consortiumnews | It is encouraging that Foreign Affairs magazine, the preeminent
professional journal of American diplomacy, took the extraordinary step
(extraordinary at least in the current environment) of publishing Robert
English’s article, entitled “Russia, Trump, and a new Détente,” that challenges the prevailing groupthink and does so with careful scholarship.
In effect, English’s article trashes the positions of all Foreign
Affairs’ featured contributors for the past several years. But it must
be stressed that there are no new discoveries of fact or new insights
that make English’s essay particularly valuable. What he has done is to
bring together the chief points of the counter-current and set them out
with extraordinary writing skills, efficiency and persuasiveness of
argumentation. Even more important, he has been uncompromising.
The facts laid out by English could have been set out by one of
several experienced and informed professors or practitioners of
international relations. But English had the courage to follow the facts
where they lead and the skill to convince the Foreign Affairs editors
to take the chance on allowing readers to see some unpopular truths even
though the editors now will probably come under attack themselves as
“Kremlin stooges.”
The overriding thesis is summed up at the start of the essay: “For 25
years, Republicans and Democrats have acted in ways that look much the
same to Moscow. Washington has pursued policies that have ignored
Russian interests (and sometimes international law as well) in order to
encircle Moscow with military alliances and trade blocs conducive to
U.S. interests. It is no wonder that Russia pushes back. The wonder is
that the U.S. policy elite doesn’t get this, even as foreign-affairs
neophyte Trump apparently does.”
English’s article goes back to the fall of the Soviet Union in the
early 1990s and explains why and how U.S. policy toward Russia was wrong
and wrong again. He debunks the notion that Boris Yeltsin brought in a
democratic age, which Vladimir Putin undid after coming to power.
English explains how the U.S. meddled in Russian domestic politics in
the mid-1990s to falsify election results and ensure Yeltsin’s
continuation in office despite his unpopularity for bringing on an
economic Depression that average Russians remember bitterly to this day.
That was a time when the vast majority of Russians equated democracy
with “shitocracy.”
English describes how the Russian economic and political collapse in
the 1990s was exploited by the Clinton administration. He tells why
currently fashionable U.S. critics of Putin are dead wrong when they
fail to acknowledge Putin’s achievements in restructuring the economy,
tax collection, governance, improvements in public health and more which
account for his spectacular popularity ratings today.
English details all the errors and stupidities of the Obama
administration in its handling of Russia and Putin, faulting President
Obama and Secretary of State (and later presidential candidate) Hillary
Clinton for all of their provocative and insensitive words and deeds.
What we see in U.S. policy, as described by English, is the application
of double standards, a prosecutorial stance towards Russia, and
outrageous lies about the country and its leadership foisted on the
American public.
Then English takes on directly all of the paranoia over Russia’s
alleged challenge to Western democratic processes. He calls attention
instead to how U.S. foreign policy and the European Union’s own policies
in the new Member States and candidate Member States have created all
the conditions for a populist revolt by buying off local elites and
subjecting the broad populace in these countries to pauperization.
English concludes his essay with a call to give détente with Putin and Russia a chance.
