The Real War: Autocrats Versus Democrats

Seventeen years after the Soviet breakup, why has Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev never run a fair election? Why is Russia's leadership the subject of a selection as opposed to an election? Why, for that matter, is China so successful as a Communist state?

According to Robert Kagan, this is the natural order of things. The last two decades have been an anomaly, and we are now seeing a revival of real ideological balance, he says in, "The Return of History and the End of Dreams."

For O and G readers, here is the best paragraph in the short, 105-page, pocket-size book: "It is a mistake to believe that autocracy has no international appeal. Thanks to decades of remarkable growth, the Chinese today can argue that their model of economic development, which combines an increasingly open economy with a closed political system, can be a successful option for development in many nations. It certainly offers a model for successful autocracy, a blueprint for how to create wealth and stability without having to give way to political liberalization. Russia's model of 'sovereign democracy' is attractive among the autocrats of Central Asia. Some Europeans worry that Russia is 'emerging as an ideological alternative to the EU that offers a different approach to sovereignty, power and world order.' In the 1980s and 1990s, the autocratic model seemed like a losing proposition as dictatorships of both right and left fell before the liberal tide. Today, thanks to the success of China and Russia, it looks like a better bet."

A cottage industry is under way of books dissecting how we started out with a peace dividend from the fall of the Soviet bloc, and ended up with a hyper-charged war atmosphere. Today's New York Times, for instance, reviews America Between the Wars, by Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier.

The books are part of the current electoral atmosphere -- while McCain and Obama battle for the White House, wonks are girding for a place in one or the other's foreign policy superstructure, including senior spots in the National Security Council and the State Department.

This is perhaps Kagan's current aim. With that in mind, he takes aim at Francis Fukuyama, who in 1992 argued in The End of History and the Last Man that liberal democracy was the final stage of governance.

For those unacquainted with him, Kagan is a long-time provider of intellectual heft for neoconservatives. In this book, he puts on a show of shedding his ideological past. Indeed the first two thirds of the book -- through page 82 -- is a bracing and sweeping display of knowledge and analysis of his argument that the world has returned to a competition between democratic and autocratic states. And that that -- and not a struggle between the West and Islam -- is the main geopolitical contest to which the world will be treated in the years ahead. Militant Islam, he says, will fall by the wayside to this more robust rivalry.

But then Kagan reverts to his past as a factory of neo-con ideological thought. For instance, other reviewers have asserted that, with this work, Kagan loses his embrace of Iraq and the transformational global change he promised in the lead up to the current war. But they apparently missed his assertion, on page 90, that Iraq remains a place that, if handled correctly, could still become a strategic boon for the U.S. "A stable, pro-American Iraq would shift the strategic balance [in the Middle East] in a decidedly pro-American direction," Kagan writes.

Indeed, he argues, unlike the criticism rendered by some major scholars, the Bush administration's foreign policy record stacks up well against its predecessors'. The Cold War resulted in "major strategic setbacks"; during the 1950s and 1960s, Egypt and Syria allied with Moscow.; and, under Jimmy Carter, the U.S. lost its crucial ally, Iran, to the uprising of Ayatollah Khomeini. "Nothing similar has yet occurred as a result of the Iraq war," Kagan writes.

One might also quibble with Kagan's characterization of one of the impulses behind Bush's foreign policy -- the same "noble generosity of spirit" that has long driven U.S. actions. In Kagan's telling, Bush's policies have dove-tailed with how Americans have been all along.

Though it might have upset his publisher, the book easily could lose 10 or 20 pages, where Kagan veers off his theme of democracy versus autocracy and into his drum-beating on behalf of the neo-con cause.

Yet I found the clear-eyed crunching of the genuine current battle worth the cover price.

Presidential Candidates on Russia

With Iraq sucking much of the air out of the room, the former Soviet Union and Russia in particular have gotten little attention from the U.S. presidential candidates. The notable exception has been GOP nominee John McCain, who threatened with Bush-like chest-thumping to expel Russia from the G-8, and sophomorically described Vladimir Putin's eyes as containing a "K a G and a B."

Matt Siegel at The Moscow Times weighs in today with a piece in which he interviews McCain's Russia expert, Stephen Biegun, a vice president at Ford Motor and a veteran of the current President Bush's foreign policy team; and Michael McFaul, who is Barack Obama's Russia specialist and acting director of the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. It's worth reading, in addition to this discussion by a panel of specialists gathered together by Johnson's List a couple of weeks ago.

