, the USSR’s minister for foreign affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, proposed that his country join an alliance for the collective security of Europe on the grounds that it would be of ‘cardinal importance for the promotion of universal peace’. Molotov’s biographer, Geoffrey Roberts, observed: ‘In May 1954 the western powers rejected the Soviet proposal to join Nato on grounds that the USSR’s membership of the organisation would be incompatible with its democratic and
So at least four Russian leaders have implored the West to let them into this gilded club and each time they were contemptuously brushed off. But then this has been the history of Russia’s relations with the West. At various times throughout the past 800 years Russia has attempted to ingratiate itself with the West, most notably of course during the reign of Peter the Great, who even forced courtiers to shave off their Russian beards, wear European-style clothing and speak French in the hope that this might impress upon visiting westerners how civilised they were. But on every occasion the Russians have tried this cosying up they have been met with either pronounced sniggering or malevolent opportunism from the rest of Europe.
What usually follows is a period of revanchism, in which subsequent leaders retreat into the comparative comfort of Russia’s roots in Asia, its Slavicness, its difference to the West, out of dismay or pique. St Petersburg itself was renamed Petrograd in 1914 because the old name sounded too western and had the whiff of Germany about it. Vladimir Putin comes from the city and however autocratic and authoritarian his regime, he is — or was chances to neutralise Russia’s potential threat. They have all been passed up.
Rod Liddle
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/we-blew-our-chance-to-befriend-putin
Wow..a sensible and insightful article from your professor Liddle.
But Putin of course didn't understand the depravity of the US's global hegemony ambitions. No room for another prosperous, equally well-armed nuclear nation, in that ambition.
The depravity of Uncle's ambition is shown most clearly in Afghanistan. Unlike Putin, the US doesn't have the ambition to be an empire. It has never wanted this.
In Syria, in the Ukraine, even in Venezuela - Putin has shown that he does.
But do you know? The world is now nostalgic for the kind of global hegemony the US offers. Not the neocon military hubris of Bush/Rumsfeld or the Washington Consensus corporate theism of Bush Snr/Clinton, but the Wilsonian consensus tradition. The UN, NATO, the Marshall Plan.
Ich bin ein Berliner. A peaceful, stable global order, the kind exemplified by the EU, with or without Britain and the US. A moderate, tamed global order: bureaucratic, a little dull, but with territorial integrity and a stable rule of law.
Far from perfect, that global order helped to keep so many rivalries in check. The USSR, of course, was once one part of that order, but it was held back by its own weight, its bloated inefficiency, and ultimately, nationalist splintering. Putin can't possibly restore it.
The US never wanted an empire, but as recent events have shown, we need Uncle at the table. WWI, WWII, the Cold War, and now.
Come back, America. Forgiven.