By Jeff Hawn, Responsible Statecraft, 8/12/21

Jeff Hawn is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of International History at The London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis and the post-Cold War international order.

On June 21 2021, the Russian prosecutor general’s office added the New York-based Bard College to its growing list of undesirable foreign organizations. In practice, this will mean Bard will be unable to continue its long-running partnership with St. Petersburg State University which has helped thousands of U.S. and Russian students undertake educational exchanges. Placing Bard on its list of undesirable foreign organizations is the latest step by the Russian government to limit avenues for cultural, diplomatic, and educational exchange with the United States. The U.S. government has done little to counteract these limitations, a trend that will be counter-productive in the long term.

The United States is engaged in an active and often hostile competition with Russia, but, instead of investing in building a robust network of Russian experts, Washington has neglected to invest in the field. The damage is well documented. In 2012, Title VIII funding, which authorizes federal money to be directed to Slavic language training and advance research, was cut sharply from $4.5 million to $3 million per year. This is part of a growing trend in the United States that applies across government, academia, and NGOs, where, despite increased confrontation with Moscow, knowledgeable experts are competing for ever fewer resources.

George Kennan, the oft-cited dean of Russian studies in the 1940s and 1950s, argued that, in order to actually understand Russia, you needed to get Russian mud on your boots. In other words, it’s not enough to read about the country, but rather it’s important to live there and understand its complex and often misunderstood history and culture.

The experience of the Cold War seemed to prove Kennan right. Having had only a few dozen Russian experts in the 1950s, by the 1990s the United States boasted several hundred across government and academia. Yet many had never had the opportunity to visit Russia, and thus their perceptions of its foreign and domestic policies were not necessarily well grounded. Hence, for many years U.S. experts believed the Soviet Union was more viable than it truly proved to be.

The collapse of the USSR inflicted an additional blow to Russian studies in the United States. An overconfidence and deep misunderstanding of the implications of the death of communism led the U.S. talent pool on Russia to dry up. That pool has not been replenished despite increasing tensions with Russia. The fault lies largely with the U.S. government’s priorities.

Unlike the 1950s, there has been no increase of funding for Russian studies and indeed the macro trends in Washington seem to act more to deter those who want to engage in Russian studies rather than encourage them. The outsourcing of background checks for security clearance to lowest-bid contractors means that would-be Russian experts applying for entry-level federal positions face daunting obstacles. Even if they are somehow able to navigate the highly dysfunctional hiring process, they still face a very arduous clearance ordeal that can result in disqualification, often on the grounds of concern over foreign contacts or connections acquired during educational or cultural exchanges. The lesson for would-be Russian scholars is: why bother trying to cultivate expertise if it will only serve to disqualify you?

That is not to say Washington is bereft of genuine expertise. But the increasingly polarized environment that rewards jingoism and punishes nuanced analysis means that many experts have been left on the sidelines.

Read full article here.

Krystal and Saagar are joined by foreign policy expert Richard Hanania to debunk the lies told by neocons about the withdrawal from Afghanistan and explain where the US went wrong in the war

Ryan Grim, Alyssa Farah and Kim Iversen discuss the situation in Afghanistan with Christian Parenti as U.S. troops withdraw and the Taliban takes over.

As the Taliban have now effectively taken control of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, there is much that our political class, policymakers and media talking heads should reflect on and many lessons to learn. But it appears unlikely that this will happen.

I remember going to my first antiwar rally in October of 2001 to protest our attack on Afghanistan in retaliation for 9/11. No one I knew wanted to go with me. I didn’t see how dropping bombs on regular Afghanis who had nothing to do with Bin Laden or the 9/11 attacks would help anything, especially after the Taliban had offered to hand over Bin Laden if the U.S. would stop bombing their country – an offer George W. Bush refused. It was a fairly small protest in San Francisco organized by the ANSWER coalition. I wouldn’t stop feeling like an outcast for my views until a year and a half later when antiwar protests swelled in the leadup to the invasion of Iraq. But the Bush administration merely blew off the largest and most coordinated antiwar rallies in the history of the world as “a focus group” that could be ignored.

