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One of our favorites, Craig Pirrong of Streetwise Professor, posted a piece highly critical of Putin. We have that here, and have rerun Paul Mirengoff”s Power Line post from a few days ago about the alternate reality that W encountered when dealing with Putin. We follow those two posts with a Forbes article by Paul Roderick Gregory explaining the milieu from whence Putin sprang. Then Michael Barone writes about communication difficulties on our side.
To help understand Russian attitudes it is worth repeating a story in a book about the history of their conquest of Siberia. In 1905 the first leg of the Trans-Siberian Railway was completed to Irkutsk, the town at the bottom of Lake Baikal 3,200 miles from Moscow. Because the Czar’s government was seriously in debt, (25% of the budget was going for interest payments. Was obama the czar?) there was not enough in the budget to do a proper job. As a result, the grades were too steep, the curves were too sharp, and good hardwoods were not used for ties. Speeds were so slow, the trip to Irkutsk took two weeks. At the time, someone pointed out to a Russian man that trains in Western Europe were able to travel three times as fast. To which the Russian responded, “Well, if you need to get someplace sooner, you can just take an earlier train.”
That confounding obliviousness is, to Pickerhead’s experience, typical for the country. We get fooled by a very thin veneer of Russians who have a Western point of view. And more confusion comes from their excellence in Western idioms of music and literature. This leads us to believe they are just like us. They are not. Scratch below the surface and you will find a xenophobic peasant; notable only for a capacity for suffering we cannot even imagine. Smart though. Because everyone of them can speak Russian like a native.
This xenophobia, the fear of the foreign, is something Russians come by honestly and we would too if geography had dealt us their poor hand. It is a huge flat country with no natural barriers to entry, or invasion, for a thousand miles. Don’t think of the Urals, they are like the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. The Volga provides an example. It rises in the Valdai Hills near Moscow and wanders for almost 4,000 miles before arriving at the Caspian Sea. A drop of less than 1,000 feet, or three inches every mile. As a consequence, the country was constantly tested from every direction and Russians came to value a strong government that would protect them.
Our political ancestors were on an island and learned to fear tyranny from inside the country. That’s why we got the Magna Carta, and a government constrained by a constitution and the rule of law. Those things did not happen because we were wrapped in virtue at birth. Our peoples solved a different set of problems.
There is another Western, particularly American, conceit that annoys Russians. It happens at the beginning of every June as we celebrate the anniversary of the D-Day invasion when we landed in Europe and subsequently, supposedly, won the war. Dmitri Vologonov, a Red Army General who served on the staffs of both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, was an historian with unique access to archives of both the Red Army and the Communist Party. His best estimate of the number of Soviets killed in WWII is 27,000,000. The United States lost 300,000. Hitler had lost the war long before June 1944. We were there for the mopping up. Not to say our contribution in national treasure was not immense. But it was Russia that paid the butcher’s bill.
Here’s Craig Pirrong with his post after what he saw as a distressing Putin performance in his presser last week.
… The impression of insanity is only reinforced by other actions during the past several days, including a live fire exercise in the Baltic (witnessed by Putin) and today’s launch of an ICBM test. Put it altogether, and Putin gives the impression of approaching Kim Jung Un or Kim Jung Il levels of aggressive craziness. (And for those who say these exercises and tests were planned in advance, they could have easily been canceled if Putin wanted to lower the tension level. The fact he let them proceed tells you all you need to know about his intent and mindset.)
So what are the broader implications of his disturbing display of mental imbalance? No doubt the Europeans are even more intimidated now, and will be all the more reluctant to challenge a leader with a nuclear arsenal that they view as mad.
And that raises another possibility: that Putin was playing the psycho for effect. The Slavic version of Nixon’s Madman Theory, and which Machiavelli wrote about centuries earlier: he wrote that leaders can find it “a very wise thing to simulate madness.”
I will say, watching the video, that Putin did a very, very credible impression of a madman, but that’s necessary to make the gambit work, isn’t it?
I don’t know whether he’s truly mad, or merely feigning it, but the effect will likely be the same. The disturbing display of mental imbalance will work to his favor, and lead the Europeans in particular to back away slowly, letting him keep his current conquests, and prepare for his next move. He may back off now, but he will be back for more. And quite possibly not just in Ukraine. But in the Baltic states and Poland.
And for reference, Paul Mirengoff’s post on W’s “discussions” with Putin.
As John noted below, President Obama spent an hour and a half on the telephone with Vladimir Putin discussing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. What was the conversation like?
We can probably get a good sense of it by considering the account of President Bush’s conversations with Putin set forth by Peter Baker in his excellent book about the Bush presidency, Days of Fire.
It’s well known that Bush and Putin got on well at first. But when the relationship soured, Bush became exasperated by his talks with the Russian bully.
Putin seemed to delight in debating Bush. But according to Baker, Bush hated debating Putin. “He’s not well informed,” Bush complained. “It’s like arguing with an eighth grader with his facts wrong.” Bush described another encounter as “like junior high debating.”
