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sitcom than CENTCOM
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American foreign policy is more sitcom than CENTCOM. That in a way is
the good news. Our failures are comic while those of other nations are
tragic. Americans do not understand the tragic impulses of other peoples
because they are exceptional. The Europeans failed as nationalists, and
are failing as post-nationalists.
Because Americans are not an ethnicity but a union of immigrants
committed to a concept, our nationalism discloses a universal impulse. We
blunder when we forget how exceptional we are, and ignore the tragic
impulses that impinge on other peoples.
Only once in the past century have we read the world aright. We got it
wrong when Woodrow Wilson proposed a utopian postwar vision in 1919, when
the isolationists tried to stay out of the European conflict in the late
1930s, when Roosevelt and Truman let Stalin absorb Eastern Europe, when
we overextended and then turned tail in Vietnam, and when we undertook to
turn Iraq and Afghanistan into Western-style democracies. Ronald Reagan
got it right when he decided that it was time to roll back communism -
but he also understood that we would have to live with Russia as a
nation.
We have stumbled into the world's troubles like incongruous clowns in
a tragedy: we observe the anguished faces of the other characters and
conclude that everyone else on stage is insane. That is how Americans
view Russian President Vladimir Putin. As Time
magazine reported last week:
An
Obama administration official leaked to the New York Times on Sunday the
fact that German Chancellor Angela Merkel told President Obama she wasn't
sure if Putin was in touch with reality. "In another world,"
Merkel reportedly said, according to the leak. Then in a conference call
with reporters later in the day, three administration officials took
turns firing rhetorical shots: "[B]eing inside Putin's head is not
someplace anyone wants to be."
I doubt that Merkel ever said it, but that's a different question.
Russia, as Colonel
Ralph Peters (retired) told Sean Hannity last week, "believes in
Russia"; to the Obamoids, belief in one's country is prima facie
evidence of mental defect. Hillary Clinton, Senator John McCain and
Senator Marco Rubio meanwhile compare Putin to Hitler, an example of what
the late Leo Strauss derided as "reduction ad Hitlerium".
Contrast that to President Obama's characterization of Iran in his
interview with Bloomberg's Jeffrey Goldberg:
[If]
you look at Iranian behavior, they are strategic, and they're not
impulsive. They have a worldview, and they see their interests, and they
respond to costs and benefits.
That's been the longstanding view
of this administration.
Just how does one define rationality in global politics? Here is a
question that helps: What is the rational self-interest of a nation that
will cease to exist within the horizon of present-day expectations? We
look uncomprehendingly on the petty wars of perished peoples and marvel
at the sheer vanity of their forgotten battles. How do we know that
someone in the future won't look back at us the same way? There have been
Great Extinctions of the Peoples before in world history, but never with
the breadth and speed of the demographic declines in our own era. That
should give us something of an objective gauge with which to judge the
rationality of actors.
Iran's unprecedented fertility decline has accelerated - from about 7
children per female in 1979 to only 1.6 last year, according to a UN
estimate. Russia, meanwhile, is struggling to emerge from what seemed
like a demographic death-sentence only a few years ago. Ukraine is
Europe's poster-boy for demographic death.
Iran is dying a slow and dreadful death: by mid-century more than a
third of its people will be over 60, and by the end of the century, half
its people will be over 60, imposing an impossible burden on a poor
country. Its rulers are taking urgent steps to reverse the fertility
decline, opening clinics to treat infertility, which reportedly affects
one-fifth of all Iranian couples, against a world average of around 8%.
Why infertility is so widespread in Iran is unclear; it might be due to
the fact that the reported incidence of chlamydia, a bacterial STD that
causes infertility, is several times higher in Iran than in Western
countries. Former president Mahmud Ahmadinejad began campaigning for
earlier marriage and bigger families in 2009, but fertility has continued
to fall.