As Sarah Lazare said on Twitter, the US press should be talking to those of us who were against this debacle to begin with, who could foresee the problems with trying to oppose a tactic with war, with trying – in the case of Afghanistan – to build a modern democratic country that is far from even being an industrialized country in terms of development and has no experience with democracy but is still largely a tribal nation that has been at war for most of the last 40 years (see my previous post on Afghanistan). I feel terrible for the plight of Afghan women and the prospect of sharia law, but we really had no business giving false hope to the women of Afghanistan that they could live as a modern western country when that was not the conditions that exist in Afghanistan – even with a western country propping up a corrupt and unpopular government. It certainly wasn’t going to be the conditions when that western country leaves. Now I see pundits and even left-leaning commentators on Twitter using this as an excuse for why we should have kept delaying the inevitable and stayed forever. If the government we are propping up collapses after 20 years, it will collapse after 25 or 30 or 50. The problem isn’t leaving too soon, the problem is the original policy of going in in the first place and thinking we can throw money at people who will then build a functioning democratic government with no skills, history or experience to do so. Sticking with something that doesn’t work after 20 years won’t make it suddenly work, it is just a form of denial.

Ironically, some of us are old enough to remember when George W. Bush campaigned on a more “humble” and less interventionist foreign policy and railed against “nation-building.” Watch this clip for yourself.

As for the speed with which the Taliban have accomplished taking over many provincial capitals and now Kabul, I can only wonder at how utterly inept our intelligence analysts must be to have predicted last week that Kabul could fall within 30 – 90 days and then have it happen less than a week later. This begs the question: do these people have a clue what’s going on anywhere in the world? Below is a press conference from a couple of weeks ago in which Biden says he doesn’t think the Kabul government will collapse upon the exit of US troops. Though Biden deserves some credit for following through on Trump’s withdrawal process, It would have been better to have prepared the American people for the fact that the Taliban were likely to take over and that the logistics of the withdrawal were not going to be pretty. But that would have entailed acknowledging that the policy was misguided to begin with and reminding us that we have been consistently lied to for years by military leaders and politicians about the situation in Afghanistan.

This may become the most infamous — and devastating — press conference ever held by an American President. pic.twitter.com/j4kKwyPDVm

— BDW (@BryanDeanWright) August 15, 2021

As this months marks the 30th anniversary of the attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in August of 1991, Gorbachev has published a long essay on his policy of perestroika (reform) in the journal Russia in Global Affairs. You can read it in English here. As some readers may be aware. unlike in the west, Gorbachev is not necessarily well-liked among Russians. Many consider his policies to have paved the way for the chaos of the 1990’s. In my conversations with Russians during my 2017 trip, in which I asked about their views of various Soviet leaders, most had either negative or indifferent views about him, while 2 or 3 expressed some degree of positive views.

Here is an interesting except from Gorbachev’s essay:

Initially, political reform was not our objective. I acknowledge that, at the time, I believed that the Party—the Communist Party of the Soviet Union—would be the vehicle of reform. For many years, it had been managing the country’s affairs; its representatives had vast administrative and political experience and held key positions in all areas of government and society. Therefore, the Party, particularly during the initial stage of perestroika, played an indispensable role. Plenary sessions of the Central Committee convened regularly, and all my reports were approved at Politburo meetings, often after sharp debate, which became increasingly contentious as tensions and differences of opinion came to the fore.

This was the drama of perestroika. Millions of Party members and many Party leaders in central bodies and local organizations supported new policies. But as I traveled and talked to people, I increasingly felt that the energy of change was hitting the wall erected by the Party and government bureaucracy—the nomenklatura.

People were wondering: Where is perestroika? Why are the most basic issues not being addressed? Why do our leaders’ attitudes toward the needs and concerns of the people remain unchanged?

In the fall of 1986, we concluded that we need to convene a plenary meeting of the Central Committee to discuss personnel policies. The plenum, held in January 1987, resonated tremendously in the Party, throughout the country and around the world. For the first time, we recognized the responsibility of the CPSU, its Central Committee and the Politburo for the strategic mistakes that had led our country into social and political stagnation. A large part of the nomenklatura saw the ideas and decisions of the plenum as a threat to themselves and moved to sabotage perestroika.

