Nostalgia is fine, but some decades should be forgotten. Old folks know this. The sixties, for example, were epic, but the seventies brought us Disco and polyester leisure suits and young women with feathered Farrah Fawcett hair out to forever, and most of the idealistic hippies from the previous decade became accountants or dentists and settled in the suburbs, with the wife and kids and the twenty-foot-long wallowing station wagon – and there was Nixon too. Fiction also took a hit. In that decade the big thing was magic realism – Gabriel García Márquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude started it all.
This was new. This wasn’t the all-out surrealism of Salvador Dalí with giant melting clocks draped over everything as far as the eye could see. This was mundane ordinary life, carefully depicted, with its quite human triumphs and tragedies, but when the scruffy gypsies arrive in town some of them have flying carpets that actually fly. People who have been dead for years just show up. They just do, without explanation, and when one of the characters is shot his blood trickles all the way across town to his mother. Márquez was famous for such things, like his story where a girl with green hair simply floats away into the clouds, because she is so pure.
Such things are startling, and usually evocative and moving, but too much of that sort of thing is dangerous. One comes to expect magic, or hope for it. Magic realism put that in the air for us all, or in the water. And those vague fears in the late sixties, that someone was going to dump massive amounts of LSD in the city reservoir, were nonsense, but a handful of Latin American writers did pretty much the same thing. But there was no magic in the air. Nixon didn’t float away into the clouds – he resigned in disgrace. We didn’t win anything at all in Vietnam – we simply left. Three Mile Island melted down. The Iranian Revolution in 1979 transformed Iran from a pro-Western monarchy under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi – the guy we installed in 1953 – into a theocratic Islamist state led by the difficult and erratic Ayatollah Khomeini, and then his government grabbed sixty-six western diplomats, mostly ours, and held them hostage for more than a year. Where was the magic? Jimmy Carter’s hostage-rescue operation was a disaster – our helicopters failed in the desert dust and just sat there, in the middle of nowhere. We needed a few magic carpets just about then. There were no magic carpets.
That’s okay. We decided to elect that master of political magic realism, Ronald Reagan. He told us about that Shining City on the Hill, which he assured us was real, and we decided it was. No one knew quite what that city actually might be, but magic is like that. And he also told us it was always Morning in America. That was an odd metaphor. Maybe the earth didn’t rotate any longer? That could happen in a Gabriel García Márquez novel. And there was his Star Wars missile-defense system, which everyone knew was never going to work. But it might work, if odd magical things can happen in everyday life. We spent hundreds of billions of dollars on that, coming up with nothing that ever intercepted anything at all in even the simplest tests, but there was the unanticipated magic – we forced the Soviets to spend hundreds of billions to thwart what we might come up with, and they didn’t have that kind of cash lying around. The Soviet Union collapsed and the long Cold War was over, because they couldn’t match our foolish spending with foolish spending of their own. Yeah, this wasn’t magic, but it worked. That would do.
There was no magic, and magic realism itself was just a clever literary device, once all the rage but now quite quaint. Life isn’t like that. Magic realism was just another way of expressing longing, for how things ought to be, that crept into our way of thinking for a time. It was wistful thinking, ingeniously repackaged for the times. It met a need. We all want some sort of magic.
We’re not going to get it, not now, not with the current Crimean crisis. In Slate, Anne Applebaum has decided to expose the current magic thinking about what Vladimir Putin is up to:
There have been high moments: Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, locked in a bear hug; George W. Bush looking into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and seeing “a sense of his soul”; Hillary Clinton pressing the “reset button.” There have been some very low moments, too. But for more than 20 years of Russian independence, a single narrative about Russia in the West has nevertheless prevailed.
Openly or subconsciously, Western leaders have since 1991 acted on the assumption that Russia is a flawed Western country. Perhaps during the Soviet years it had become different, even deformed. But sooner or later, the land of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the home of classical ballet, would join what Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, so movingly called “our common European home.”
Applebaum thinks this is as nutty as, say, a girl with green hair simply floating away into the clouds because she is so pure:
In the 1990s, many people thought Russian progress toward that home simply required new policies: With the right economic reforms, Russians will sooner or later become like us. Others though that if Russia joined the Council of Europe, and if we turned the G-7 into the G-8, then sooner or later Russia would absorb Western values. Such privileges were never even extended to China, which is a far greater economic and political power. This is because we’ve never believed that China would be “Western.” But deep down, we believed that Russia would someday join our club.
Still others thought that Russia’s forward progress required a certain kind of Western language, a better dialogue. When the relationship deteriorated, President Bush blamed President Clinton. President Obama blamed President Bush. And all of us blamed ourselves. Back in 1999, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story titled “Who Lost Russia?” Much-discussed at the time, it argued that we’d lost Russia “because we pursued agendas that were hopelessly wrong for Russia” and gave bad economic advice. Last week, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock, echoed Putin and argued that the United States, by “treating Russia like a loser,” is responsible for the current crisis.
