Obama Or His "Senior Aide" Just Don't Get It

On NBC's Evening News it was reported that a "senior aide" characterised the two hour one-on-one meeting between President Obama and Vladimir Putin as having been dominated by "a fifty minute soliloquy" on the part of Putin. The (conveniently) unnamed aide opined that this lecture on the history of US-Russian relations was a "sort of throwback to the Soviet era leaders."

With interpretations like that floating in the air of the White House it is no wonder that the President made the ill-advised and flatly wrong statement that Putin "had one foot in the Cold War past." Further, it is this sort of utter disregard for the power of history in Russian thinking that serves to gut the President's highly accurate view of Putin (per CBS interview) as being "very tough, very smart, and very unsentimental."

There can be no doubt about Putin's personal attributes of toughness, intelligence, and lack of sentimentality. A man did not rise to the top ranks of KGB by being weak, stupid, or laden with warm fuzziness. Nor can a person accomplish what Putin did in his one man show of pulling Russia out of the wreckage of the immediate post-Soviet years without immense reserves of emotional and intellectual strength, complete dedication to a goal and the way of achieving that goal, and an absence of ruth.

It deserves mentioning that Putin is a highly emotional man, indeed it is the power of his emotional commitment to the Russian nation and its future which has fueled both his post-Cold War career and his strong and pervasive connection with the Russian people. Equally important to understanding both Putin's successes to date and predicting his courses of action in the future is recognising that he, like many--even most--Russians has a potent sense of history and an intuitive appreciation of its constraining force.

Vladimir Putin, as well as many in the upper reaches of the Russian government and intelligence services, is aware that history is irrelevant to most Americans. He is attuned to the fact that Americans of Mr Obama's vintage, age, and background in academia and the law are particularly ignorant of the force of history as an inducement and constraint operating on future policies and actions. Putin probably suspects that the American president and many of his policy circle are not only ignorant of history and its inherent power but are out-and-out indifferent to the reality that the past conditions and informs the future.

With that as context, the lecture by "Professor" Putin was clearly intended to show the American just what the sources of Russian conduct in the critical issues facing both Russia and the United States actually are. Far from being some sort of "throwback" to the days of the Cold War and shoe-pounding Soviet leaders, the "soliloquy" was forward-looking and a sincere attempt to educate the American interlocutor in the facts of history-as-life.

It is ironic to say the least that the Russian Prime Minister has a better understanding of the brilliance of the containment policy developed sixty plus years ago by George Kennan than does the American president. The containment policy which ultimately was the single greatest contributor to the collapse of the Soviet Empire was the product of a profoundly insightful historical mind and imagination. Working from the continuities of Russian cultural, social, and political history, Kennan concluded that an emphasis upon the containment of the empire would assure that its internal inefficiencies would sap its strength while the never-ending garrison state mentality required would erode the faith in Marxism-Leninism held by leaders and followers alike.

The past was not simply prologue in Kennan's understanding. History had a power of inertia much greater than the physical force most associate with the word. By compelling the Kremlin and those who existed under its sway to continue to exist confined to the world defined by their own past and the expectations or fears that past had created, the future would see the crumbling of the empire.

And, so affairs developed over the next forty or so years. The end was, as they say, "history."

Academics and others equally, willfully disconnected from any sense of the past in the US saw the end of the Cold War as (to use the title of a monograph popular in the early Nineties) "The End of History." Russians were not so out-to-lunch. Russians saw history at work in the outcome of the Cold War. They looked at the years of the Soviet Union not as some sort of evil foreign body pressed upon the Russian soul but as a small part of an unending process. The process being that of the evolution and development of Russia and its people.

Putin sees the Soviet period and its ending as just part of the unfolding reality of the Russian nation. As a Russian nationalist he sees the Soviets, their successes and failures, as grist for the mill of the future. He sees the years of Communism including those of his earlier life as educational materials to be employed along with all the other lessons of history to provide the basis for a better Russia in the future.

In his lecture Putin might have been serving warning on the American president. Unlike academics and other "progressives" in the US and Western Europe, Putin and Russians generally place no trust whatsoever in either the good intentions of other nations or international institutions.

Russia's government is the sole judge of what Russia's national and strategic interests might be. Russia's government has the responsibility to pursue, protect, and enlarge those interests. Period.

Russia will pursue its interests in conjunction with other nations when doing so best serves Russian needs. It will use or cooperate with international institutions when doing such is the most effective way to protect or achieve national interest. Period.

Vladimir Putin does not accept the common (among the rarefied atmosphere of academia and "progressive" circles) that the nation-state is not only obsolete but also a blight upon the common human future. Putin is not alone in this perspective.

The primacy of the nation-state as well as the power of the past on the future are features of a world-view which is common throughout the world. The Men of the Forbidden City see matters that way. So does Dear Leader. It is the way life is seen in Israel. Ditto for most of the countries in the world.

Only in portions of the Western European and American elites is the nation-state eschewed. Only within the American elite (OK, and in the hoi polloi as well) is the power of the past ignored.

Putin's history lesson is not surprising. It was needed. How much it was needed is seen in the "senior aide's" response. For the future of US-Russian relations and the impact of these on the affairs of the world generally it is hoped that President Obama listened up and listened tight.