In 1987, the struggle between the reformers and the anti-reform wing of the CPSU began in earnest. It was pervasive, and it was weakening the Party’s ability to manage the country’s affairs and its legitimacy within Soviet society. My like-minded supporters and I realized then that unless we truly involved the country’s citizens in the processes of renewal and decoupled the Party from political power, the policy of perestroika would hit a dead end. We became aware of the need for political reform.

Paul Robinson has written an interesting piece, partly inspired by some other recent comments by Gorbachev, about the different opinions about who is to blame for the collapse of the Soviet Union which – whether one thinks it was a good or bad thing in the long run – created major tumult and instability:

It suits most people to blame Gorbachev; if it was all his fault, everybody else is off the hook. On the other hand, were communist hardliners to blame, you can argue the problem was that Gorbachev failed to reform fast enough, and this suits liberals. But if it was Yeltsin and the liberal reformers around him who were responsible, you can argue their successors today are unfit to run the country, having dragged it into ruin once already.

So, what’s the truth?

Gorbachev is right to remind people of the situation when he took power in 1985. The Soviet model had reached the limits of its potential. Central state planning was incapable of responding effectively to the demands of a modern, high-tech economy. Social problems such as absenteeism, alcoholism and crime were on the rise. There was a growing sense that something had to be done.

The Soviet leader’s problem was that he never had a very good idea of what that something should be. At heart, he was a true communist believer, who felt that all one needed to do was liberate people and they would work constructively towards improving the existing system. His attitude was similar to that of one of his closest advisors, Alexander Yakovlev, who remarked, “It seemed to me that it was enough to remove the machinery of repression … and all would be well.”

Gorbachev was not merely naïve, he was also economically clueless. American academic Graham Allison was shocked at a meeting held to discuss economic reform by the “dumb questions” Gorbachev asked. The Soviet leader could never overcome his suspicion of private property and opted for a form of “market socialism” that kept business under state control but gave enterprises more freedom from central planning authorities. The policy undermined whatever advantages central planning provided without giving any of the benefits of the free market. It accelerated economic collapse.

When people responded to Gorbachev’s reforms in a less than constructive fashion, he blamed hardliners in the party for obstructing him. He then set about dismantling the power of the Communist Party. But the party was the primary institution regulating Soviet society. When Gorbachev undermined it, there was nothing to replace it. The result was anarchy.

Read the full article here.

Harlan Ullman*, in an OpEd published at The Hill last week** titled “Is Ukraine Putin’s Taiwan?” called for NATO to make even further provocative moves near Russia’s borders, after having already carried out several naval exercises this summer  in the Black Sea.  A British warship sailing close to the Crimean coast even prompted the scramble of Russian warplanes.  His suggestion is all based on alarmist assumptions regarding an essay Vladimir Putin wrote recently and the mischaracterization of past events. 

In the essay, which readers can see for themselves in English here, Putin stated that Russians and Ukrainians are historically one people with a shared culture and history – not one country.  Interestingly, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky essentially acknowledged the same thing in 2014 and 41 percent of Ukrainians agreed in a recent poll.  But Ullman uses Putin’s essay to jump to the conclusion that Putin wants to take over Ukraine and doesn’t respect its independence.  The solution to this supposed problem, according to Ullman, is for NATO to boot up, grab its military hardware and ride to Ukraine’s rescue from Russia’s alleged imminent attack.   

As we all need to be reminded in order to support more NATO action, Putin is an aggressive autocrat and therefore capable of taking over eastern Ukraine.  As part of his evidence, Ullman mentions Putin’s speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference.  He leaves out the context of why Putin was criticizing the U.S.-led international order.  First, Putin was the first world leader to call President Bush to offer condolences after 9/11.  He also offered military assistance, against the advice of his national security team, to the U.S. in their pursuit of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.  The following year, Bush showed his gratitude by unilaterally withdrawing from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, a move Russia perceived as a threat to its nuclear deterrent.  Moreover, the U.S. had illegally invaded Iraq based on false claims, killing hundreds of thousands and creating long-term instability in the Middle East, a region geographically much closer to Russia than the U.S.

