David Warsh: U.S. foreign policy, wars and global warming

American tanks in 1991 during the Gulf War.

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

I have been dipping into Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War 1931-1945 (Viking 2021), by Richard Overy, of the University of Exeter, one of Britain’s foremost historians. The book is brilliant, difficult enough to pick up – 994 pages! – harder still to put down. I have been trying to understand why World War II ended the way it did.

World War II was the America’s first successful war of partition on the Eurasian continent: East and West Germany, the Iron Curtain, all that. A second successful war of seemingly permanent partition followed soon thereafter, in Korea.

The record since then hasn’t been good. America’s wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq all failed to achieve their aims. Now the U.S. is engaged in a proxy war with the Russian Federation, in defense of Ukraine. Meanwhile, China’s determination to take possession of Taiwan looms.

Partition failed in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq because American tactics were inept, borders were porous, enemy supply lines were short; and because the use of nuclear weapons, by now widely held, had become taboo.

What are the chances that the invasion of Ukraine will end in negotiated partition?

I don’t know anything more about the prospects for peace in the war in Ukraine than what I read in four major newspapers I follow. As a former newspaperman, for whom the war in Vietnam dominated most of a decade in my youth, I observe that coverage of the Russian invasion  often is accompanied by the same overtones of moral outrage that were characteristic of  the early stages  of the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. The Financial Times seems the most consistently balanced of the leading English-language papers, admitting all viewpoints to its opinion pages, favoring none.

But even the FT seems uninterested for the most part in Russia’s side of the story.  Vladimir Putin has been clear all along about his objections to NATO enlargement.  But the 6,000-word essay he published a year ago, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” spelled out in some detail his version of NATO’s plans for Ukraine’s membership – and for the privatization of Ukraine’s economy.

I am as disgusted by the tradition of Russian disdain for legality, today in Ukraine, as I was in 1956, in Hungary; in 1968, in Czechoslovakia; in 1979, in Afghanistan.  This Washington Post story – Russia wants Viktor Bout back, badly. The question is: Why? (subscription may be required) – is evidence that the tradition of lawless brutality has continued under Putin. But in a second-best world, when you routinely can’t get what you want, you must learn to get what you need.

For all this is unfolding against the backdrop of climate change. That story, too, I have been living with for most of my career as a journalist. In the last decade or two, the experience has come to be widely shared. The best metaphor for explicating global warming I know is the one associated with Michael Mann, of Penn State University, author, most recently, of The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet (Public Affairs, 2021).

Last week Mann told an interviewer for National Public Radio, “We frame this as if it’s some sort of cliff that we go off at three degrees Fahrenheit warming or four degrees Fahrenheit warming. That’s not what it is. It’s a minefield. And we’re walking farther and farther out onto that minefield. And the farther we walk out onto that minefield, the more danger that we are going to encounter.”

So back to Blood and Ruins. I cannot recommend Overy’s book highly enough. At the very beginning, he explains that he has taken his title from Imperialism and Civilization, a well-received 1929 book by Leonard Woolf, a political economist (and husband of the novelist Virginia Woolf).  “Imperialism, as it was known in the nineteenth century, is no longer possible,” wrote Woolf, “and the only question is whether it will be buried peacefully or in blood and ruins.”

On the last page of his text, Overy concludes, “The Long Second World War… ended not only a particular form of empire, but discredited the longer history of the term.”  He quoted the Oxford Africanist Margery Perham from a lecture in 1961 on what she believed had been a profound historical shift: “All though the sixty centuries of more or less recorded history, imperialism, the extension of political power by one state over another, was… taken for granted as part of the established order.”

Since 1945, however, she continued, the only authority that people would now accept “is that which arises from their own wills, or can be made to appear to do so.”  Hence the scramble for the status of nationhood since the ‘50s, Overy wrote: There were193 sovereign countries, according to the United Nations, as of 2019.

Has the emergence of China as a hegemonic superpower and Putin’s determination to bundle together Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians in what he calls “a single triune nation,” changed all that? Probably it has. The pressing question now is whether the short-lived period of “the end of history” will conclude relatively peacefully, or enter a lengthy era of heat and ruins.

.                                               xxx

A year ago, on the advice of a knowledgeable friend, I argued that Tunisians deserved a second chance to build a working system of government.

Tunisia had been celebrated as the only Arab nation to turn towards democratic rule since the “Arab Spring” of 201l sent autocrat Zine El Abidine Ben Ali into exile, after 20 years in power.  A democratic constitution was adopted in 2014, but a series of coalition governments failed to solve the once-prosperous nation’s growing economic problems and religious strife. Law professor Kais Saied was elected in a landslide in 2019 and sent parliament home in July 2021 to rule by decree since then.

The draft of a new constitution, which, if adopted, would weaken term limits and extend presidential powers considerably, was endorsed by something like 92 percent of those who voted.

The trouble is, only 27.5 percent of eligible voters went to the polls, reflecting a boycott of the referendum by several leading parties. With food and energy prices rising, unemployment high, and tourism stagnant, the situation facing Saied does not seem promising.

David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay originated.

Global average temperature, shown by measurements from various sources, has increased since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

David Warsh: Putin, Czar Peter and RealLifeLore

Portrait of Peter the Great, possibly by J.M. Nattier, in the Hermitage Museum, in St. Petersburg, named, of course, after that czar.

SOMERVILLE, Mass.
It is becoming clear to dispassionate observers that, after surprising successes in its defense of Kyiv, Ukraine is losing hope that its troops can reverse gains that Russia has made in the east of the nation. A three-correspondent team yesterday put it this way in The Washington Post:

“[T]he overall trajectory of the war has unmistakably shifted away from one of unexpectedly dismal Russian failures and tilted in favor of Russia as the demonstrably stronger force.’’

In a speech June 9 to Russian entrepreneurs in St, Petersburg, marking the 350th anniversary of the birth of Czar Peter the Great, Russian President Vladimir Putin compared his invasion of Ukraine to Peter’s Great Northern War. That twenty-one-year-long series of campaigns, little remembered outside the Baltic nations, Russia, and Ukraine, began when Peter recruited Denmark and Norway as allies to test the newly crowned fifteen-year-old King of Sweden, Charles XII (sometimes called Karl XII).

Charles’s army defeated Russian forces three times its size at Narva, in 1700, and for a time Peter retreated, and began construction of St. Petersburg in 1703.  But in 1709, as the over-confident Swedish king marched his army towards Moscow, via Ukraine, Peter’s forces crushed the Swedes in the battle of Poltava, effectively ending the short-lived Swedish Empire, and, as Peter the Great declared, laying the final stone in the foundations of St Petersburg and the Russian Empire. In the decade to come, Peter took possession of much of Finland and the northeastern shores of the Baltic.

“What was [Peter] doing?” Putin asked his audience Thursday, according to the Associated Press. “Taking back and reinforcing. That’s what he did. And it looks like it fell on us to take back and reinforce as well.”

Peter’s war in the Baltic was about gaining access to Europe. Putin’s war in Ukraine is about retaining access to European energy markets. It has been clear all along that the Russian invasion was about the possession of oil and gas resources and their transport.  But the details are hard to explain.

My own path to the story followed the work of Marshal Goldman, of Wellesley College and Harvard Russian Research Center, who narrated Russian history after 1972 in a series of lucid books, culminating in Petrostate: Putin, Power and the New Russia (2008). But Goldman died in 2017. That left the field to Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, both of the Brookings Institution, authors of The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold, and Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. Hill became well-known as an adviser to President Trump at the end of his term. Last week Gideon Rachman, chief foreign-affairs commentator for the Financial Times, interviewed historian Daniel Yergin to good effect in an FT podcast (s subscription may be required) .

But it turns out that the best forty minutes you can spend on the war, that is, if you have forty minutes to spend, is Russia’s Catastrophic Oil & Gas Problem, a new episode of a strange new independently produced series called RealLifeLore. Production values are striking. So is the relative lack of spin. Only the narrator’s forceful delivery wears thin, though his pronunciation of place names seems impeccable. . .

The provenance of the program itself is somewhat unclear. The YouTube link came to me from a trusted old friend; she got it from Illinois Rep. Bill Foster, the only nuclear physicist currently serving in Congress.

CuriosityStream, which carries the RealLifeLore series, is an American media company and subscription video streaming service that offers documentary programming including films, series, and TV shows. It was launched in 2015 by the founder of the Discovery Channel, John S. Hendricks. RealLifeLores’s producer, Sam Denby, is an entrepreneur best known for creating,via Wendover Productions, several edutainment YouTube channels, including Half as Interesting; Extremities; and Jet Lag, The Game. I look forward to learning more about Denby as Wikipedia goes to work and streaming networks and newspapers tune in.

I don’t know what more to say except to recommend that you watch it. It skews slightly optimistic towards the end. The Great Northern War doesn’t come into it.  That’s my department, as is the is the opportunity to occasionally marvel at  the yeastiness of the  enterprise economy of the West, not “free” exactly, but far less clumsily guided than the system that Vladimir Putin is trying to control.

The moral of the story: Putin’s war aims are grimly realistic. Those of NATO in support of Ukraine are not. The invasion was wrong, and probably a colossal mistake, even if Russia winds up taking possession of some or all of its neighbor.  Putin’s “special military operation” in the 21st Century is the opposite of Peter’s Great Northern War in the early 18th Century. Russia will suffer for decades for his folly.

                                           xxx

Dale W. Jorgenson, of Harvard University, died June 8 in Cambridge, Mass., of complications arising from long-lasting Corona virus infection.  He was 89. An excellent Wall Street Journal obituary is here.

Awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 1971, Jorgenson was among the founders of modern growth accounting, a major force in the rejuvenation of Harvard’s Department of Economics, and, as John Fernald put it in a recently-prepared intellectual biography, attentive, supportive, warm, and kind, beneath an unfailing veneer of formality.

A memorial service is planned for the autumn.

David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column originated.

David Warsh: What Putin had hoped in assaulting Ukraine

St. Andrew Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Boston.

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

Two days into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the dispatch from Russia’s state-owned news service seemed to reflect Vladimir Putin’s innermost reasoning.

