‘Apologists for Putin’

In brief during his appearance on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS program on CNN a week ago, and at greater length in an interview with Newsweek magazine published on 14 March,  Professor Emeritus of NYU and Princeton Stephen Cohen responded directly to recent attacks from commentators on Russian and Ukrainian affairs who denounce him as an ‘apologist for Putin.’

Cohen tells the name-callers that he is the only American patriot among them, since he identified Putin as ‘the best potential partner we had anywhere in the world to pursue our national security’ whereas the Russophobe policies of his critics have made an active opponent of this potential friend and so have greatly complicated management of global security issues.

Cohen also very gently raps his detractors across the knuckles for using name-calling to avoid engaging him in direct debate over facts and issues. 

Given what I have said in my book Stepping Out of Line and in my essays published on the US-Russia.org website over the past year, some might think the label "apologist for Putin'' is at least as applicable to me as it is to Professor Cohen.  And while I share with him the defense of being a true patriot where others are false patriots, I have a different case to make for my partiality to Mr. Putin, who is, and I have no sense of embarrassment in saying this, the hero of our times not just for Russia but for world governance.

His being a hero does not mean I would like to have him as a neighbor or that I take an interest in his personal affairs.  He is my hero because he is the only statesman on the world stage who stands up to American hegemony.  The Chinese remain rather circumspect except when something very, very close to their security interests arises, like American presidents receiving the Dalai Lama or the Americans rallying to the Japanese side on the issue of those South China Sea islands. Western Europe is all giving the US the finger in their pockets while lining up like so many ducks on the issues of the day like sanctions over Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

So, what relevance does Putin's standing up to American hegemony have to my claims of being a true patriot?  It goes back to the principle of power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely. The post-Cold War triumphalism in America brought in the false notion that the country could finally set about arranging what it saw as global public goods without any concessions to the opinions and interests of other nations. A bipolar world, a musclebound world of two superpowers, one representing the beacon of freedom on the hill and the other, the Evil Empire, to put it concisely in Ronald Reagan’s comic book bullet points, had yielded to a Golden Age of rule by the just.

However, it did not take long for the Just to exercise their military force in ways that were an abomination and in direct contradiction to the stated values of protecting human rights, spreading democracy and the like. The unilateral use of force outside the framework of the United Nations beginning under Clinton, continuing under Bush in his Iraq invasion and extending to Obama and American assistance to regime change and murder of Gaddafi in Libya under the guise of imposing a no-flight zone demonstrated to anyone with a sense of fairness and humane values that only dualism keeps goodness from degenerating into evil. Here is the true sense of Vladimir Putin’s widely cited and almost universally misconstrued statement that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the great catastrophe of the 20th century.

In consequence, over the past 20 years American elites have become deeply corrupt, a corruption of the soul, of the mind. I won't attempt to characterize the guy or gal in the street, who may or may not be ‘the salt of the earth’ as the American folk culture believes, since the street is not very interested in world affairs.

My second reason for joining the brawl is to expand upon what is wrong with the counter-party’s methodology of argumentation. In a word, it is anti-intellectual, or know-nothing in the literal sense. Name calling, i.e. ad hominem arguments, are just one of a whole series of violations of the ancient art of public debate that America’s War Party practices daily. They are contemptuous of the subject (Putin and Russia) and so also contemptuous of their audience. They do not engage the arguments we put up; they ignore them, speak past them, or pigeonhole them into categories generally considered to be covered with opprobrium such as ‘Cold War thinking.’

In my writings, I have systematically analyzed the works of some of the most eminent American experts on Russia, demonstrating how they are complacent, coddled by never being subjected to direct debate with others of differing views.  Lacking in rigor, their argumentation falls like a deck of cards under objective scrutiny.

The bipartisan War Party of Neocons and Progressive Internationalists is operating under a propaganda cloud that even its directors cannot see through and is stumbling towards the Armageddon that far wiser men than today’s presidential advisers avoided precisely by taking their opponents seriously and measuring risks with dispassionate precision.

During the Cold War, Soviet military capability, in particular its missile arsenal, tended to be exaggerated by our expert community for the sake of getting military appropriations through Congress. Today our elites speak disparagingly of Russian military force as passé, inapplicable to present operational objectives. Both extremes in interpretation were/are wrong, but the second is vastly more dangerous as it removes the element of respect that is vital if wars are to be prevented.