Ullman also repeats the unfounded claim that Russia “laid a trap” for Georgia in 2008. As the EU Fact-Finding Mission published in its 2009 report, Russia did not start the war but responded to military attacks by Tbilisi against Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia.  This attack was undertaken because the Georgian leader at the time, Mikhail Saakashvili, was operating under the false impression the U.S. would militarily support him.  One can debate whether Russia overreacted to these events, but Russia did not start the armed hostilities in 2008 as is commonly and erroneously claimed. 

Ullman then moves on to mention “Russia staged a large military buildup around Ukraine, possibly as a rehearsal” in reference to an increase in Russian troops near the Ukrainian border back in April.  The term “possibly as a rehearsal” is clearly supposition and he again leaves out significant context.  For example, in February, Ukrainian president Zelensky ordered troops and heavy weapons into the area near Donbas, which represents the conflict zone in eastern Ukraine.  Then on March 24th, Zelensky signed a decree approving a strategy to reintegrate Crimea and the Russian naval base at Sevastopol into Ukraine. 

Ullman cites a possible invasion and occupation of Serpent Island located in the western part of the Black Sea as something Putin might do, stating “this scenario is at least as viable as a Russian invasion of the Baltics.”  This is another fantastical claim some pundits make about the Kremlin’s supposed aggressive designs on Eastern Europe.  However, no one has ever provided a plausible explanation of what the possible benefit of invading the Baltics would be to Moscow, especially given the obvious drawbacks of invading and occupying these three small countries.  If this Serpent Island idea has comparable viability, then we have very little to worry about.

What is always in the background of touting Russia’s aggressive designs in its neighborhood, particularly Ukraine, is the 2014 annexation of Crimea.  Again, some context would be helpful in assessing whether this event suggests that Moscow is interested in taking over eastern Ukraine by force.

Crimea had been part of Russia from the time of Catherine the Great’s reign in the 18th century. But in 1954, Nikita Khrushchev gifted Crimea to Ukraine as part of his campaign to consolidate power in the post-Stalin era. Since both Russia and Ukraine were part of the Soviet Union at the time, this was not a problem. However, when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, Crimea remained in Ukraine as an autonomous region, while the naval base at Sevastopol was retained by Russia via a lease agreement with the Kiev government. 

When the corrupt but democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovich was illegally overthrown, with the active support of Washington, in February of 2014, Putin viewed the events as a threat to Russia’s security, especially when three former Ukrainian presidents subsequently called for repudiating the legal basis of the lease agreement with Russia.  Sevastopol is Russia’s only warm water port and a critical naval base that is the last militarily defensible barrier to an invasion into southern Russia. Sevastopol has major historical importance for Russians due to the crucial battle against the Germans there in summer 1942 in which the Soviets ground down a portion of the German army for months, preventing their advance to Stalingrad, leaving a smaller and weaker German force that ultimately lost to the Red Army .  The Soviet Union lost 27 million people fighting the Nazis.   

Eastern Ukraine does not have the same immediate security significance to Russia as the naval base in Crimea.  Given that Russia had also ignored several requests from Crimeans – the majority of whom are ethnically Russian and Russophone – since the 1990’s for reunification, it seems reasonable to conclude that the situation with Crimea in 2014 represented a unique national security issue for Russia that the Donbas does not.  Ukraine in NATO is viewed as a red line for Moscow, but a military invasion of Donbas or any other part of Ukraine is not required to protect its interests as the U.S.-led west is not going to grant it membership anytime soon.

We need to have a rational discussion about what U.S. policy toward Russia and Ukraine should be.  That discussion is not helped by alarmist recommendations based on distorted information and decontextualized claims.

*Harlan Ullman is a senior advisor at The Atlantic Council. This explains a lot.

**Note:  The Hill acknowledged receipt of but refused to publish this response to Ullman’s OpEd.