A new world is coming into being before our very eyes. Russia’s military operation has opened a new epoch…. Russia is recovering its unity – the tragedy of 1991, this horrendous catastrophe in our history, its unnatural caesura, has been overcome. Yes, at a great price, yes through the tragic events of what amounts to a civil war, because now for the time being brothers are shooting one another… but Ukraine as anti-Russia will no longer exist.

Instead, the Novosti account continued, the Great Russians, the Belarusians and the Little Russians (Ukrainians) would come together as a whole – a reconstituted Russian Empire. Putin had undertaken the “historic responsibility” of reunification upon himself “rather than leaving the Ukrainian question to future generations.”

The pronouncement was quickly taken down, according to Jonathan Haslam, Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, N.J., describing Putin’s Premature Victory Roll in early March.  It wasn’t just the over-optimism that rendered it embarrassing.  It was too transparent. The goal of reunification superseded Putin’s usual complaint about the threat to Russia posed by NATO expansion.

I was broadly sympathetic to Putin after 1999, when he published his essay on Russia in the Twenty-First Century as an appendix to his First Person interview in 2000, upon taking office. I overlooked the Second Chechen War.  I began paying attention after he criticized the U.S. for its invasion of Iraq in a speech in Munich, in 2007. Even after Putin’s seizure of the Crimean Peninsula, in 2014, he seemed to be within his rights, though barely.  Russia had a historic claim on the peninsula on which its Black Sea naval base in Sebastopol in situated, I reasoned.

No more. Last week I re-read Putin’s article from last August, On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians.  Then I read When history is weaponized for war, historian Simon Schama’s scathing criticism of it, When the Pope sought to give Putin an excuse for his invasion, in an interview with an Italian newspaper earlier this month, asserting that NATO had been “barking at Russia’s door,” it rang hollow. Nobody is talking about a Morgenthau Plan for Russia after the war in Ukraine, but nobody is talking about a Marshall Plan, either.  It has options – a stronger alliance with India? But regaining its reputation in Europe looks harder than ever.

NATO’s long-term strategy of “leaning-in” seems to have worked. Putin may or may not have cancer, as a report suggested yesterday in The Times of London, but something has seriously wrong gone wrong with the man. Haslam cites Shakespeare. Putin has waged a war he cannot win. He is cementing in place the fence around him of which he complained.

Consider that his war on Ukraine has persuaded Finland and Sweden to seek to join NATO.

David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first ran. He’s the author of, among other books, Because They Could: The Harvard Russia Scandal (and NATO Enlargement) after Twenty-Five Years.

Llewellyn King: The threat of nuclear war and the license it has given Russia’s dictator

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

History isn’t short of people to blame. You could say of the present world crisis that it was former President Obama’s fault for not getting tougher with Russian President Putin in Syria. You could blame former President Trump for giving Putin a sense of entitlement and for undermining NATO, seeing it as a financial play. You could blame former German Chancellor Angela Merkel for encouraging Russian gas imports, shutting out the nuclear- energy option.

You could, of course, blame President Biden for explicitly telling Putin, and the world, what the United States wouldn’t do if he invaded Ukraine. And you could blame Biden and NATO for dribbling vital military aid to Ukraine over the first devastating weeks of the Russian invasion.

If you want to continue, you could blame the world’s military strategists for believing that Russia, after the fall of communism, had changed. You could, perhaps, blame NATO itself, for expanding its reach to the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia.

But Putin is unequivocally the one to blame. The dictator is the one who wants to remake Russia in the image of the imperial tsars. It is a flawed scheme but a real one.

As the world grapples with the reality of Putin, the past informs but it doesn’t instruct.

If NATO were to engage Russia with conventional forces, it would triumph. That is one lesson of Ukraine. Russian military forces are woefully inefficient, even incompetent.

Would it were that simple.

The beast in the room, the feared monster, the threat that hangs over the whole world is nuclear war. It is the clear-and-present danger. It shapes our handling of Russia and will shape our response to China, if and when it invades Taiwan.

Nuclear-war avoidance is again dominating the world in ways we had nearly forgotten.

Will Russia, a caged, fierce bear, resort to nuclear, and how much nuclear to what effect against which targets?

The United States and the Soviet Union reached a modus vivendi: mutual assured destruction (MAD), which kept the peace even as nuclear armaments proliferated and stockpiles grew exponentially. Is that still the option? Is MAD -- so long after the collapse of the Soviet Union -- still the underlying realpolitik, the restraining factor between nuclear powers?

Does that mean that anyone with nuclear weapons can wage conventional warfare in the belief that they won’t face NATO or any other serious restraining military action because they can unleash terrifying global destruction?

Or is there, as some believe, the prospect of limited nuclear engagement, using area tactical nuclear weapons? This has never been tested.

There hasn’t been a limited nuclear ground war. Could it be contained? Should it be contemplated outside the deeper reaches of the defense establishment?

But it is what keeps the leaders of Europe, the United States and Canada awake nights. If you favor limited nuclear war, just look to the effects of a nuclear disaster, Chernobyl, and start multiplying.

It is the unthinkable scenario that must be thought about. It is the reality which holds back NATO and makes the West a spectator to the carnage in Ukraine.

Russia isn’t a rich country except in some natural resources. It has a large but poorly trained and equipped military. But it bristles with nuclear weapons aimed at North American and European cities. Its ability to threaten us with nuclear horror changes the balance between nations: an indelible change to future foreign policy.

In the short term, when contemplating the return of MAD in international relations, the question is: How mad – as in insane -- is Putin, and how ready is Biden?

The pieces on the world chess board have moved and they won’t be moved back. The intelligentsia has yet to grasp the extent to which Ukraine has changed the world – and made it a more dangerous place. They need to catch up fast.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C

whchronicle.com

Chuck Collins: Cracking down on Russian oligarchs should include closing U.S. tax havens

Placing "dirty" money in a service company, where it is layered with legitimate income and then integrated into the flow of money, is a common form of money laundering.

Via OtherWords.org

BOSTON

As part of the sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, the United States and its European partners are cracking down on Russian oligarchs. They’re freezing assets and tracking the yachts, private jets and luxury real estate holdings of these Russian billionaires.

“I say to the Russian oligarchs and the corrupt leaders who bilked billions of dollars off this violent regime: no more,” Biden said in his State of the Union address. “We are coming for your ill-begotten gains.”

Targeting Russia’s elites, who have stolen trillions from their own people, is an important strategy to pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin, who himself may be among the wealthiest people on the planet.

But the U.S. faces a major obstacle in this effort: Our own country has become a major destination tax haven for criminal and oligarch wealth from around the world — and not just Russians.

While European Union countries have been increasing transparency and cracking down on kleptocratic capital, the United States is a laggard. As the Pandora Papers disclosed last year, the U.S. has become a weak link in the fight against global corruption.

Delaware, the state President Biden represented in the Senate for 36 years, is the premiere venue for anonymous limited-liability companies that don’t have to disclose who their real beneficial owners are, even to law enforcement. And South Dakota is the home for billionaires creating dynasty trusts, where they can park wealth outside the reach of tax authorities for generations.

Even U.S. charities, as my colleague Helen Flannery wrote recently, have received billions from Russian oligarchs, helping to sanitize their reputations.

Global wealth continues to flood into the United States, especially in luxury real estate. In February, the New York Post did an expose on the luxury real estate holdings of Russian oligarchs in the Big Apple. But oligarchs hide their wealth in real estate all over the country, as well as art, cryptocurrency, and jewelry.

This vast wealth-hiding apparatus would not exist without an enormous enabling class of lawyers, accountants and wealth managers. These “wealth defense industry” professionals are the agents of inequality, the facilitators of the wealth disappearing act. This class of professionals uses their considerable political clout to block reforms.

The first step in fixing the hidden wealth system is ownership transparency — requiring the disclosure of beneficial ownership in real estate, trusts, and companies and corporations. Cities such as Los Angeles are exploring municipal-level disclosure of real estate ownership so they can know who’s buying their neighborhoods.

But we should also shine a spotlight on the wealth defense industry. Days after the release of the Pandora Papers, U.S. lawmakers introduced the ENABLERS Act, which would require such attorneys, wealth managers, real estate professionals, and art dealers to report suspicious activity. The attention on Russian oligarchs has revived interest in this legislation.

If the U.S. wants to clamp down on Russian oligarchs, the first step is to get our own house in order

Chuck Collins, based in Boston, directs the Program on Inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies. He’s the author of The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions.

Sarah Barney: Are U.S. drug companies staying in Russia so greedy they’re complicit with Putin’s mass murder?

Maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, destroyed by Russian invaders on March 9.

From Kaiser Health News

U.S. drug companies that keep doing business in Russia are “being misguided at best, cynical in the medium case, and outright deplorably misleading and deceptive.’’ 

— Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management

Even as the war in Ukraine has prompted an exodus of international companies — from fast-food chains and oil producers to luxury retailers — from Russia, U.S. and global drug companies said they would continue manufacturing and selling their products there.

Airlines, automakers, banks, and technology giants — at least 320 companies by one count — are among the businesses curtailing operations or making high-profile exits from Russia as its invasion of Ukraine intensifies. McDonald’s, Starbucks and Coca-Cola announced a pause in sales this week.

But drugmakers, medical device manufacturers, and health care companies, which are exempted from U.S. and European sanctions, said Russians need access to medicines and medical equipment and contend that international humanitarian law requires they keep supply chains open.

“As a health care company, we have an important purpose, which is why at this time we continue to serve people in all countries in which we operate who depend on us for essential products, some life-sustaining,” said Scott Stoffel, divisional vice president for Illinois-based Abbott Laboratories, which manufactures and sells medicines in Russia for oncology, women’s health, pancreatic insufficiency, and liver health.

Johnson & Johnson — which has corporate offices in Moscow, Novosibirsk, St. Petersburg, and Yekaterinburg — said in a statement, “We remain committed to providing essential health products to those in need in Ukraine, Russia, and the region, in compliance with current sanctions and while adapting to the rapidly changing situation on the ground.”

The reluctance of drugmakers to pause operations in Russia is being met with a growing chorus of criticism.

Pharmaceutical companies that say they must continue to manufacture drugs in Russia for humanitarian reasons are “being misguided at best, cynical in the medium case, and outright deplorably misleading and deceptive,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management who is tracking which companies have curtailed operations in Russia. He noted that banks and technology companies also provide essential services.