I argued nearly a decade ago (see Demographics
and Iran's imperial design, Asia Times Online, September 13, 2005)
that Iran's decision to acquire nuclear weapons is an entirely rational
response to its demographic decline: "Iran's motives for acquiring
nuclear power are not only economic but strategic. Like Hitler and
Stalin, Ahmadinejad looks to imperial expansion as a solution for
economic crisis at home. ... This may appear to be a desperate gamble,
but conditions call for desperate gambles. Ahmadinejad is not a
throwback, as I wrote with a dismissiveness that seems painful in
hindsight. He has taken the measure of his country's crisis, and
determined to meet it head-on. Washington, from what I can tell, has no
idea what sort of opponent it confronts."
Iran is rational, but not in the way Obama seems to believe. If you
need $100,000 for an operation that will save your life and have only
$10,000, it is rational to bet the whole stake at 10:1 odds. Iran must
break out or break down. That is why it will gamble on nuclear weapons
acquisition.
Total fertility rate for Russia, Ukraine, and Iran
Source: UN and CIA
Apart from some fine work by the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt,
though, the glaring facts of Iran's demographic predicament have escaped
notice by America's policymakers. Not so the demographics of Russia: the
prevailing view among Western analysts (and especially hawkish ones)
holds that Russia is a doomed nation. In December 2011, Professor
Eberstadt published an essay entitled "The Dying Bear: Russia's
Demographic Disaster" in Foreign
Affairs. Last year I reviewed on this site Ilan Berman's book Implosion,
which stated this widely held view as follows:
Russia
is dying. Russia is undergoing a catastrophic post-Soviet societal
decline due to abysmal health standards, runaway drug addiction, and an
AIDS crisis that officials have termed an "epidemic." The population
of the Russian Federation is declining by close to half a million souls
every year due to death and emigration. At this rate, the once-mighty
Russian state could lose a quarter of its population by the middle of
this century. And according to some projections, if Russia's demographic
trajectory does not change, its population could plummet to as little as
fifty-two million people by 2080. It's a phenomenon demographers have
described as "the emptying of Russia" - a wholesale implosion
of Russia's human capital and a collapse of its prospects as a viable
modern state. (See Reports
of Russia's death are exaggerated, Asia Times Online, October 15,
2013).
A specter is haunting Russia: the specter of depopulation. The cohort
of Russian women of child-bearing age is so depleted that even a recovery
of Russia's birth rate will not forestall severe problems. Nonetheless I
thought Berman's thesis one-sided and overstated. Russia's total
fertility rate has recovered from around 1.2 a decade ago to 1.7 last
year, and Russia's population increased slightly in 2013 for the first
time in almost two decades.
We do not know quite why this has occurred, but it seems that Putin's
aggressive efforts to promote fertility have had some effect - unlike in
Iran. Like Jonah's prophecy to Nineveh, the threat of extinction may have
motivated Russia to change course. And like Jonah, our modern prophets
rankle at the prospect that the ban of doom may have been lifted.
I suspect that Russia's revived nationalism has a great deal to do
with rising fertility. That includes the revival of the Orthodox Church,
which is consubstantial with the Russian state. Countries that lose their
faith and their identity also lose their motivation to bring new
generations into the world; that is how civilizations die, the title of
my 2011 book on demographics and geopolitics. Putin's nationalism is also
a rational response to an existential threat. The Germans might go gentle
into that good night, but Russia will fight for its identity and its
future existence.
Russian nationalism - historically an imperial
more than a national identity - always was a brutal business, and
especially nasty towards national minorities, as my ancestors from the
Pale of Jewish Settlement on the Western order of the Russian Empire knew
all too well.
A core goal of Putin's national revivalism is the reintegration of
Russians left stranded in the "near abroad" by the collapse of
the Soviet Union: Russia's imperial policy of salting its border states
with Russian settlers backfired when the evil Soviet empire collapsed.
From the Russian vantage point this is not a matter of scoring points but
an existential issue, a sine qua non of what it means to be
Russian, and exemplary of the motivation for Russians to want their
culture to continue.
Western pundits ridicule
Putin's claim that Russia is a bulwark against Western decadence. From a
Western standpoint, Putin's methods are repugnant. But they are the only
methods Russia has ever known. The problem is that Western Europe is
decadent. Most European countries are headed for demographic extinction.
Russia, which seemed passed the point of no return, is struggling to
retrace its steps.