Yeah, treat them as our equals, because, deep down, they’re just like us – and that’ll make them just like us. Isn’t it pretty to think so? Why, it’s just like magic, except it isn’t:
These arguments are self-serving: Russian politics has never been “all about us.” In truth, we’ve had very little influence on Russian internal politics since 1991, even when we’ve understood them. The most important changes – the massive transfer of oil and gas from the state to the oligarchs, the return to power of men formed by the KGB, the elimination of free press and political opposition – took place against our advice. The most important military decisions – the invasions of Chechnya and Georgia – met with our protests. Though many appear to believe otherwise, the invasion of Crimea was not primarily intended to provoke the West either. As one astute Russian commentator has noted, the most important lines in Putin’s annexation speech this week were largely overlooked: his reference to the “fifth columnists” and the Western-funded Russian “traitors” who will now have to be silenced. Putin invaded Crimea because Putin needs a war. In a time of slower growth, and with a more restive middle class, he may need some more wars, too. This time, it’s really not about us.
If so, that ruins a lot of magical thinking:
For the first time, many are beginning to understand that the narrative is wrong: Russia is not a flawed Western power. Russia is an anti-Western power with a different, darker vision of global politics. The sanctions lists published in Europe this week were laughably short, but the fact that they appeared at all reflects this sea change. For twenty years, nobody has thought about how to “contain” Russia. Now they will.
Applebaum has some suggests for how to do that:
We need to reimagine NATO, to move its forces from Germany to the alliance’s eastern borders. We need to re-examine the presence of Russian money in international financial markets, given that so much “private” Russian money is in fact controlled by the state. We need to look again at our tax shelters and money-laundering laws, given that Russia uses corruption as a tool of foreign policy. Above all we need to examine the West’s energy strategy, given that Russia’s oil and gas assets are also used to manipulate European politics and politicians, and find ways to reduce our dependence.
In short, we have to give up on the “magic” Russia we imagined, and deal with the real one. They’re the bad guys. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky aren’t the issue. They wrote novels. They’re about as useful as Gabriel García Márquez. Russia is an anti-Western power, with an anti-Western agenda, and Russia doesn’t play nice. There are no gypsies on magic carpets either. Deal with it.
That seems to be what we’re finally doing:
President Obama expanded sanctions against Russia on Thursday, blacklisting a bank and several wealthy businessmen with close ties to President Vladimir V. Putin, as the United States struggled to forestall further Russian incursions into Ukraine.
Among those targeted were Sergei B. Ivanov, the president’s chief of staff; Gennady N. Timchenko, a billionaire investor with links to Mr. Putin; and Yuri V. Kovalchuk, whom the administration described as the personal banker for Russian leaders, including the president.
Mr. Obama also opened the door to more sweeping measures against core parts of the Russian economy, including the oil and natural gas industries, which account for much of Russia’s exports. He said the actions could disrupt the global economy, but might be necessary because of what he described as menacing movements by the Russian military near eastern and southern Ukraine.
This is more than symbolic this time:
The latest round of sanctions is surgical, experts said: designed to hit the wallets of individuals with close ties to Mr. Putin, rather than to damage the broader Russian economy.
“The dollar figure is not big,” said Anders Aslund, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “But these people are really close to Putin.”
It was time to get nasty in our own way:
New to the list were four men who have amassed vast empires through their ties to the government. In addition to Mr. Timchenko and Mr. Kovalchuk, they are Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, billionaire brothers who were awarded an estimated $7 billion in contracts for the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi.
The Treasury also designated Bank Rossiya, the 17th-largest Russian bank, of which Mr. Kovalchuk is the largest shareholder. A senior official said that would pinch Mr. Putin and his friends because Rossiya would no longer be able to conduct transactions in dollars and would find its assets frozen in correspondent accounts in European banks.
This may not sound like much to those like John McCain, now calling for sending lots of heavy arms, and the matching trainers and advisers to the Ukraine, presumably just like we did in 1964 in Vietnam, before we sent in half a million troops, but the odd thing is this economic stuff might work:
A senior Treasury official said there were already signs that the sanctions were having an impact. On Thursday, Standard & Poor’s, the ratings agency, downgraded its outlook on the Russian economy to negative. And jitters over Crimea have weakened the Russian stock market and the value of the ruble.
One of Mr. Timchenko’s companies, Gunvor Group, a commodities trader, also announced that he had sold his substantial stake in the company on Wednesday to the chief executive, Torbjorn Tornqvist, a Swede, “to ensure with certainty the continued and uninterrupted operations.” Mr. Timchenko and Mr. Tornqvist founded Gunvor in 2000.
We’re doing to Russia what Reagan did to the old Soviet Union, even if Reagan said he was doing something else – we slowly destroying their economy. It’s not magic. That was always our lever.
