Putin Is Right

Let me say from the top that I yield to no one in my detestation of Vladimir Putin and all that he has wrought. Here is a ex-KGB thug who has turned Russia into a thuggish kleptocracy fueled by oil wealth and totally dominated by the new version of the KGB known as FSB. Putin runs an autocratic regime based on the mailed fist (silnaya ruka) that casually murders its opponents, whether in Moscow or in London. Internationally, Putin’s Russia bullies weaker, resource-poor neighbors like Georgia and Ukraine, irresponsibly shares nuclear technology with Iran and uses Europe’s addiction on its natural gas to keep the EU from challenging its behavior.

Yet despite all of that, Putin was right on target when he gave a speech at a security conference in Munich featuring the participation of DefSec Robert Gates, Sen John McCain, Joe Lieberman and others in which he accused the U.S. of forcing its will on the rest of the world.
Putin accused the United States of making the world a more dangerous place by pursuing policies aimed at making it "one single master." Attacking the concept of a "unipolar" world in which the United States was the sole superpower, he said: "What is a unipolar world? No matter how we beautify this term it means one single center of power, one single center of force, and one single master. "It has nothing in common with democracy because that is the opinion of the majority taking into account the minority opinion," he told the gathering of top security and defense officials. Putin archly added that “People are always teaching us democracy, but the people who teach us democracy don't want to learn it themselves," he said.

Incredibly, in all of the U.S. press coverage I’ve seen of the speech, in the NYT, Washington Post, and elsewhere, the focus has been almost exclusively on asking whether oil-rich Putin was trying to start a new Cold War, without focusing on the obvious; that most of the world emphatically agrees with Putin’s position that the unipolar American hegemony that has ruled the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union, has been bad for the world. Despite the collapse of its only rival, the U.S., even under the relatively pacific Clinton regime, kept on building arms—including nuclear arms—as though there was some rational reason to do so, and poisoned westernization trends in Russia during the 90’s by expanding NATO to include all the former Soviet satellites and the Baltic states. Bush started off in 2001 by tearing up the 30-year-old anti-ballistic missile treaty (it now plans to place ABM’s in Poland and the Czech Republic, and of course, going hog wild after 9-11; sending U.S. forces to Central Asia and then invading Iraq despite the overwhelming opposition of the international community to that invasion. Bush and company refused to abide by any international agreements and tore up the Kyoto Protocol, postponing for a decade the efforts of the world community to try to deal with global warming.

Putin said the United States had repeatedly overstepped its national borders on questions of international security, a policy he said had made the world less, not more, safe.
"Unilateral actions have not resolved conflicts but have made them worse," Putin said, adding that force should only be used when the option is backed by the United Nations Security Council. "This is very dangerous. Nobody feels secure any more because nobody can hide behind international law," he said. Putin also said the increased use of force was "causing an arms race with the desire of countries to get nuclear weapons." All of the above is very true and right on target.

Are we so blind in this country that we can’t see how much the world; not only Russia, but China, Latin America, the Muslim world and Europe as well, resents the U.S. dictat, and it is that sense of being pushed around and disregarded, as much as the presence of the obnoxious George Bush in the presidency, that is making this country hated more and more around the world. In the wake of the bloody debacle of Iraq, which was caused by the hubris and arrogance of the neo-cons, we can only hope that the next administration will ‘get it’ that the age of absolute U.S. domination of the world is over. The U.S. may still have the military razzle-dazzle to sweep into a third world nation and overthrow its government in the face of world opinion, but Iraq has shown that we can’t do the follow through and force our will and version of reality on a (dissolving) Middle Eastern society with very different priorities.

So far, Bush, with his arrogant self-righteousness and unilateralism, has played completely into the hands of bin-Laden and his ilk, immeasurably strengthening Islamic extremism by invading the heart of the Arab/Muslim world and trying to create some new version of Texas there. The U.S. is not in a position to ‘do’ Iraq or Agfghanistan on its own; it needs the help of the world and that help will come at a price; no more unilateral decision making out of Washington, whether by reactionary Bushies or a restored (Hillary) Clinton regime. Putin, nasty and thuggish though he is, deserves credit for saying out loud what most of the rest of the world has been feeling for quite a long time.