“Russians are put in a tragic position of unearned suffering. If we continue to make life palatable for them, then we are continuing to support the regime,” Sonnenfeld said. “These drug companies will be seen as complicit with the most vicious operation on the planet. Instead of protecting life, they are going to be seen as destroying life. The goal here is to show that Putin is not in control of all sectors of the economy.”

U.S. pharmaceutical and medical companies have operated in Russia for decades, and many ramped up operations after Russia invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014, navigating the fraught relationship between the U.S. and Russia amid sanctions. In 2010, Vladimir Putin, then Russian prime minister, announced an ambitious national plan for the Russian pharmaceutical industry that would be a pillar in his efforts to reestablish his country as an influential superpower and wean the country off Western pharmaceutical imports. Under the plan, called “Pharma-2020” and “Pharma-2030,” the government required Western pharmaceutical companies eager to sell to Russia’s growing middle class to locate production inside the country.

Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, and Abbott are among the drugmakers that manufacture pharmaceutical drugs at facilities in St. Petersburg and elsewhere in the country and typically sell those drugs as branded generics or under Russian brands.

Pfizer’s CEO, Albert Bourla, said on CBS that the giant drugmaker is not going to make further investments in Russia, but that it will not cut ties with Russia, as multinational companies in other industries are doing.

Pharmaceutical manufacturing plants in Kaluga, a major manufacturing center for Volkswagen and Volvo southwest of Moscow, have been funded through a partnership between Rusnano, a state-owned venture that promotes the development of high-tech enterprises, and U.S. venture capital firms.

Russia also has sought to position itself as an attractive research market, offering an inexpensive and lax regulatory environment for clinical drug trials. Last year, Pfizer conducted in Russia clinical trials of Paxlovid, its experimental antiviral pill to treat covid-19. Before the invasion began in late February, 3,072 trials were underway in Russia and 503 were underway in Ukraine, according to BioWorld, a reporting hub focused on drug development that features data from Cortellis.

AstraZeneca is the top sponsor of clinical trials in Russia, with 49 trials, followed by a subsidiary of Merck, with 48 trials.

So far, drugmakers’ response to the Ukraine invasion has largely centered on public pledges to donate essential medicines and vaccines to Ukrainian patients and refugees. They’ve also made general comments about the need to keep open the supply of medicines flowing within Russia.

Abbott has pledged $2 million to support humanitarian efforts in Ukraine, and Pfizer, based in New York, said it has supplied $1 million in humanitarian grants. Swiss drug maker Novartis said it was expanding humanitarian efforts in Ukraine and working to “ensure the continued supply of our medicines in Ukraine.”

But no major pharmaceutical or medical device maker has announced plans to shutter manufacturing plants or halt sales inside Russia.

In an open letter, hundreds of leaders of mainly smaller biotechnology companies have called on industry members to cease business activities in Russia, including “investment in Russian companies and new investment within the borders of Russia,” and to halt trade and collaboration with Russian companies, except for supplying food and medicines. How many of the signatories have business operations in Russia was unclear.

Ulrich Neumann, director for market access at Janssen, a Johnson & Johnson company, was among those who signed the letter, but whether he was speaking for the company was unclear. In its own statement posted on social media, the company said it’s “committed to providing access to our essential medical products in the countries where we operate, in compliance with current international sanctions.”

GlaxoSmithKline, headquartered in the United Kingdom, said in a statement that it’s stopping all advertising in Russia and will not enter into contracts that “directly support the Russian administration or military.” But the company said that as a “supplier of needed medicines, vaccines and everyday health products, we have a responsibility to do all we can to make them available. For this reason, we will continue to supply our products to the people of Russia, while we can.”

Nell Minow, vice chair of ValueEdge Advisors, an investment consulting firm, noted that drug companies have been treated differently than other industries during previous global conflicts. For example, some corporate ethicists advised against pharmaceutical companies’ total divestment from South Africa’s apartheid regime to ensure essential medicines flowed to the country.

“There is a difference between a hamburger and a pill,” Minow said. Companies should strongly condemn Russia’s actions, she said, but unless the U.S. enters directly into a war with Russia, companies that make essential medicines and health care products should continue to operate. Before U.S. involvement in World War II, she added, there were “some American companies that did business with Germany until the last minute.”

Sarah Varney is a Kaiser Health News reporter; KHN senior correspondent Arthur Allen contributed to this article.

Llewellyn King: Putin’s diabolical romanticism is sinking the global economy; deconstructing the NATO as threat myth

Face of evil: Vladimir Putin in the KGB in 1980

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

The barbarity of the Russian assault on Ukraine is neither mitigated by the ineptitude of the Russian Army nor can hearts be uplifted by the bravery of the Ukrainians. Murder on a colossal scale is taking place in plain sight on television day after day.

At this writing, there are 3.5 million refugees and thousands of civilian casualties reported. This is killing, killing, killing without respite. The Russian economy is destroyed, and the consequence of this bloody slaughter is affecting the world economy.

Even pusillanimous nations like India and Brazil feel the hot breath of the crazed organ grinder Vladimir Putin and his Russian bear.

The invasion of Ukraine was folly and a criminal act, but its continuation has become pure and sustained evil.

Some in the U.S. commentariat have suggested with amazing thought gymnastics that all this is because of the expansion of NATO. But if NATO hadn’t expanded after the fall of the Berlin Wall, then Russia wouldn’t have felt threatened and wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine. Nonsense. Russia has felt threatened in Europe since the days of the tsar. If NATO hadn’t expanded to include the Baltic nations of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, Russian troops would be billeted there right now.

Had Ukraine joined NATO, the United States wouldn’t be paying the price at the pump and Europe wouldn’t be shivering out the last days of winter, wondering how it will get through the coming months without enough fuel to produce electricity. 

Security is the abiding fault line in Russia’s thinking about the West. Sure, St. Petersburg is close to the rest of Europe and could be overrun. And Moscow isn’t so far from European neighbors that it couldn’t be reached easily by an invader: Napoleon got there, and Hitler could have if he had been a better strategist. But most of Russia with its 11 time zones is geographically out of reach. That makes it hard to swallow the security argument.

Putin wants to restore Imperial Russia and the empire that reached even farther under communism -- which makes him a diabolical romanticist. He wants to restore Russian hegemony over its former states: Ukraine is the biggest.

Larry O’Donnell, the MSNBC host, correctly postulated that for NATO, or the United States alone, to intervene to help Ukraine, nuclear war could result; war not just in Europe, but also between the United States and Russia -- the very thing that dominated the world from 1945 to the fall of the Soviet Union.

O’Donnell’s argument reveals the impotence that comes with nuclear weapons and sets up this question: Can we never challenge Russia, China or any other country with a substantial nuclear arsenal and the ability to deliver its weapons into the United States and our European and other democratic allies?

If that is so, does it inoculate Russia from invading the Baltic states?

We know the reality that lurks behind China’s ambitions for Taiwan. Is that more inevitable than ever? President George W. Bush said we would do “whatever it takes to defend Taiwan.” That is very unlikely now, if it ever was.

It isn’t that the reality of the international scene has changed so much as it has come into a clear and harsh light. However, one thing has changed: The slaughter, the unspeakable suffering in Ukraine will change the attitude of a generation to Russia in Europe. Russia will be a pariah, not a partner.

The United States fears war with Russia, but Russia, much weaker in every way, must fear war with NATO and the United States.

On a visit to Moscow, toward the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, I heard a four-star Russian general say, “Never again.” But the Ukraine invasion is again. Will Russia and other aggressors be deterred long after the last of the dead are buried in Ukraine, and long after the last body bag has gone back to Russia? Maybe for a generation, which is about how long it will take to rebuild the global economy after the Russian invasion of Ukraine has run its ghastly course.

Llewellyn King is executive  producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Web site: whchronicle.com

Don Pesci: May we be worthy of the brave Ukrainians

Albert Camus

VERNON, Conn.

In March, 1957, the French novelist and philosopher Albert Camus (1913-1960) published an essay, at great cost to himself, titled “{Janos} Kadar Had His Day Of Fear.” His epitaph on the Soviet-suppressed Hungarian Revolution, in the fall of 1956, may serve as well as an epitaph on the Ukraine’s democratic revolution, which Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is now trying to destroy. Kadar (1912-1989) was the Communist boss of Hungary, reporting to his Soviet bosses.

The Hungarian Revolution was suppressed at the order of the Kremlin, run by its then boss, Nikita Khrushchev, after Stalin had installed in Hungary a Communist dictatorship after World War II. Camus regarded the takeover of Hungary by totalitarian Stalinists as a counter-revolution.

His essay was costly to Camus for a number of reasons. It was an epistle of liberty and a resolute, unambiguous disparagement of totalitarianism.

The essay began on a defiant note: “The Hungarian Minister of State Marosan, whose name sounds like a program, declared a few days ago that there would be no further counter-revolution in Hungary. For once, one of Kadar's Ministers has told the truth. How could there be a counter-revolution since it has already seized power? There can be no other revolution in Hungary.”

And the second paragraph likely was considered in France by what we might call its philosophical establishment as an awakening slap in the face: “I am not one of those who long for the Hungarian people to take up arms again in an uprising doomed to be crushed under the eyes of an international society that will spare neither applause nor virtuous tears before returning to their slippers like football enthusiasts on Saturday evening after a big game. There are already too many dead in the stadium, and we can be generous only with our own blood. Hungarian blood has proved to be so valuable to Europe and to freedom that we must try to spare every drop of it.”

And then France’s apostle of liberty let loose the following thunderbolt: “But I am not one to think there can be even a resigned or provisional compromise with a reign of terror that has as much right to be called socialist as the executioners of the Inquisition had to be called Christians. And, on this anniversary of liberty, I hope with all my strength that the mute resistance of the Hungarian people will continue, grow stronger, and, echoed by all the voices we can give it, get unanimous international opinion to boycott its oppressors. And if that opinion is too flabby or selfish to do justice to a martyred people, if our voices also are too weak, I hope that the Hungarian resistance will continue until the counter-revolutionary state collapses everywhere in the East under the weight of its lies and its contradictions.”