Miriam Elder says it’s about time Obama did something like this:
The first round of sanctions announced by Obama on Monday was symbolic but ultimately toothless, targeting people with big mystiques but little power in today’s Kremlin … These sanctions are different. They hit as close to Putin without targeting the man himself. There are a couple notable absences from the list – Alexei Miller, the CEO of Gazprom, and, more importantly, Igor Sechin, the CEO of the state oil company Rosneft and one of Putin’s hardline advisors. But by reaching to his favorite oligarchs, the U.S. has hit Putin where it hurts. There’s a reason most outside Russia have never heard of these people – in Russia those with the real power stay in the shadows.
Keven Drum, however, is expecting the usual – “We’ll quickly get a pro forma response about how weak and vacillating this is from Bill Kristol, John McCain, and Charles Krauthammer.”
Of course we will, but just before this new sanctions announcement, Fred Kaplan offered this:
What’s going on now is not Cold War II.
The Cold War split the entire world in two factions. Scads of civil wars, regional wars, and wars of national liberation were, in some sense, “proxy wars” in the titanic struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. China was used as a lever for playing one side off the other – and China played off both. Nothing like that is going on now. Nothing like it could possibly go on now. Neither side has the leverage to do it. Russia has no global reach whatsoever. Russia has no support for its actions in Ukraine; China has evinced no interest in it.
Right now, then, this is at most a regional conflict, not a global one, and the best thing that Obama can do – in both his threats and his inducements – is to keep it that way. Certain Republicans on Capitol Hill could help. Senators like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who used to know better, could lay off their absurd yelping about Obama’s “weakness” and “feckless leadership.” For one thing, it’s not true; at least when it comes to this crisis, they’ve recommended very few steps that Obama hasn’t already taken. If they’re really worried about Putin’s perceptions of America, instead of merely clamoring to make political points with GOP extremists, they should stand by the president and make sure Putin understands that, on this issue, there are no domestic fissures for him to exploit.
Max Fisher put it nicely:
Today Obama became 10,000 times more hawkish on Russia than Bush ever was. Right or wrong, that’s a very big deal and worth acknowledging…
Fine, but will it work? In the Washington Post, Timothy Frye wonders about that:
One big question is whether the anticipation of a slowing economy and lower personal popularity in the future will make Russia more likely to repeat a Crimean scenario in Eastern Ukraine, Transdniestr, Kazakhstan or the Baltics as a way to divert attention from deeper problems or whether these negative trends would moderate Russian foreign policy. Empirical support for the diversionary theory of war is mixed at best, but this is a question that bears watching. It also bears remembering that while attention is focused on President Putin’s skyrocketing approval ratings and his triumphant speech in Moscow, events in Crimea will likely divert Russia from addressing its most important problems.
The diversionary theory of war is, of course, the wag-the-dog theory of war – like in the movie where we decide to conquer Albania because the president has been dicking around and the Albanian crisis will assure that no one thinks about sex, or in Putin’s case this theory:
Earlier this month, NPR’s Shankar Vedantam floated the idea that something called “prospect theory” could explain Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Crimea. A behavioral economic model developed in the late 1970′s, the theory states that people are more cautious when they have the upper hand and riskier when they don’t. If this indeed explains Putin’s actions, it would mean he perceives Russia as losing power in the world, and is willing to take risks – like annexing Crimea, and perhaps even more of Ukraine – to recover what his nation once lost.
That might be it, but either way, Daniel Berman argues here that Estonia had better watch out:
Putin needs three things in a target at this point. First it needs to be of less strategic value than the Crimea so that the arguments, for fighting for it, are even less. Second it needs to be politically vital, preferably as part of both NATO and the EU so that if the West chooses not to fight for it, both organizations will be shattered. Thirdly, Russia’s moral case must be so impeccable that in the game of political chess that will precede the Western defeat, Russia at all times maintains at least a moral deadlock if not a moral ascendancy. In effect, he needs an Eastern European Verdun.
Estonia meets all of these criteria. It is poor and geographically isolated. Furthermore, more than a third of its population is Russian, a legacy of Soviet rule, and that minority, unlike that in the Crimea, has legitimate cause for complaint. …
Estonia is also a member of both the EU and NATO. If Russia is able to stir up chaos in the form of riots and unrest within a member of both organizations it will discredit them totally. It makes no sense for Europe to risk destruction to defend Estonia, less than it did over the Ukraine, but the EU and NATO are based on the lie that an attack on one is an attack on all.
Putin’s goal is to exploit this as a lie; Estonia is Verdun, a strategically worthless target that political factors forced the French army to defend to the death. In this case, it’s Putin’s goal to draw NATO and the EU into a battle not of armies, but of political capital, and to destroy that capital in the open fields of the Baltic shore.
No magic will fix that, and no magical thinking is useful either. Our best bet is to make sure Putin doesn’t have the cash on hand to mount an Estonian campaign, creating another Verdun or whatever. Leave magical realism to the novelists – but even they abandoned that long ago. It never did make any sense.