Vladimir Putin’s Posturing <br>Evokes a New Gratitude <br>To Veterans of the Great War

The robust words of Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, to Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Australia were welcome, appropriate, and should be supported by all Canadians. They complemented the similarly forthright position taken by the G20 summit host, Australia’s prime minister, Tony Abbott. Unfortunately, Russia has never in its history paid the slightest attention to any cautionary note from anyone except someone sufficiently strong, militarily or economically, to deter it.The czars and the communist leaders who followed them paid some attention to the strongest German, French, British, and Turkish leaders. In current memory, the Kremlin listened rather impatiently to Mao Tse-tung and Deng Xiaoping, and to almost all American presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton.When our prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King wrote to Stalin, professing continuation of the war-time alliance despite startling evidence of vast Soviet espionage unearthed in the Gouzenko Affair in Ottawa in 1945, he received no reply. (King considered Gouzenko “a manly patriot” who had been won over from communism “by Canadian democracy,” not unreasonable assessments.) Louis St. Laurent and Lester Pearson, men of proven diplomatic aptitudes, never got a rise from Stalin, who by the late Forties was like a reclusive crocodile straddling Europe and Asia, or from his successor, Nikita S. Khrushchev.Neither did John Diefenbaker when he angrily reproached Khrushchev at the United Nations for the illegal Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. Pierre Trudeau was no more successful with Khrushchev’s successor Leonid I. Brezhnev on several bilateral issues, although he claimed to believe (wrongly) that Churchill and Roosevelt had ceded Eastern Europe to Stalin at the Tehran and Yalta conferences.Trudeau also facilitated Cuban intervention in the Angolan Civil War as Soviet mercenaries by giving them transit landing rights in Newfoundland, and he publicly referred to heroic Soviet human rights activists Andrei Sakharov and Anatoly Sharansky as “hooligans.”Russia became a great power under Peter the Great, (czar from 1689-1725) when he consolidated Russia’s hold on Ukraine, pushed the Turks southwards, expanded across Asia and founded St. Petersburg as “a window on the West;” beginning the struggle that continues to this day between the Western emulators and the nativists. The latter faction are the reactionary upholders of Holy Mother Russia’s isolationist exceptionalism, much romanticized in Russian literature and familiar to any reader of Tolstoy or Solzhenitsyn. This current of opinion and psychology has been largely hijacked by Putin.Since the apotheosis of the brilliant American strategy of containment of the Soviet Union and of international communism, pursued assiduously by 10 American presidents (five of each party), with the abandonment of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union, after the brief, bibulous, near-anarchy of Western emulator Boris Yeltsin, Putin has been playing to great Russian nationalism by mischief-making in almost every corner of the world. Mr. Putin has perversely assisted Iran in attaining a nuclear military capacity, and has aided other terrorism-promoting states, especially Syria, although Russia has itself been a victim of Islamist extremism, even in Moscow itself.Mr. Putin has played a seminal role in promoting the present impasse in the Middle East, as Stephen Harper has rightly denounced. The beleaguered and blood-stained Syrian leader Bashir Assad is the puppet of the Iranians and the Russians, but is mortally opposed by the Turks, Saudis, and Egyptians.Those powers are supporting both the moderate reformers and the Islamist opponents of the secularist Assad, but also oppose the Islamic State in Iraq and Al-Sham ultra-extremists, who are at (professedly holy) war with everyone. Islamic State arose from the wreckage of (to take an expression from Balkan politics of a century ago) “the ungrateful volcano” of post-American Iraq. Syria has become the chief recruiting ground for the ISIS and Turkey will not assist in the repulse of ISIS unless the United States resumes its former determination to be rid of Assad.Readers will recall prolonged official American waffling on that subject, from Hillary Clinton’s infamous description of Assad as “a reformer,” to Barack Obama’s complacent decree that Assad “must go,” to his imposition of the violated “red line” when Assad poison-gassed his own citizens, to his abdication to the Congress of the president’s right as commander-in-chief to enforce the red line by military retaliation, to fumbling the matter in anticipation of defeat in the Congress to the ubiquitous Slavonic sorcerer Putin.While this fiasco has been wrought by former president Jimmy Carter’s complicity in the eviction of the pro-American government of the Shah of Iran and by Europe’s haughty straight-arming of the pro-Western Kemalist leadership of Turkey for decades, Russia has been the chief recent troublemaker. The absurdity of the present affray is highlighted by the fact that after 35 years of U.S. demonizing of the loopy theocrats in Tehran, and after all the threats of “crippling sanctions” and air attack being an “option on the table,” Iran is now a quasi-ally of the U.S. against ISIS.This may well mean American toleration of Iran becoming a “threshold” nuclear power, and that may entrain an Israeli air strike on Iran’s nuclear program, with whole-hearted Turkish and Arab approval. There remains a chance that Saudi Arabia’s reduction of the oil price could cause the Iranians to come to their arithmetical senses and stall their nuclear program, but unintended consequences have fallen like confetti, from the latest problems with the Keystone XL pipeline because of pricing scenarios, to Putin’s comparative restraint in Ukraine, neither of which was of the least interest to the petro-nomads of the House of Saud. The disintegration of Iraq has already virtually created an independent Kurdistan, which is agitating Turkey’s 20 million Kurds.The Euro-fantasy of influencing the Middle East is over, and the ineffectuality or failure of American efforts in the region, since the first Gulf War — which at least ejected Saddam from Kuwait, had an exit strategy, and ended quickly and without heavy casualties — and the almost mindless cynicism of Mr. Putin, may leave it to the countries and factions, sects and tribes in situ to sort it out, even if it is a sun-drenched version of the Thirty Years War.Bismarck warned against the great powers becoming involved in the quarrels of the Balkan “sheep-stealers;” he was ignored and the hecatomb of The First World War followed. The same advice applies to the Middle East now. The U.S. should leave completely, apart from advancing its allies full anti-missile defenses, which it partially withheld in Eastern Europe as part of the fatuous “reset” of relations with Russia, and not come back until it has rediscovered its “containment” era genius for foreign and strategic policy.A positive thought: It emerges from the newly produced research on the origins of the First World War a century ago that the British, French, Germans, and Austro-Hungarians were all convinced in 1914 that Russia was the rising power in Europe and Asia and was putting up such economic growth rates and technological advances that it was thought to be rivaled only by the United States as the land of the future. That is why several of those countries thought a war might not be a bad idea, before the Russians became impossible to contain.So it may not be entirely true that, horrible though it was, the First World War had no purpose, and that the communist victory in Russia was one of its most baleful consequences. The triumph of the Bolsheviks may have spared the West a greater, if somewhat less barbarous Russian challenge. Communism liquidated 20 million Soviet civilians, enabled the Second World War with the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and then took over 90% of the casualties in subduing Nazi Germany, while Germany, France, Italy and Japan became prosperous democratic allies of the English-speaking countries. And then the U.S.S.R. fragmented, almost bloodlessly.Mr. Harper is right to call Mr. Putin the thug that he is, but perhaps we should be even more grateful than we have been to those who served in the First World War for the fact that Mr. Putin’s despotism misgoverns fewer than half the people of the empires ruled by the Romanovs and the Supreme Soviet.cbletters@gmail.com From the National Post.

Vladimir Putin’s Posturing <br>Evokes a New Gratitude <br>To Veterans of the Great War

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