Camus himself was both an atheist and a socialist fully prepared to take to the ramparts, in fine French fashion: “For it [the Stalinist false front] is indeed a counter-revolutionary state. What else can we call a regime that forces the father to inform on his son, the son to demand the supreme punishment for his father, the wife to bear witness against her husband —that has raised denunciation to the level of a virtue? Foreign tanks, police, twenty-year-old girls hanged, committees of workers decapitated and gagged, scaffolds, writers deported and imprisoned, the lying press, camps, censorship, judges arrested, criminals legislating, and the scaffold again—is this socialism, the great celebration of liberty and justice?”

Here at last was a man who knew how to draw proper distinctions. The essay was bound to tread on tender toes.

In Hungary, a Joshua horn had been sounded, and walls had begun to tumble: “Thus, with the first shout of insurrection in free Budapest, learned and shortsighted philosophies, miles of false reasonings and deceptively beautiful doctrines were scattered like dust. And the truth, the naked truth, so long outraged, burst upon the eyes of the world.

“Contemptuous teachers, unaware that they were thereby insulting the working classes, had assured us that the masses could readily get along without liberty if only they were given bread. And the masses themselves suddenly replied that they didn't have bread but that, even if they did, they would still like something else. For it was not a learned professor but a Budapest blacksmith who wrote: ‘I want to be considered an adult eager to think and capable of thought. I want to be able to express my thoughts without having anything to fear and I want, also, to be listened to.’"

It was an essay too far for many stern socialists in France, some of whom were prepared to avert their eyes so long as the Soviet experiment in Russia moved forward unimpeded.

Camus stood in the way of totalitarian progress. He was of the party of liberty and just revolt. As such, he ended his essay: “Our faith is that throughout the world, beside the impulse toward coercion and death that is darkening history, there is a growing impulse toward persuasion and life, a vast emancipatory movement called culture that is made up both of free creation and of free work.

“Our daily task, our long vocation is to add to that culture by our labors and not to subtract, even temporarily, anything from it. But our proudest duty is to defend personally to the very end, against the impulse toward coercion and death, the freedom of that culture—in other words, the freedom of work and of creation.

“The Hungarian workers and intellectuals, beside whom we stand today with so much impotent grief, realized that and made us realize it. This is why, if their suffering is ours, their hope belongs to us too. Despite their destitution, their exile, their chains, it took them but a single day to transmit to us the royal legacy of liberty. May we be worthy of it!”

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

David Warsh: Is Putin responding to U.S. ‘hyper use’ of force and overreach?

Blue indicates member states of NATO.

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

With President Biden confidently forecasting a Russian “war of choice” against Ukraine –“I’m convinced he’s made the decision,” he said Feb. 18, – there is not much point in writing about it until war happens, or fails to materialize.  Except to say this:

I spent some time last week leafing through books I read long ago, about an earlier “war of choice,” this one thoroughly catastrophic, as it turned  – two by Robert Draper, of The New York Times, Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush, and To Start a War: How the Bush Administration took America into Iraq; one by Peter Baker, also of The Times,  Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House; another by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, of The Washington Post,  Imperial Lives in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone; and a fifth, by Michael MacDonald, of Williams College,  Overreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq.

My interest was piqued by a dispatch from New York Times Moscow bureau chief Anton Troianovski. Is NATO dealing with a crafty strategist, he asked, or a reckless paranoid?  “At this moment of crescendo for the Ukraine crisis, it all comes down to what kind of leader President Vladimir V. Putin is.”  He continued,

In Moscow, many analysts remain convinced that the Russian president is essentially rational, and that the risks of invading Ukraine would be so great that his huge troop buildup makes sense only as a very convincing bluff. But some also leave the door open to the idea that he has fundamentally changed amid the pandemic, a shift that may have left him more paranoid, more aggrieved and more reckless.

It seemed to me that Troianovski, and, by extension, President Biden, had neglected a third interpretation.  When Putin gave a famous speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, criticizing the U.S. for “almost un-contained hyper use of force in international relations,” he reminded listeners in his audience mainly of the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were then underway, but his subtext was NATO expansion into Eastern Europe and Eurasia after 1993.

Perhaps, I thought, the way to think of Putin is as an accomplished rhetorician, creating a grand show-of-force, illustrated by satellite photographs and maps, with which to quietly bargain with various Ukrainian factions, while seeking to persuade other audiences that for three decades the behavior of the Unites States has been the neglected element, or, as the saying goes, “ the elephant in the room.” Perhaps the long table at whose far end Putin was photographed speaking with French President Emmanuel Macron was more symbolic of the distance that the Russian president feels from NATO negotiators than emblematic of his fear of COVID contagion.

Meanwhile, The Times last week published a story about a secretive U.S. missile base in Poland a hundred miles from the Russian border – a presence that seemed to give the lie to verbal assurances given long ago in negotiations over the reunification of Germany that NATO would expand not one inch to the East.

What if Joe Biden’s convictions about Putin’s intentions turn out to be no better than were those of George W. Bush about Saddam Hussein?  When Russian forces finally attack Kyiv – or gradually return to their bases – we’ll know who was right and who was wrong. I’ll stop writing about it when they decide.

While we are hanging on the breathless daily news reports, though, Putin has managed to remind more than a few persons around the world of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, this time played out in in reverse. Was it really Pax Americana?  Or more of a three-decade toot?

David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first ran.

Of Harvard, Summers, Russia and the future

The Kremlin

— Photo by A.Savin

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

Some years ago, I set out to write a little book about Harvard University’s USAID project to teach market manners to Boris Yeltsin’s Russian government in the 1990s.  The project collapsed after leaders of the Harvard mission were caught seeking to line their own pockets by gaining control of an American firm they had  brought in to advise the Russians. Project director Andrei Shleifer was a Harvard professor. His best friend, Lawrence Summers, was U.S. assistant Treasury secretary at the time.

There was justice to be served. The USAID officer who blew the whistle, Janet Ballantyne, was a Foreign Service hero. The victim of the squeeze, John Keffer, of Portland, Maine, was an exemplary American businessman, high-minded and resourceful.

But I had something besides history in mind.  By adding a chapter to David McClintick’s classic story of the scandal, “How Harvard Lost Russia,’’ in Institutional Investor magazine in 2006), I aimed to make it more complicated for former Treasury Secretary Summers, of Harvard University, to return to a policy job in a Hillary Rodham Clinton administration.

It turned out there was no third Clinton administration. My account, “Because They Could, ‘‘ appeared in 2018. So I was gratified last August when, with the presidential election underway, Summers told an interviewer at the Aspen Security Forum that “My time in government is behind me and my time as a free speaker is ahead of me.” Plenty of progressive Democrats had objected to Summers as well.

Writing about Russia in the1990s meant delving deeper into the history of U.S.-Russia relations than I had before. I developed the conviction that, during the quarter century after the end of the Cold War, U.S. policy toward Russia had been imperious and cavalier.

By 1999, Yeltsin was already deeply upset by NATO expansion. The man he chose to succeed him was Vladimir Putin. It wasn’t difficult to follow the story Through Putin’s eyes. He was realistic to begin with, and, after 9/11, hopeful (Putin was the among the first foreign leaders to offer assistance to President George W. Bush).

But NATO’s 2002 invitation to the Baltic states — Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — all former Soviet Republics, the U.S .invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration’s supposed failure to share intelligence about the siege of a  school in Beslan, Russia, led to Putin’s 2007 Munich speech, in which he complained of  America’s “almost uncontained hyper use of force in international relations.”

Then came the Arab Spring. NATO’s intervention in Libya, ending in the death of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, was followed by Putin’s decision to reassume the Russian presidency, displacing his hand-picked, Dimitri Medvedev, in 2012. Putin blamed Hillary Clinton for disparaging his campaign.

And in March 2014, Putin’s plans to further a Eurasian Union via closer economic ties with Ukraine having fallen through, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych fled to Moscow in the face of massive of pro-European Union demonstrations in Kyiv’s Maidan Square. Russia seized and annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula soon after that.

The Trump administration brought a Charlie Chaplin interlude to Russian-American relations. Putin saw no problem: He offered to begin negotiating an anti-hacking treaty right away.  Neither did Trump:  Remember Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s Oval Office drop-by, the day after the president fired FBI Director James Comey?

Only the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, among the writers I read, seemed to think there was nothing to worry about in Trump’s ties to Russia. Meanwhile, Putin rewrote the Russian Constitution once again, giving himself the opportunity to serve until 2036, when he will be 84.

But Russia’s internal history has taken a darker turn with the return of Alexander Navalny to Moscow. The Kremlin critic maintains that Putin sought his murder in August, using a Soviet-era chemical nerve-agent. Navalny survived, and spent five months under medical care in Germany before returning.

Official Russian media describe Navalny as a “blogger,” when he is in fact Russia’s opposition leader. He has been sentenced to at least two-and-a-half years in prison on a flimsy charge, and face other indictments. But his arrest sparked the largest demonstrations across Russia since the final demise of the Soviet Union. More than 10,000 persons have been detained, in a hundred cities across Russia, according to Robyn Dixon, of The Washington Post. Putin’s approval ratings stand at 29 percent

What can President Biden do? Very little. However much Americans may wish that Russian leaders shared their view of human rights, it should be clear by now there is no alternative but to deplore, to recognize Russian sovereignty, to encourage its legitimate business interests, discourage its trickery, and otherwise hope for the best. There are plenty of problems to work on at home.

David Warsh, an economic historian and veteran columnist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this columnist first appeared.

David Warsh: Why Russia invaded our 2016 election, and they're at it again

Vladimir Putin pushing hard to keep Donald Trump in power.

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

The Russian government meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election in a variety of ways. Most consequential were the thefts of Democratic National Committee emails and their publication by WikiLeaks. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation documented the interference. A bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report confirmed it. No serious person doubts that the Russian campaign occurred, though few believe it tipped the election. And no serious person, except Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins, Jr., has attempted to dismiss it as a trivial matter.

“I was not shocked and still am not,” Jenkins wrote last month. “Since Czarist times, the Russian government has played such games, and was hardly going to adopt a self-denying ordinance now that the Internet was making them costless and effortless.”

A more knowledgeable account of the background to the Russian monkey business is to be found in The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal (Random House, 2019), by William Burns, former ambassador to  Russia (2005-08) and deputy secretary of state (2011-14).  Burns is currently president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and not to be confused with Nicholas Burns, a former ambassador to NATO (2001-05) and undersecretary of state for Political Affairs (2005-08), who is today a professor of practice at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

The formal end of the Cold War was engineered mainly by Secretary of State James Baker, who, in less than a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, negotiated Germany’s reunification as a member of NATO, in October 1990.  He convinced Soviet leaders that they would be safer with Germany inside the alliance than outside of it, free to acquire nuclear weapon. In talks with Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, Baker promised that NATO would not expand “one inch to the east” of Germany’s borders in the years ahead.

