Cold War Redux

Many years ago I read a book wherein a Western diplomat retold the story of when he asked a Chinese diplomat in the 1970s if he thought the French Revolution had been a good thing or not. "It's too early to tell," the Chinese diplomat said, with obvious respect for the long view of history. I can't remember the name of the book or the names of either diplomat, but that's par for the course for me - I remember the footnote but not the title of the book.

I bring this up mainly because John McCain is starting to frighten me. A lot. I never intended to vote him, but I always reassured myself by saying "Well, even if in the worst case he does become President, at least he isn't a lunatic." Now I'm not so sure.

Lately McCain has bestirred himself to threaten to kick the Russians out of the G8 and, presumably, snub them something awful at other international conventions. This to punish them for the erosion in Russian democracy, or so he says. I think he was just more comfortable in the glory days of the Cold War and wants to go back to that paradigm, when wars like Vietnam and Korea could be understood in the context of the superpowers and were thus a lot easier to understand than dreadful muddles like Iraq.

But don't we have enough trouble on our plate - several economic crises all at the same time, Iraq, Aghanistan, the energy crisis, ballooning government debt - without provoking an arms race with the Russians that will be just as pointless as the old one but many times more expensive? McCain's apparent desire to return to the days of the Cold War scare me silly. I'm no fool and I know the Russians aren't our friends - but they aren't our enemies either. And let's keep them that way.

So what does this have to do with Chinese diplomats and the French Revolution? We have to remember that democracy in Russia is really in its infancy. Despite sops to democracy like the Czar's Duma and the CPSU's Supreme Soviet, Russia was an authoritarian or even totalitarian state since basically day one. It wasn't until the fall of the USSR in the 1990s that the Russians had even the most cursory experience with democracy, and it shouldn't surprise anyone when they sometimes get it wrong.

Should Putin be rewarded for steering Russia back toward a much more authoritarian form of government? Of course not. But neither should the Russians as a whole be punished for political mistakes, and history has shown (or shown me, anyway) that a common political mistake made in formerly fascist countries is an unhealthy flirtation with neo-fascism. Like McCain longing for the cold war, the "patriots" in countries like Russia today or Germany in the 1920s yearn for earlier and better days when there was a kaiser, or a czar, or a Stalin, or what-have-you. In a hundred years or so we'll be able to say with some confidence if the Russian experiment with democracy has gone well or not, but now, less than two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union? Pfft. Still far too early to tell.

The Russians have to find their own way, and the paranoid finger-waving of people like McCain doesn't help. But the scary thing about McCain is that he might be elected! If so, I guess that means war with Iran, no attention paid to Afghanistan, a new Cold War with the Russians, and God knows what other foreign policy atrocities...

My eyebrow is starting to twitch again.