Total Fertility Rate for Russia and Selected European Countries
Source: UN and CIA
That leaves the West with a conundrum concerning the Russian
intervention in Crimea and possibly elsewhere in Russian-majority areas
in Ukraine. Russia does not want to be like other European countries.
Hungary, Poland, and the Baltic States have the lowest fertility rates of
any nations in the West, ranging from just 0.82 children per female for
ethnic Magyars in Hungary (excluding the Roma) to about 1.2 for Poland.
That is where Russia was in 2000. Russia prefers the fecund past to the
bleak future of the Europeans. That is why the nations of Europe fought
the First World War 100 years ago: to avoid becoming what they are today.
They fought to sustain belief in their destiny as nations. As Col. Peters
said in the cited interview, "Putin believes in Russia's
destiny."
The re-assertion of Russian identity, meanwhile, is as brutal a
business as Russian self-assertion has been since the time of Peter the
Great. Putin's patriotism is not my patriotism. I don't particularly like
what Putin did in Crimea, but it was delusional to expect any other
course of action. Russia is short of Russians, and it cannot ignore the
22 million Russians left stranded in newly independent republics of the
former Soviet Union.
The Obama administration is staffed by the sort of utopian liberal internationalists
who attended conflict-resolution seminars at Ivy League colleges. Putin
seems a throwback, and that is just what he is: he is trying to revert to
Russian identity prior to the 1917 October Revolution, not without some
success. To compare him to Hitler is Billingsgate. The hawks seem upset
that Russia has not chosen to accept its decline with Stoic resignation.
It is easier to condemn Russian brutality than to suggest an alternative
path by which Russia would remain viable a century from now.
It was inevitable that Russia would intervene if Ukraine became
unstable. It is tragic in the full sense of the world, namely an outcome
to which the participants are driven by circumstances they cannot
control. Russia's interest in Ukraine, particularly in the
Russian-speaking eastern half of the country, is existential not
opportunistic.
As in Georgia, there was nothing the United States (let alone the
Europeans) could have done to hinder it, and nothing they can do to
reverse it. The tragedy will play itself out, and at the end of it - the
very end - there will be no Ukraine, because there will be no Ukrainians.
Whether Russia survives into the next century is an open question upon
which the crude conclusions of hawkish foreign policy analysts shed no light.
I do not know the answer, but I am sure that America will have to deal
with Russia as a strategic power for the indefinite future - a power of
second rank, perhaps, but not one to be trifled with in its back yard.
I am an American and a hawk who wants America to be the world's
dominant superpower. Whatever our errors, we are the only nation in the
world capable of altruism. We hawks had a mandate after September 11,
2011, such as no-one had in America since Pearl Harbor, and we misplayed
hand after hand until our chips are nearly gone. If we fail to understand
the underlying trends that drive events and the motivations of the main
actors, we will be out of the game entirely.
What should we have done in Ukraine? As I wrote on February
20, the West had the opportunity to promote a constitutional
referendum including the option of partition. If Russian speakers in
Crimea or the Donbas region preferred affiliation with Russia, so be it.
Ukraine's constitution was in ruins before the Russians moved in. The
odious Viktor Yanukovich beat the "Gas Princess" Yulia
Timoshenko in a reasonably fair election in 2010, and proceeded to abuse
his presidential powers. When the Maidan Square demonstrators chased him
out, Ukraine's parliament voted unanimously to dismiss him. The absence
of a single "nay" recalls Soviet-era majorities.
The West could have been midwife to a new national consensus - either
a single Ukraine reaffirmed by popular mandate, or a decent divorce on
the Czech-Slovak model, or perhaps a federal solution somewhere in
between. Instead, we encouraged a constitutional crisis in Ukraine. Now
we are stuck with the dubious Ms Timoshenko, one of the wealthiest
oligarchs to emerge from Ukraine's post-independence theft of national
assets, and an intransigent Russia in possession of Crimea.
David P. Goldman is Senior Fellow at the London Center for Policy
Research and Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
Related
Topics: Iran, Russia/Soviet Union,
US policy
| David P. Goldman
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