IPFS
Russia Has a National Strategy that Matches the Times -- Why Doesn't the U.S.?
Written by Ivan Eland Subject: World NewsDuring the Cold War, U.S. strategy was to contain Soviet expansion until the Soviets' inefficient communist economic system collapsed from within. Despite the perversion of George Kennan's original political, economic, and military containment strategy into one that emphasized primarily military intervention and CIA covert action, the strategy largely worked. However, if the United States had stuck with Kennan's original concept and scoped down the strategy to contain Soviet power only in areas of the world that really mattered from a strategic perspective -- that is, areas of high technology and economic output--the United States could have allowed the Soviet Empire to bankrupt itself even faster by expansion into then-destitute developing world. Communist expansion in backwater areas of the world would have raised Soviet costs in administering those regions and providing military, political, and economic assistance to them. In short, following such a Cold War-Lite strategy, the United States could have avoided getting bogged down in costly, non-strategic wars in Korea and Vietnam and running up huge debts for a peacetime U.S. military build up during the Reagan administration in the 1980s.
Of course, adopting a more restrained strategy would have interfered with the real purpose of U.S. actions vis-à-vis the decrepit Soviet "superpower" -- often derisively called "Upper Volta with missiles" in national security circles. Although the Soviet Union was somewhat of a threat, the U.S. foreign policy establishment overstated it to mask U.S. empire building throughout the world. The informal U.S. Empire, as opposed to the formal empires of the British and French, has been supported internally by not only the American foreign policy elite but also the U.S. military-industrial-congressional complex. In short, to a great extent, the U.S. establishment used the Soviet bogeyman as an excuse to remake the world after World War II. If doubt exists among "patriotic" U.S. citizens that their government would do such a thing, they should ask themselves why, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the USSR itself, did the U.S. Empire not contract but instead expand?
And
now we come to the very valid complaint that Vladimir Putin and Russia
have with U.S. post-Cold War policy. The collapse of Russia's Warsaw
Pact buffer zone was exacerbated by expansion of a hostile military bloc
-- NATO -- through inducting those former Warsaw Pact nations into that
swelling alliance. That expansion has continued right up to Russia's
borders. Even prior to the current crisis in Crimea, U.S. fighters were
patrolling the border between Russia and NATO-member Baltic states.
Why does Russia think it needs buffer states? From the Russian
perspective, Napoleon and Adolf Hitler invaded Russia and the nation
lost 40 million people in the two World Wars. Many great powers in
history create such buffer zones. For example, in addition to its
informal worldwide empire, the United States, since 1823, has reserved
the right to intervene militarily anywhere in Latin America under the
Monroe Doctrine.
When victors rub the noses of the vanquished in
the dirt, they often breed further conflict -- as Britain, France, and
the United States found the hard way after World War I. Some of us
warned that ill consequences for the United States would follow as it
did the same to Russia during the post-Cold War period in the 1990s and
the first decade of the twenty-first century -- instead of following the
model of inclusion of defeated France after the Napoleonic Wars, which
led to a century absent a major conflagration. After the Cold War ended,
instead of doing away with NATO and including Russia in the larger
European community, Russia was excluded from Europe. Moreover, to get
Soviet agreement to reunite Germany, President George H. W. Bush
promised then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not
expand; since then, that promise has been repeatedly broken. A
humiliated and nationalistic Russia, with a chauvinistic Putin leading
it, is a direct outcome such prior U.S. policies.
When Putin saw even more of his buffer zone eroding with the collapse of
the Russian-friendly Yanukovych government in Ukraine, he was tired of
the humiliation and acted to salvage what was left by annexing the
Russian-speaking area of Crimea back into Russia, which had it taken
away in 1954. Nearby Ukraine has always been strategic to Russia,
containing Russia's only warm water port and the strategic naval base in
Crimea's Sevastopol; neither Ukraine nor Crimea is strategic for the
United States half a world away.
Putin was wrong to invade Crimea, but he is hardly trying to retake
Eastern Europe; in fact, his military is probably too weak even to take
and hold the hostile western regions of Ukraine. The U.S. government
needs to quit fanning hysteria and put Russian intentions and
capabilities into proper perspective. It also needs to recognize that
Russia is trying only to protect an eroding sphere of influence. The
United States would be lucky to have so coherent a national strategy.
Currently, the U.S. is trying to retain its role as world policeman, a
role that it can no longer afford.
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