One of Putin’s tactics was to present absurd analogies between his abuses of power and events in the U.S., a tactic also favored by Nikita Khrushchev in Soviet times:
“You talk about Khodorkovsky [the head of Yukos whose assets and freedom were taken from him after he became a critic of Putin], and I talk about Enron,” Putin told Bush. “You appoint the Electoral College and I appoint governors. What’s the difference?”
At another point, Putin defended his control over media in Russia. “Don’t lecture me about the free press,” he said, “not after you fired that reporter.”
“Vladimir, are you talking about Dan Rather?” Bush asked. Yes, replied Putin.
More along this vein from Paul Roderick Gregory writing in Forbes.
… After level-headed Angela Merkel of Germany talked by phone with Vladimir Putin on the Ukraine crisis, she came away reporting that he had lost touch with reality and was living in another world. Putin’s saber-rattling press conference was another shocking introduction to Putin’s parallel universe, in which black is white, down is up, and the sun rises at night.
In Putin’s world, all demonstrators in Moscow streets are paid agents of Hillary Clinton, and now John Kerry, a student deserves two and a half years in jail for injuring a heavily-armored riot policeman with a lemon, the tiny Georgian army attacked Russian forces without prvocation as rabid Georgians killed and maimed the embattled citizens of Abkhazia, the Maidan demonstrators are Nazis and skinheads who burn innocent bystanders alive, Yanukovich’s Berkut riot police bravely held their ground as anti-Semitic snipers dropped them one by one, Yanukovich is the legitimate president although Ukraine has no president, the new Crimean governor (who last commanded a whopping 4% of the vote) has the unanimous support of the people, desperate Russian-speaking Ukrainians turned to Russia for humanitarian support, and the Russian uniforms worn by Crimean “local self defense forces” were purchased in second-hand stores.
Chancellor Merkel should not be surprised by Putin’s lack of touch with reality, or that he is living “in another world.” After all, she grew up behind a wall, erected by Putin’s KGB heroes for the express purpose of keeping out “enemy provocateurs,” not to keep the people from fleeing. The likes of John Kerry and Barack Obama, however, face Putin’s KGB alternative universe for the first time. Let’s hope they come to understand Putin’s uncivilized provokatsia, desinformatisia, maskirovka, and the tried-and-true “big lie” as quickly as possible. …
Michael Barone thinks presidential-sized personality defects lead our country into trouble.
Solipsism. It’s a fancy word which means that you assume others see the world as you do and will behave as you would.
It’s a quality often found in narcissists, people who greatly admire themselves — like a presidential candidate confident that he is a better speechwriter than his speechwriters, knows more about policy than his policy directors and is a better political director than his political director.
If that sounds familiar, it’s a paraphrase of what President Obama told top political aide Patrick Gaspard in 2008, according to the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza.
More recently, Obama’s solipsism has been painfully apparent as the United States suffers one reversal after another in world affairs. But it has been apparent ever since he started running for president in 2007.
Candidate Obama campaigned not just as a critic of the policies of the opposing party’s president, as many candidates do. He portrayed himself repeatedly as someone who, because he “looks different” from other presidents, would make America beloved and cherished in the world.
Plenty of solipsism here. Obama’s status as the possible and then actual first black president was surely an electoral asset. Most Americans believed and believe that, given the nation’s history, the election of a black president would be a good thing, at least in the abstract.
But that history has less resonance beyond America’s borders. Obama must have been surprised to find, on his trip to his father’s native Africa, that he was less popular there than George W. Bush, thanks to Bush’s program to combat AIDS. …
Speaking of defects, John Podhoretz says the healthcare disaster is now undeniable.
The Washington Post has the bombshell story of the month: “A pair of surveys released on Thursday suggest that just one in 10 uninsured people who qualify for private health plans through the new marketplace have signed up for one—and that about half of uninsured adults has looked for information on the online exchanges or plans to look.” Well, and there goes the famed rationale for the health-care law—which was to bring the people, numbering anywhere between 31 million to 47 million depending on how and whom you count, without insurance into the system.
Why aren’t they signing up? First off, there will always be people who choose to live on the margins in some way or other. They don’t want to be in the system, they’re paranoid about the system, they keep their money in their mattress and lots of cans in the basement. But mostly, people aren’t signing up now and haven’t had health care before because of the cost: “Of people who are uninsured and do not intend to get a health plan through the marketplaces, the biggest factor is that they believe they could not afford one.”
Since October 1 of last year, the coverage of the Obamacare disaster has centered on the technical catastrophe of the healthcare.gov and the transitional problems afflicting insurers, employers, and the insured alike—and more recently the administration’s desperate efforts to delay the penalties and controls imposed by the law to limit the political fallout. It is safe to say, though, that this is the worst possible news for Obama and his people. They have thrown the entire health-care system into unprecedented chaos for a population that is, it seems, staying as far away from it as possible. Little has been fixed; much has been made far worse; nothing makes sense; and good luck to the Democrats who have to defend their votes for this colossal cock-up in November.