But Baker made the pledge before the breakup of the Soviet Union, in December 1991. Its leaders failed to get it in writing.  Bill Clinton won the 1992 election and, at the urging of Poland, Hungary and what was then Czechoslovakia began NATO enlargement soon thereafter.  Defense Secretary William Perry and strategist George Kennan warned of a fateful mistake in the offing; the Moscow embassy advised that “hostility to expansion is almost universally felt across the political spectrum.” Clinton waited until Russian President Boris Yeltsin and he had been re-elected, in 1996, then went ahead.

NATO’s intervention against Serbia in Kosovo, in 1999, left an especially bitter taste, with U.S. jets bombing Belgrade and a tense confrontation between Russian and NATO forces on the ground defused at the last moment.  Putin was appointed president of Russia in 1999 and elected the next year. George W. Bush was elected in 2000, and, for a little while, the mood was optimistic.  After 9/11, Putin’s hopes for a common front against terrorism, with Russian backing of the U.S. in Afghanistan and Washington supporting Moscow’s measures against Chechen rebels, were dashed (William Burns is especially good on why the U.S. declined), and Bush went ahead with plans to admit seven more Eastern European nations to NATO, including Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, former parts of the USSR. He barely mentions the second wave of expansion, which took place during NATO Ambassador Nicholas Burns’s  watch.)

In 2003. Putin sought without success to persuade Bush not to invade Iraq, but it was the U.S. failure to share information about a pending Chechen hostage-taking at a Russia school, according to Burns, that was a turning point in Putin’s view of the possibilities,. The raid ended with 394 deaths and dramatically altered Russia’s internal politics. In a speech in Munich, in 2007, Putin denounced   the United States for “having overstepped its national borders in every way.”

In 2008 Putin  warned Bush, in no uncertain terms, via Ambassador Burns, against broaching NATO membership for Ukraine. “There could be no doubt that Putin would fight back hard against any steps in the direction of membership” for either Georgia or Ukraine, Burns writes. In August, Russia undertook a walkover war against a secessionist province of Georgia. In the shadow of a growing financial crisis in the West, it was barely noticed. In 2014. U.S,. support for a 2014 Ukraine uprising aimed at joining the European Union instead of a Russian-backed economic alliance proved the breaking point.

Burns sums up his view of the history this way:

The expansion of NATO membership stayed on autopilot as a matter of U.S. policy long after its fundamental assumptions should have been reassessed. Commitments originally meant to reflect interests morphed into interests themselves and the door cracked open to membership for Georgia and Ukraine – the latter a bright red line for any Russian leadership. A Putin regime pumped up by years of high energy prices pushed back hard And even after Putin’s ruthless annexation of Crimea [in 2014] it proved difficult to imagine that he would stretch his score-settling into a systematic assault in the 2016 presidential election.

(I wrote a small book about all this, Because They Could: The Harvard-Russia Scandal (and NATO Expansion) after Twenty-Five Years (KDP, 2017). In The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War (Simon & Schuster, 2018), Benn Steil explained Russian dismay as arising from history and geography, not ideology.)

Why did Putin authorize the campaign? In Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle over American Power (Random House, 2016), veteran New York Times correspondent Mark Landler documented the animosity between Hillary Clinton and the Russian leader. It grew after, as secretary of state, Clinton engineered NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya; deepened considerably when  Putin accused her of interfering in his 2012 campaign for re-election to a third presidential term; and achieved new heights after demonstrations caused Ukraine’s president, a loyal ally, (and hopeless crook, let it be said) to flee to Moscow. Clinton was running for president by then. Passing out cookies to demonstrators in Kiev’s central square (and phoning instructions to the American embassy) was Clinton’s former spokesperson, Victoria Nuland, by then serving as under secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs.

What did Putin expect to happen in the unlikely event that Trump won?  Clearly the former KGB officer, who served abroad only in Germany before the Soviet Union came apart, doesn’t understand American society or politics very well. In May 2017 he secretly proposed through embassy channels an elaborate reset of relations, including digital-warfare-limitations talks. John Hudson’s story of the overture didn’t receive the degree of attention and elaboration that it deserved, presumably because Hudson was working for BuzzFeed at the time. Today he covers national security and the State Department for The Washington Post.

Since its annexation of Crimea and subsequent support for low-level war in eastern Ukraine, Russia has seemed to revert to its old ways.  An “imitation democracy” at home. Arrest or murder or attempted murder in Russia of Putin’s critics. State-sponsored assassinations of enemies abroad, in London, Berlin, Salisbury, England. Digital meddling in other nations’ affairs wherever it pleases, All of this blandly denied, and punctuated by regular claims of technological breakthroughs: hypersonic torpedoes and the first effective COVID-19 vaccine.

In Russia Without Putin: Money, Power, and the Myths of the New Cold War (Verso, 2018), journalist Tony Wood writes that such an account is unfair, ignoring the ways in which the West’s own actions have shaped Russia’s decisions.  After 1991, Wood writes, the Russian elite tended to see the country’s future as lying “either alongside or within” the G-8. Pro-Western sentiment started with Gorbachev and Yeltsin, but continued with Putin and [one-term President Dimitry] Medvedev much longer than is assumed by most Western commentators. Only after Ukraine was it replaced by a more combative approach, a geopolitical watershed.

So what next?  President Trump and his defenders at the editorial page of the WSJ have had almost nothing to say about any of this for four years. In Survival, a journal of global politics and strategy, Thomas Graham and Dimitri Trenin  last month described a “New Model for U.S.- Russian Relations” that seemed likely to  take hold if Joe Biden wins the presidency. Graham is a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations; Trenin is director of the Carnegie Moscow Center (I saw their essay only because I continue to follow David Johnson’s indispensable survey of coverage  of U.S.-Russia relations Johnson’s Russia List.)  They write:

To date, Russian and American experts disturbed by the sorry state of U.S.-Russian relations have sought ways to repair them, embracing old and inadequate models of cooperation or balance. The task, however, is to rethink them. We need to move beyond the current adversarial relationship, which runs too great a risk of accidental collision escalating to nuclear catastrophe, to one that promotes global stability, restrains competition within safe parameters and encourages needed cooperation against transnational threats.

The hard truth is that the aspirations for partnership that the two sides harbored at the end of the Cold War have evaporated irretrievably. The future is going to feature a mixed relationship of competition and cooperation, with the balance heavily tilted towards competition and much of the cooperation aimed at managing it.

The challenge is to prevent the rivalry from devolving into acute confrontation with the associated risk of nuclear cataclysm. In other words, the United States and Russia need to cooperate not to become friends, but to make their competition safer: a compelling and realistic incentive. The methods of managing great-power rivalry in the past 200 years – through balance-of-power mechanisms and, for brief periods, détente – are inadequate for the complexity of today’s world and the reality of substantial asymmetry between the United States and Russia. What might work is what we could call responsible great-power rivalry, grounded in enlightened restraint, leavened with collaboration on a narrow range of issues, and moderated by trilateral and multilateral formats. That is the new model for U.S.-Russian relations.

Meanwhile, in 2020 the Russians are at it again, according to U.S. intelligence officials. State-backed actors are using a variety of measures, including recorded and leaked telephone calls, to denigrate former Vice President Joe Biden and a Washington elite it perceived as anti-Russian.  That’s a job for the next secretary of state.  Here’s hoping that it will be William Burns.

David Warsh is a veteran columnist and an economic historian. He’s proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first ran.

David Warsh: The two Putins

As shocking as anything that Donald Trump said in Helsinki last week was Vladimir Putin’s emphatic claim that “the Russian state has never interfered, and is not going to interfere, into internal American affairs, including election processes.”

Just as there are two NATOs, there are two Vladimir Putins.  When U.S. policy didn’t change during his first eight years in office, Putin changed his own.  Gradually he became an antagonist – and a demonstrable liar.

Much of what I know about the Russian president I owe to Steven Lee Myer’s biography, The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin (Knopf, 2015), which, despite its tendentious title, is a first-rate book.  During seven years in Moscow for The New York Times, Myers lost all sympathy with his subject, and, by the end of the book, regards him as a little more than a megalomaniac, returning to the presidency in 2012 “with no clear purpose other than the exercise of power for its own sake.” That much, I think, is pretty clearly mistaken. But the bulk of Myers’s sensitive and extensive reporting permits the reader to reach a conclusion independent of the author.

As an officer in the KGB in the 1980s, watching the Soviet Union begin to fall apart, Putin learned much about the virtues of credibility. He was, for instance, unusually candid in the campaign manifesto, “Russia at the Turn of the Millennium,” that he published on the eve of replacing Boris Yeltsin, at the end of 1999. Russia’s economy had shrunk by half in the 1990s, he wrote; it was a tenth the size of the United States, then a fifth the size of China. Fifteen years of robust growth would be required just to reach the level of Spain or Portugal.

Putin wrote:

"For the first time in the past two hundred [or] three hundred years, [Russia] is facing the real threat of slipping down into the second, and possibly even third rank of world states. We are running out of time to avoid this.''

Putin took office as a conciliator, eager for economic integration with the West. He was the first to offer assistance to the Bush administration after 9/11. He did not object to a US base in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan to support the invasion of Afghanistan. He journeyed to Texas to visit George W. Bush at his Crawford ranch.

A series of disappointments followed. NATO continued a second round of expansion, admitting seven nations, including Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, former republics of the Soviet Union.  Putin flew to Germany and France to join them in their opposition to the invasion of Iraq, without success. The U.S. quietly supported the Orange and Rose Revolutions – westernizing movements in Ukraine and Georgia, and bruited those nations eventual entry into NATO.

Perhaps the most decisive development came when Chechen hostage-taking left 400 dead in the north Caucasus city of Beslan in September 2004. Afterwards, Putin blamed the U.S. for failing to work closely with Russia in cracking down on Chechen rebels.  All were terrorists in Moscow’s eyes; in Washington’s opinion, some were moderates with legitimate aspirations to independence.

