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Statesmanship for Dummies

May 12, 2006 03:14 PM

Anatole Lieven finds that Vladimir Putin in Dick Cheney are similar in so many ways. And isn't it obvious? One's busily turning Russia back into a dictatorship, where political opponents are jailed, the media are kept on a short leash and international groups are presumed agents of foreign powers if they press Russia on human rights and democracy -- and the other guy is Vice President of the United States. So the similarities are readily apparent. But wait:

But to judge by their records, and especially their speeches of the past week, there is also an important difference between them. Putin is a statesman, and Cheney is not.

Uh, how's that?

Cheney's tub-thumping speech in Vilnius, Lithuania, attacking Russia for lack of democracy and energy "blackmail," coupled with his attempts to create an energy alliance against Russia, invited a blistering response from the Russian president. With perfect fairness, and with the approval - in this case - of most of humanity, Putin could have torn Cheney's speech apart on a whole range of issues.

Among that segment of humanity that wouldn't tear apart the speech: Cheney's audience of leaders from the former Soviet republics, to whom the speech was directed. I guess they consider Putin's statesmanship to be overrated.

These include the hypocrisy of denouncing Russia over democracy and going straight on to lavish praise on the oil- rich dictators of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan; the general weirdness of Cheney talking about human rights at all; the insolence of an administration with the Bush-Cheney team's record in the Middle East daring to demand automatic Russian support against Iran in the name of "the international community," and so on.

Of course we all giggle when Cheney mentions human rights. It's so weird. But someone will have to clue me in on what "record in the Middle East" precludes the Bush administration from worrying about Iranian nukes and the help provided to the program by Russia.

And of course we're hypocrites. We have nukes and we don't want Iran to have them. Putin might just as well have pointed that out, too.

If Putin had issued such a response in his state of the union address on Wednesday, he would have had the approval of the overwhelming majority of Russians - while of course doing still further damage to U.S.-Russian relations.

It is hard to imagine a U.S. president turning down a domestic political opportunity like this, whatever the likely effect on his country's interests. But apart from a couple of mild and indirect comments, Putin said none of these things. Instead, he focused on the issue that is indeed the greatest threat to the Russian nation, namely demographic decline.

Oh please. Putin left the demagoguery to the Kremlin-controlled media. Dictatorship has those kinds of advantages.

Putin's calm response to Cheney may be rooted partly in a new confidence in Russia's strength, especially when it comes to influence within the former Soviet Union. One of the marks of Putin's statesmanship is that with some exceptions (mainly with regard to Ukraine, about which Russians tend to be irrational) he has displayed an accurate feel for Russia's real strengths and weaknesses.

Yeah, that Ukraine thing was a doozy. But of course we all remember Bush campaigning for a favored candidate in Mexico, poisoning his opponent with Dioxin and shutting off the country's access to a critical natural resource when he didn't get his way. Statesmen behave that way sometimes.

To give one example, Putin last year withdrew the remaining Russian military bases from Georgia proper, where they were provocative and vulnerable, while continuing the Russian military presence in the breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, where it enjoys overwhelming local support.

Gosh. If getting kicked out of Georgia gives Putin such confidence, imagine how great he'll feel when Georgia and Ukraine abandon the Commonwealth of Independent States and join NATO....

Russia | Ukraine

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A middle-aged Ukrainian woman told me last night about her experiences as a member of the Komsomol, the Communist Youth organization during the Soviet era. On Christmas and Easter, she and other members of the group were ordered to the local churches, where they were instructed to form two concentric rings around the buildings by locking arms. These rings were intended as a defense perimeter that would keep people from going to church on religious occasions. This peculiar Soviet abhorrence of religion is one reason that in Ukraine gifts are not exchanged on Christmas, but rather (last night) on New Year's Eve. In 2007, let's all of us, and especially us Americans, make a little more effort to keep in perspective our astonishing good fortune, and be grateful for what some sacrifice to preserve it. America may not be perfect, but it's the closest thing we've got.

January 1, 2007 06:51 AM ·