Back to the USSR: A Call for Glasnost and Perestroika as We Re-think U.S. Foreign Policy

This year, nine U.S. cities, including Boston, Chicago, Denver, Houston, New York, Orlando, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington hosted the "Immortal Regiment” marches that commemorates those who fought against Nazi Germany during World War II. During the marches, people carry photographs of their ancestors who participated in the war.

By Edward Lozansky and Gilbert Doctorow - Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Establishment Democrats and Republicans have widely decried the 2016 presidential campaign for going off script. Indeed, both Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side in his speeches on domestic policy and Donald Trump on the Republican side on foreign policy have blown huge holes in long-standing American-as-Apple-Pie thinking about national priorities and our matching policies.

They won so much attention with their statements precisely because the traditional wisdom they have questioned was untouchable for over two decades. In effect, on matters of great concern to the citizenry, such whether Main Street or Wall Street decides economic policy or whether the United States should be the world’s only policeman and intervene in every regional conflict, there was no difference of opinion among our leading politicians till Donald Trump entered the race. His dissenting voice, if raised by a less forceful and less successful candidate, would have been dismissed as unpatriotic heresy.

In what follows, we will direct attention to foreign policy, because the impending failure there and our going off the cliff into World War III has to be the country’s first concern. Come a nuclear war, which, sadly, is more likely now than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and all thoughts about the minimum federal wage, the sustainability of social security and transgender use of toilets will go out the window.

The clamp-down on our free speech about foreign policy began imperceptibly in the name of bipartisanship in the second term of Bill Clinton when a hybrid Neocon/Neoliberal Interventionist ideology fully replaced pragmatism and common sense at the State Department under Madeleine Albright and rippled out further to the Pentagon and Presidential Administration.

In this new environment emanating from the main source of funding and other incentives, our university centers and think tanks followed the gravitation lines and aligned with Washington. Our mass media snapped to attention. Newspapers of record like New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal became unquestioning purveyors of the latest press handouts from the State Department.

The irony is that these and other main stream media or MSM sources have picked up the old Soviet style and use the tone and expressions closely resembling the "Pravda” vocabulary which used the most vicious anti-American propaganda. The language used by Soviet journalists and commentators was so rude and hysterical that even people sympathetic to communist causes were turned off. For those who have any nostalgia for Soviet agitprop, welcome to western MSM.

Following President Putin’s famous speech rejecting Washington’s New World Order at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, the United States unleashed an Information War that has not let up ever since. From the Oval Office on down, we demonize the President of the Russian Federation even as we use this one person as a shorthand notation for an entire nation. Step by step, American mass media have been closed to those who think otherwise.

We are now in a situation similar to what Mikhail Gorbachev encountered in the mid-1980s when he tried to move beyond the official ideology of Soviet society and enter upon reform. He issued a call for Glasnost and Perestroika, meaning transparency and open discussion of issues that had been taboo.

The words entered the English language back then but we had the mistaken belief that they were a curiosity, that they pertained to specifically Soviet conditions. Now we know better: the United States badly needs a dose of the same if we are to face domestic and international challenges that our ideology in place has proven incapable of mastering.

It is good that Donald Trump raised questions about NATO relevance for U.S. security, our overseas interventions, failed nation building efforts, and other foreign policy issues on the campaign trail but they are too important to be left to this one candidate, to his speechwriters and his small coterie of advisers.

It is high time for our major electronic media including Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, Bloomberg to open their air waves to full-blooded debate between authoritative representatives from all sides in the American professional community, to bring back into circulation those experts they have blackballed so foolishly and to solicit contributions from a new generation of critics of the status quo from the standpoint of efficacy, not ideological purity. The same injunction applies to the mainstream print media: open your op-ed pages to real debate, not merely to those who toe the Administration line, as is the case today. Let us not be afraid, let the chips fall where they may. This is the only way we can prepare whomever wins the election in November to take us out of the present cul-de-sac.

Edward Lozansky is president of the American University in Moscow, Professor of Moscow Sate and National Research Nuclear Universities

Gilbert Doctorow is the European Coordinator of the American Committee for East West Accord, Ltd. Gilbert Doctorow is a Research Fellow of the American University in Moscow

The Washington Times