Putin spoke out strongly in February 2007 in a speech to a security conference audience that included several American grandees.  The New World Order with “one master, one sovereign,” was increasing tensions, not diminishing them. “Unilateral and frequently illegitimate actions” were causing more deaths than  the bi-polar world that had existed before 1989, he said.

The next developments are familiar. A short war with Georgia in 2008 designed to emphasize its Finlandization in Moscow’s eyes.  President Obama’s appointment of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.  The Arab Spring and NATO’s intervention to remove the Qaddafi regime in Libya.  The beginnings of civil war in Syria. Putin’s decision to replace Dimitri Medvedev as president after the latter served a single term. Clinton’s support of election protests, and, above all, the events in Ukraine in 2014 that led to Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula.

Even then, Putin relied on the reputation he had built for candor, starting with  “Russia at the Turn of the Millennium.” The emotionally charged speech to both houses of the Russian parliament announcing the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula was analyzed and annotated by the BBC.  It stands up well as an act of persuasion to those who grant Moscow’s right to a Monroe Doctrine of its own. Even the pretense of the “little green men” who stage-managed the referendum by which Russia obtained the consent of the locals seems to fall within the penumbra of truth-telling. Nations aren’t expected to disclose orders of battle when going to war.

It was the downing of a Malaysian airliner by missile in eastern Ukraine that marked Putin’s departure from Western standards of credibility.  The Russian government denied any role in the in incident, in which 298 persons perished, but investigators concluded that only a senior Russian military commander could have ordered the sophisticated anti-aircraft system deployed to Ukraine.

It was the same thing again last week, when Putin denied that the Kremlin had sponsored a massive campaign of digital theft and political tinkering with U.S. social media in 2016. The Washington Post reported July 21 that Clemson University researchers had discovered that Russian operatives had spun out 18,000 tweets, at the rate of a dozen a minute, on the eve of Wikileaks’ first disclosures of emails stolen from Clinton’s campaign manager.

It’s not that Russian interference changed the election.  If any last-minute gambit was decisive, it was the incipient mutiny in the FBI’s New York office, for which former U.S. attorney and New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani served as the mouthpiece.  It’s that the Russian invasion of digital discourse was a flagrant violation of previous norms.  Presumably it arose from exasperation; undoubtedly it made matters worse.  But there is no reason to think that it changed the result of the election.  The fact remains that Trump won, 304 to 227 votes in the Electoral College. There will be another presidential election in little more than two years.

Apparently Trump hoped to return home from Helsinki with a written Russian promise that the government wouldn’t encourage or even allow such trespassing again, starting with the mid-term elections. “There was the idea that if Trump brought home such a guarantee, he would be seen as having scored a victory,” an unnamed Russian lawmaker told Demetri Sevastopulo and Kathrin Hille  of the Financial Times. “But the proposed text amounted to an admission of guilt.”

Twenty-seven years after the end of the Soviet Union, Russia and the United States are once again foes. This time the valences are reversed.  The U.S. is the expansionist power. It is Russia promulgating a doctrine of containment. Both nations are led by men who cannot be taken at their word. U.S. overreaching is not likely to continue indefinitely, any more than did Soviet behavior the last time around. But this much is already clear. Putin is a major figure in the history of his country.  Trump is slowly being disowned by his.

David Warsh, a longtime columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of economic principals.com. He's  based in Somerville, Mass.

John Peffer: Trump and Putin share hatred of liberal democracy and the E.U.

The European Parliament, in Strasbourg, France.

Via OtherWords.org

Donald Trump didn’t fly to Europe to meet with NATO, European leaders, and Russian President Vladimir Putin. He got there by stepping through the looking glass.

Once on the other side, he made a series of extraordinary statements.

He accused Germany of being “totally controlled by Russia.” He declared that the European Union is a “foe” of the United States. He told British Prime Minister Theresa May that she should sue the E.U. instead of negotiate with it.

And, just days after the U.S. intelligence community and special counsel Robert Mueller confirmed once again that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election with the aim of electing Trump, Trump said that he believed in Vladimir Putin’s claims of Russian innocence.

Why on earth would Trump embark on this surrealistic misadventure in foreign policy? Does Russia have some dirt on him?

Maybe. But whatever else is going on, Trump’s erratic behavior reflects a very specific worldview. Trump is attacking Europe and siding with Russia for political — and not just personal — reasons.

A segment of the U.S. right wing, which has now coalesced around Trump, has always been skeptical about Europe. It hates the social-democratic ideals baked into the European system. Indeed, any U.S. politician that leans in that direction inevitably gets branded a “European socialist.”

Then there are the more pacifist inclinations of Europe. Old hawks like Donald Rumsfeld famously railed against such E.U. stalwarts as France and Germany that opposed the U.S. misadventure in Iraq. (Remember “freedom fries”?)

These trends converge in the Euroskepticism expressed by media outlets like Fox News, a sentiment that heavily influenced the George W. Bush administration. To them, the European Union represented a kind of super-socialism that was spreading  and threatening U.S. global dominance.

The other major contribution to Trump’s worldview comes from Europe itself. Right-wing nationalist movements such as the Brexit campaign have tried to unravel the European Union.

These Euroskeptics view Brussels as an outside force trying to impose unwelcome regulations, immigrants, and political customs. For instance, the Polish and Hungarian governments are establishing illiberal regimes that challenge freedom of the press, judicial independence, and the free functioning of civil society the EU demands.

But there’s another strong Euroskeptic voice: Vladimir Putin.

Under Putin, Russia has supplied rhetorical and financial support for far-right wing parties throughout Europe — the National Front in France, the Freedom Party in Austria, the Northern League in Italy. Putin and the Euroskeptics are anti-immigrant and anti-liberal, and they favor nationalist and law-and-order policies.

But Putin also sees opportunity in Euroskepticism. A weaker E.U. won’t be able to attract new, post-Soviet members such as Ukraine or Moldova. A weaker E.U. will be more dependent on Russian energy exports. A weaker E.U. would have less power to criticize Russia’s political and foreign-policy conduct.

Which brings us back to Donald Trump.

The president has declared Europe an enemy because of its trade policies. But that’s just a red herring. He actually has a more systemic critique of the E.U. that coincides with the worldview of Vladimir Putin, Europe’s right-wing nationalists, and Euroskeptics among America’s conservatives.

This is very bad news. If the crisis in transatlantic relations were just about trade, it could be handled by some hardnosed negotiating. If the disputes with the EU and NATO were simply about Trump’s disruptive style, then everything could be resolved by a regime change at the polls in 2020.

But Trump has launched a much larger, ideological assault on European institutions and values. What’s worse: It’s part of the same attack on liberal values here in the United States.

Forget about NATO: Maybe we need a transatlantic alliance against Trump.

John Feffer wrote the dystopian novel Splinterlands and directs Foreign Policy In Focus, where a longer version of this piece appeared. 

David Warsh: Trump looks like a one-term president at this point

For a column that likes to look a little forward, the Trump presidency is a considerable roadblock. It won’t be possible to write with confidence about the American story until his administration is succeeded by the next. For that matter, Donald Trump himself can’t think very far ahead in these circumstances, and, while he improvises well, he is clearly  not a man accustomed to planning well into the future.

So the intriguing question for the moment remains, what happens if the then 74-year-old Trump declares victory and doesn’t run again?  What if he waits to announce, perhaps at the last possible moment, in July 2020, “I’ve accomplished what I was elected to do” and moves on to build his library?  Sixty-year-old Vice President Mike Pence  presumably would be more than ready to run.

It’s in this context that the latest developments should be understood – both his impending nomination of a second member to the Supreme Court and the planned trip to meet Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.  Both seem to me to bolster the likelihood that, when the time comes, Trump will prefer to be a one-term president rather than take his chances trying to win a second term.

There’s no arguing with the fact that Trump has a chance to influence the Supreme Court for another 20 to 25  years. But the course that any particular justice’s influence might take on a nine-person court is very hard to predict.  The Senate is narrowly divided and that will constrain the choice.  The president met June 28 at the White House with Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and the five senators whose votes will likely determine the fate of any nomination:  Republicans Susan Collins, of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska; and Democrats Joe Donnelley, of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp, of North Dakota, and Joe Manchin, of West Virginia,

As for the Helsinki meeting, Trump will talk to Putin about Syria and Iran, in hopes of finding some sort of mutual accommodation that might ratchet down the violence there. Some lifting of sanctions on trade will probably be part of the discussion. Putin may put back on the table the proposal for an across-the-board renormalization of relations that he privately transmitted through diplomatic channels last year.  Trump may choose to talk instead of the joint measures against election-tampering that he broached, then backed away from, a year ago. He promised to “talk about everything” when the two meet.  “Perhaps the world can de-escalate,” the president said. “We might be talking about some things President Obama lost.”

Obama’s foreign policy is not the issue. Even without Trump, American voters are probably returning to the realist, balance-of-power view of relations with Russia that dominated U.S. politics for the 45 years of the Cold War. The conviction that the United States is duty-bound to spread its values around the world, associated with Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, has been losing force everywhere but the Atlantic Council.

In this view, foreign policy towards Russia is a sideshow that will largely take care of itself. The real story is Trump himself. What got him elected was his tough talk on immigration and trade. What sustains his popularity, as best I can tell, is the very considerable set of skills he acquired as a reality-TV performer on The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice.  In this respect, Trump is like Ronald Reagan.

In every other respect, he is different. Reagan stressed alliances; Trump breaks them apart. Reagan was cheerful and friendly; Trump is a bully and a boor. Reagan made some bad appointments; Trump appointees have committed wholesale administrative vandalism. Reagan had confidence in the verdict of history; Trump makes war on it. The Iran-Contra hearings failed to seriously touch Reagan; the Mueller probe remains a dagger at the heart of Trump’s current term.

So see what happens in the November mid-term elections. Pay careful attention to polls next year.  Much depends on who wins the Democratic primaries. Then there will be the 2020 congressional elections to consider – what if the Dems take back both houses? Where would be the fun in that?  And, of course, keep an eye on the bond market, that harbinger of recession. It is always possible that Trump will run the table and, like Clinton, Bush, and Obama, settle into a second term more comfortable than the one before. I put the chances at one in three.