Both of the Democratic candidates make the point that it's unnecessary to rile Russia at the moment by insisting on a missile-defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, when there is no evidence that the technology works. McCain supports installation of the shield regardless.

Much also is made of Putin's crackdown on rival voices.

None of the candidates has said a word as far as I can tell about a serious, omnibus approach to Eurasian energy security stretching from Central Asia into western Europe. As readers of this blog know, Putin -- and by extension Dmitri Medvedev -- have treated this as a paramount issue, while Washington has been looking the other way to Iraq.

One amusing aspect of the foreign policy debate that has taken place is hoopla among some in the expert community over Obama's reliance on Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Carter-era national security adviser, as a chief foreign policy expert. These experts see Brzezinski as a relic of the Cold War. Perhaps such younger specialists see themselves as more authoritative. But a reading of his writing over the last decade and a half shows Brzezinski proving himself again and again as one of the most realistic and wise hands on the former Soviet Union. He does so again here in the current issue of The Washington Quarterly.

At core is a subjective issue that will not be settled to anyone's satisfaction -- is Russia a normal country, meaning should it be treated the way one would approach, say, France? Brzezinski would be on the reasonable side of those who reply 'no,' at least at the moment. Those for whom the answer seems to be yes seem to include Stephen Kotkin of Princeton and Anatol Lieven of King's College in London.

Hillary, McCain and Jingoism

I was in Baku on an oil story when Hillary Clinton visited Central Asia during the 1990s, but when I got back to Almaty I asked around for local impressions of her. The visit went over well, I was told by her Kazakh and Uzbek hosts -- she stopped by a pre-natal care clinic in Almaty, and met with Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev and, in Tashkent, with Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov. But I also heard a singular personal observation from the amused locals -- Clinton, it turns out, doesn't have an athlete's slim legs.

How to respond to an immature remark? Probably with silence, which is what I did. And in fact, I didn't hear Nazarbayev, Karimov or any other official or reporter say publicly: F-A-T T-H-I-G-H-S.

Nor for that matter did I hear then or since any public official abroad say of John McCain: "I looked into his eyes and saw three letters: O-L-D."

Which brings me to recent remarks by Clinton and McCain, both of whom maintain that above all else what sets them apart from their respective rivals in both main parties is gravitas on the foreign policy stage.

So how is it that we find Clinton saying of Vladimir Putin, as she did yesterday: "he's a KGB agent. By definition he doesn't have a soul." And McCain in a newspaper interview: "I looked into his eyes and saw three letters: a K, a G and a B."

Both of these knee-slappers were intended as swipes at President Bush for his oft-quoted 2001 remark about Putin, as kindly provided by the L.A. Times' Andrew Malcolm: "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country. And I appreciated so very much the frank dialogue."

Did Bush's remark reflect wisdom or good judgment? No. But neither does it require any to remark on someone's well-known former employment.

Putin's KGB background does affect Kremlin policy. The thrust of it is -- anything goes. In other words, set the goal, and use whatever means necessary to achieve it, which is a worrying approach to domestic and foreign policy.

But Putin is going to be around a long time, and the U.S. is going to have to find a common language with him. Rather than offering a serious approach, Clinton and McCain dived quite happily into the muck in a craven effort to capture the base.

Photo: DBKing
Rights: Creative Commons

Presidential Candidates Clueless on Russia; Report: Putin to be NYT columnist

The presidential candidates as a whole don't look very sure-footed on former Soviet policy. That is except for John McCain, who says Russia should be shoved out of the G-8, and that the U.S. should proceed with the non-working missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. The Council on Foreign Relations collected the candidates' various positions, and The Washington Post ran them out on Friday.

How about returning to part of the Soviet-era approach -- averting McCain's petulant muscle-flexing, but accepting that there's little overlap in belief systems, that the U.S. and Russia are each out for their own self-interest around the world, and that it's each country for itself in terms of competition?

One challenge of 2008 -- winning the battle to control the new flow of energy into Europe. Russia has the edge in winning over the key country in this battle -- Turkmenistan and its huge natural gas supplies. But Turkmenistan President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov is still leaving the door open for Europe and Washington's idea to direct his country's natural gas West.

Putin in the New York Times? The Media Bloodhound reports that NYT editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal, who just announced a deal to publish his sworn enemy Bill Kristol once a week, has struck a second masterstroke: a weekly column by Vladimir Putin. Satire at its best.

Photo: OxDE
Rights: Creative Commons