David Warsh, a Somerville, Mass.-based longtime columnist and economic historian, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com

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Not afraid of a challenge

This is Robert S. Mueller as a Marine lieutenant in 1968,  in Vietnam, at the height of the war there. Now, of course, he's the special prosecutor in the probe of the Trump circle's collusion with  the regime of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. He at least used to be a Republican.

David Warsh: A little-reported visit by the Russians

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

The story raised eyebrows in my circles.  Vladimir Putin had dispatched one of his diplomats to the State Department in April to deliver a bold proposal:  an across-the-board re-normalization of the many channels that had been severed after Moscow’s military interventions in Ukraine and Syria — diplomatic, military and intelligence.

“The broad scope of the Kremlin’s  reset plan came with an ambitious launch date,” wrote  John Hudson, a foreign-affairs reporter for Buzzfeed: “immediately.” In early May, President Trump received Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and its ambassador to the U.S.,, Sergey Kislyak, at the White House. The earlier overture remained secret until last week.

Johnson’s Russia List,  the most widely read agglomerater of news about Russia, circulated Hudson’s story.  Putin’s press secretary confirmed the authenticity of the offer at a news conference in Moscow. The White House and the State Department acknowledged the offer had been received but declined to tell Hudson who had delivered the offer.

The WSJ had replicated the  story and advanced it the next day: "Moscow Acknowledges Effort to Woo Donald Trump’s Administration''. For the next four  days, The New York Times and The Washington Post gave Hudson’s scoop a good leaving-alone.  

Instead, The Times continued reporting on its discovery of “a cyberarmy of bloggers posing as Americans and spreading propaganda and disinformation about an American electorate on Facebook, Twitter and other programs.” It front-paged a dispatch on Russian military exercises: “With War Games, Russia Creates a Fake Enemy, but Real Alarm.”  And it reported that the U.S. banned the use of Russian-made Kaspersky software on computers of federal agencies.   

The story seem likely to appear eventually, but two things already seem clear

Putin  thoroughly misunderstood the political situation in the United States  as of April, when he made its offer.

The editors of the The New York Times, have a great deal of explaining to do. Editors are curators of narratives. They are entitled to mull over the meaning of Hudson’s story.  But they also obligated to report news when it breaks. Much is to be learned from the lags.

  .                                              xxx

Another report likely to be in the news for months to come appeared this week. “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research.  Authors Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones,  Michael Webb, all of Stanford University; and John van Reenen, of MIT, answer unequivocally in the affirmative.  

“Across a broad range of case studies we find that [new] ideas — and in particular the exponential growth they imply — are getting harder and harder to find.”

Among the case studies were Moore’s Law, or computer performance per watt of electricity; agricultural crop yields; and mortality and life expectancy and the productivity of medical research.

Economic Principals is traveling and unable to pursue either story right now. Expect more in due course.

David Warsh, a veteran economic and political columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Greater Boston-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first ran.

David Warsh: 5 big issues wrapped around Russia

The fine new biography Mikhail Gorbachev: His Life and Times (Norton), by William Taubman, of Amherst College, is just what we don’t need today. An interesting and decent man, Gorbachev steered the Soviet Union into its transition in 1985, then made a mess of it, turning a collapsing economy over to Boris Yeltsin after an attempted coup in 1991. Recognized with a Nobel Prize for Peace, Gorby was a hero everywhere but his own country.

If you’re interested in the part that Gorbachev played in easing tensions between superpowers in the 1990s, read instead The End of the Cold War 1985-1991 (Public Affairs, 2015), by Robert Service. The high degree of trust and cooperation that unexpectedly developed between Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, and their seconds, Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze and Secretary of State George Shultz, is the real story.

Otherwise, lean forward and pay attention to the present day.

The manner of the recent closing of the Russian consulate in San Francisco and trade missions in Washington and New York, represented a significant escalation in the tit-for-tat diplomatic penalties of the last two years. This time the Russians were given two days to clear out before their San Francisco buildings were searched by U.S. security services – hence the black smoke emanating from the consulate fireplace.

Five quite different issues are wrapped up in almost every story about Russia these days.

1. Donald Trump’s unacceptability as president to a wide segment of the electorate is almost always present.

2. The possibility exists that members of the Trump family and some associated with the Trump campaign colluded with various Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton. That the president himself might have sought to obstruct an investigation of his campaign’s practices is the focus of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation for the Justice Department.

3. That Russian government-sponsored interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election took place, with a view to damaging the Clinton candidacy, now seems beyond doubt, though few believe it was decisive. Whatever went on is part of a much larger story about the advent of what has become known as hybrid warfare, pioneered by the United States, Russia, China, Iran, Israel, North Korea and various non-state terrorist groups. The Russians say that the U.S. employed its techniques in support of various “color revolutions” on Russia’s borders. The U.S. accuses Russia of all manner of tricks in, as one commentator for the government’s Radio Free Europe  puts it, “a widespread effort to undermine, corrupt, and cripple the institutions of liberal democratic governance” around the world.”

4. A loose coalition of interests is devoted to painting Vladimir Putin in the worst possible light, for one reason or another. The problems Russia faces building out its economy are thus obscured.  We could do with a good deal more economic and business coverage, in the manner of this story by Bloomberg’s Leonid Bershidsky, or this one, by Andrew Higgins, of The New York Times.

5. Finally, the military-industrial complex in the United States is quietly seeking to foment a new high-tech arms race. A new array of smaller tactical nuclear weapons is the latest hot-button issue.  Missile defense is a hardy perennial. And, of course, NATO remains the largest arms market in the world. There is even less coverage of this aspect of things.

Disentangling one element of the story from another takes plenty of time and focus.   The current fever will subside one day.  Let’s hope it doesn’t take a war to bring it down.

.                                                                 xxx

Economic Principals went off half-cocked three weeks ago when it sought to draw attention to the presumed availability of Federal Reserve Board vice chair Stanley Fischer to replace Janet Yellen should she be denied the opportunity – or prefer not to serve – a second term as chair

Fischer resigned last week after three years as a member of the board of governors, citing “personal reasons.”  Fed-watcher Tim Duy speculated that “a serious health issue” may be involved. May blessings attend the Fischer family.  He would have made a terrific chair.

David Warsh, proprietor of economicprincipals.com, is an economic historian and veteran journalist.

PCFR and Putin; Macron update; U.S. & China to war? Backstabbers

Russia troops march in 2015 military parade in Moscow.

To members and friends of the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org; pcfremail@gmail.com).

For news about non-PCFR  local events and an article or two that caught our eyes, please go to the bottom of this memo.

Meanwhile, with Russian intrusion into American politics and government such an issue, we thought it would a good idea to recruit a Russia expert to start off our season. Thus we have the distinguished Prof. David R. Stone of the U.S. Naval War College lined up for Wednesday, Sept. 13.

He'll explain Putin and the new Russian nationalism and how it affects us.

Professor Stone received his B.A. in history and mathematics from Wabash College and his Ph.D in history from Yale University. He has taught at Hamilton College and at Kansas State University, where he served as director of the Institute for Military History. He has also been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. His first book Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union, 1926-1933 (2000) won the Shulman Prize of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies and the Best First Book Prize of the Historical Society. He has also published A Military History of Russia: From Ivan the Terrible to the War in Chechnya (2006), and The Russian Army in the Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 (2015). He also edited The Soviet Union at War, 1941-1945 (2010). He is the author of several dozen articles and book chapters on Russian / Soviet military history and foreign policy.

The next dinner after that will be with French Consul General Valery Freland, who will talk about how the French presidential-election outcome might change that nation’s foreign policy and the Western Alliance, on Wednesday, Sept. 27. By the way, he went to school with French President Macron.

Then on Wednesday, Oct. 11, Graham Allison, who has been running Harvard’s Belfer Institute, will talk about, among other things, Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea. He'll talk about his new book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? 

On Wednesday, Nov. 1, comes Michael Soussan, the writer and skeptic about the United Nations. He’s the author of, among other things, Backstabbing for Beginners, about his experiences in Iraq, which is being made into a movie starring Ben Kingsley.

In January, at a date to be announced, we’ll have Victoria Bruce, author of Sellout: How Washington Gave Away America's Technological Soul, and One Man's Fight to Bring It Home. This is about, among other things, China’s monopolization of rare earths, which are essential in electronics.

On Wednesday, Feb. 21, we'll have Dan Strechay, the U.S. representative for outreach and engagement at the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), who talk about the massive deforestation and socio-economic effects associated with producing palm oil in the Developing World and what to do about them. 

Prior to joining the RSPO, he was the senior manager for Sustainability Communications for PepsiCo.

The dates of the dinners for the rest of the season to be announced.

Suggestions for speakers and topics are always much appreciated. We’re all in this together.

In other news:

For movies and other upcoming events about Brazil at Brown’s Watson Institute, see:

 http://watson.brown.edu/events/series/brazil-initiative

Hear Edward Luce talk about the decline of Western liberalism:

http://watson.brown.edu/events/2017/edward-luce-retreat-western-liberalism

Former Timor Leste President Xanana Gusmao will speak on Monday, Sept. 18 at the Pell Center at Salve Regina University, Newport. The event will begin at 11 A. M. 

Timor Leste itself is at a crossroads. The clock is winding down on a novel test of dispute resolution, a first-time effort under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) to settle a maritime boundary dispute not through arbitration, but through mediation. The principals in this dispute are the young democracy of Timor-Leste and its neighbor, Australia.

Meanwhile, scary North Korean news. See:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2017/sep/03/north-korea-nuclear-test-south-korea-yohap-kim-jong-un-live

President Macron may actually succeed in fixing French labor law. See:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/emmanuel-macron-scores-a-win-where-presidents-failed-to-overhaul-frances-labor-laws/2017/09/01/049c9222-8f14-11e7-9c53-6a169beb0953_story.html?utm_term=.40828bb11738

David Warsh: Of 'guardians' and 'commerce-seekers'

It’s not easy to find a disinterested and well-informed view of the Russian economy these days. I don’t know a better source among economists than Kenneth Rogoff, of Harvard University.

The former chief economist of the IMF (2001-03) has no axe to grind as far as I can tell, beyond a certain taste for good housekeeping and global order. (His wife, Natasha Lance Rogoff, produced Sesame Street for Russian television in the Nineties.) An early diagnostician of the severity of the 2008 financial crisis, he was author, with fellow Harvard professor Carmen Reinhart, of This Time Is Different (Princeton, 2009).  As a reformer, he wants to rein in on cash, especially $100 bills.  Rogoff wrote up a recent estimate of Russia for Project Syndicate, a source of op-ed articles by economists.

He made two basic points.

The first is that 25 years after the Soviet Union came apart, Russia remains a victim of the resource curse, and therefore highly vulnerable to the cycle of commodity prices. The great preponderance of its foreign earnings come from the export of oil and gas. With the price of a barrel of oil at $119 Russia was riding high as Dimitri Medvedev completed his sole term as president, in February 2012.

Vladimir Putin began his third term just as the cycle turned down. The price of oilfell to $27 a barrel in 2016.  A deep recession accompanied the plunge, comparable to what the US suffered in 2008-09, Rogoff wrote, with real output contracting 4 percent.  The ruble fell by half against the dollar, forcing consumers to cut back sharply. The Ukraine crisis welled up halfway through the downturn:  Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych fled to Moscow;  the annexation of Crimea followed, and brought U.S. and European sanctions that exacerbated the recession, as least somewhat.

That Russia avoided a financial crisis, Rogoff wrote, owed largely to the efforts of the Central Bank of Russia, and its governor, Elvira Nabiullina. Despite strenuous objections by various oligarchs, she kept interest rates high to control inflation (cut from 15 percent to 4 percent) and forced banks to raise capital and write down loans (at least the smaller, less politically-connected banks). Twice Nabiullina has been cited by the trade press as central banker of the year. Putin reappointed her in March to a second five-year term.

Rogoff’s second point: Russia suffers from the failure to diversify its economy. The price of oil is back to around $50 a barrel but growth prospects for the year are barely 2 percent. The Economist reported last week that Daimler-Benz broke ground on a new Mercedes-Benz plant northwest of Moscow — the first such foreign automaker investment since sanctions were imposed three years ago.

Russian media blame the sanctions, Rogoff wrote, but far more pervasive are the problems identified by economist Sergei Guriev – weak institutions, courts inparticular. Guriev, head of Moscow’s prestigious New School of Economics, fled in 2013 rather than risk retribution for his opposition to Putin’s third presidential term. He is today chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. “Without reform” wrote Rogoff, “there is little reason to be optimistic about Russia’s long-term growth trend… despite having an enormously talented and creative population.”

I have a lot of sympathy for central bankers. In principle, and sometimes in practice, they are among the most importantan protectors of social order. Reading about Nabiullina, whose contributions Putin underscores by regularly referring to her in public by her first name, I realized the extent to which I see the story of Russia’s transition through the eyes of Jane Jacobs, the American-born Canadian social philosopher.

In her last major book, Systems of Survival:A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (Random House, 1992), Jacobs distinguished between two different and distinct ethical systems – syndromes, she called them – that had evolved over millennia to govern human conduct in different spheres of life.

Guardians (a term she took from Plato) are custodians of the political order – leaders, priests, soldiers, police, bureaucrats and, yes, central bankers. An extensive commercial class called the bourgeoisie has grown up in the last several hundred years as well — traders, or commerce-seekers, in Jacobs’s terminology, as opposed to guardians.  The two ways of life are essentially incompatible. Problems arise when one moral code or another gets too much of an upper hand in society; or when values are commingled.

Jacobs enumerated aspects of the two codes:

Guardians shun trading, exert prowess, cherish obedience and discipline, adhere to tradition, respect hierarchy, prize loyalty, take vengeance, deceive for the sake of the task, embrace leisure, dispense largesse, behave ostentatiously, remain exclusive, show fortitude, remain fatalistic, and treasure honor.

Commerce-seekers shun force, compete, prize efficiency, are open to inventiveness and novelty, use initiative and enterprise, come to voluntary agreements, respect contracts, dissent for the sake of the task, are industrious, thrifty, invest for productive purposes, collaborate easily with strangers and aliens, promote comfort and convenience, are optimistic, honest.

Russia has been investing heavily in its guardian class since 1993 – the men and women of power known as siloviki.  What chance is there that leaders who already recognize the necessity of a rising commercial class will accommodate it with new ways and institutions in the future – sooner or later?   Pretty good, I’d say. But what a lot of tension in the meantime!

.                                                        xxx

Marshall Goldman, a mainstay of the Wellesley College Department of Economics for several decades, died last week, at 87.  He was well known, too, as an expert on the mysteries of the USSR’s centrally-planned economy, appearing frequently on television. As a member of Harvard’s Russian Research Center, he wrote six books about the Soviet transition

Goldman had one major scoop as a Sovietolgist, according to David Engerman, of Brandeis University:  The USSR in Crisis (Norton 1983) broke the news and galvanized the public debate about the future of the Soviet Union, just as the Reagan arms build-up reached its peak. Goldman followed up with five more books, concluding with Petrostate: Putin, Power, and the New Russia (Oxford, 2012). Those six books constitue an indelible record of what we knew (and thought we knew) and how we knew it (or didn’t) — a first-rate first draft of the history of those years.

David Warsh is proprietor of economicprincipals. com, where this first ran.

David Warsh: On Russia, Trump hoisted on the Democrats' petard

A few months after Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula, in 2014, Foreign Affairs conducted an illuminating exchange of views. It is as good a place as any to begin to retrace the steps that brought us to the present day “Russia crisis.” It is always a good idea to go back to the beginning when you are lost.

John Mearsheimer, of the University of Chicago, wrote “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions that Provoked Putin.  Michael McFaul, advisor to President Barack Obama, back at Stanford after a two-year stint as ambassador to Moscow, argued that the takeover had been “Moscow’s Choice: Who Started the Ukraine Crisis.”  Alexander Lukin, vice president of the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, described “What the Kremlin Is Thinking: Putin’s Vision for Eurasia.” (Foreign Affairs allows non-subscribers only one free article a month, so choose your link carefully.)

Mearsheimer, 69, the leading expositor (after Henry Kissinger, 94) of what is commonly called the realist view in international affairs, described a triple package of encroachment:  NATO enlargement, European Union expansion, and aggressive democracy promotion.  Of these, NATO was the “taproot” of the trouble. Putin’s actions should be easy to comprehend, he wrote, especially for those who remembered Russian experiences with Napoleonic France (in 1812), imperial Germany (in World War I) and Nazi Germany (in World War II). He continued,

No Russian leader would tolerate [NATO], a military alliance that was Moscow’s mortal enemy until recently, moving into Ukraine. Nor would any Russian leader stand idly by while the West helped install a government there that was determined to integrate Ukraine into the West…. After all, the United States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in the Western hemisphere, much less on its borders. Imagine the outrage in Washington if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico in it.''

McFaul, 53, an expositor of the liberal view of foreign affairs, responded in the next issue. If Russia was really opposed to NATO expansion, why didn’t it raise  a stink after 1999, when NATO expansion began?  Hadn’t Russian president Dimitri Mededev permitted the U.S. to continue to operate its airbase in Kyrgyzstan?  Hadn’t he tacitly acquiesced to NATO intervention in Libya?

"In the five years that I served in the Obama administration, I attended almost every meeting Obama held with Putin and Medvedev, and, for three of those years, while working at the While House, I listened in on every phone conversation, and I cannot remember NATO expansion ever coming up.''

The real reason for the annexation, McFaul wrote, had to do with internal Russian politics. Putin needed to cast the US as an enemy in order to discredit those who opposed his election to a third presidential term.  He feared a “color revolution,” like the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine in 2004, might force him from power.

Mearsheimer wasn’t impressed:  And to argue that Russian opposition was based on “resentment,” as had former Bill Clinton adviser Stephen Sestanovich, 67, in a companion piece, “How the West Has Won,”  was to miss the point.  Russia was worried about its border.

"Great powers always worry about the balance of power in their neighborhoods and push back when other great powers march up to their doorstep. This is why the United States adopted the Monroe Doctrine in the early nineteenth century and why it has repeatedly used military force and covert action to shape political events in the Western Hemisphere.''

Meanwhile, Lukin, the Kremlin insider, had already reminded readers of the gauzy view of Russia that had taken hold in America after 1993.  Gradually Russia would embrace Western-style democracy at home and cease to pose a threat to the security of its former satellites. It would accept Western leadership in economic affairs.  And it would recognize that various tough treatment of its one-time allies – Serbia, Libya, Iraq, and Iran – was the legitimate exercise of Western leadership in global affairs. Lukin wrote:

"The ongoing crisis in Ukraine has finally put an end to this fantasy.   In annexing Crimea, Moscow decisively rejected the West’s rules and in the process shattered many flawed Western assumptions about its motivations.  US and European officials need a new paradigm for how to think about Russian foreign policy – and if they want to resolve the Ukraine crisis and prevent similar ones from occurring in the future, they need to get better at putting themselves in Moscow’s shoes.''

What Putin had in mind, Lukin wrote, was the formation of a Eurasian Union, similar to the European Union but not particularly a rival to it, linking the economies of Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Ukraine.

"The concept of a Eurasian space or identity first arose among Russian philosophers and historians who emigrated from communist Russia to Western Europe in  the 1920s. Like Russian Slavophiles before them, advocates of Eurasianism spoke of the special nature of Russian civilization and its differences from European society; but they gazed in a different direction. Whereas earlier Slavophiles emphasized Slavic unity and contrasted European individualism with the collectivism of Russian peasant communities, the Eurasians linked the Russian people to the Turkic-speaking people, or 'Turanians,' of the Central Asian Steppe.''

The differences of opinion had been clearly set out.

That was three years ago. You know the rest. Escalating sanctions on Russia from the West, especially the US.  From Russia, increasing bellicosity.

Since he was elected, Donald Trump has been hoist on a petard largely of the Democratic Party’s making, going back to Bill Clinton’s decision to press for NATO expansion in 1994. Enlargement was forcefully opposed by other Democrats in 1996, but to no avail.  Clinton went ahead. George W. Bush and Obama continued in the same groove.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to say a kind word about Trump.  He first came by his views of Russia from well-heeled Russian customers for his real estate developments.  And I am only mildly sympathetic to Putin’s problems.  We have enough of our own.

The good news is that Trump has appointed two sensible realists who know a thing or two about Russia:  Rex Tillerson Secretary of State and, the other week, Jon Huntsman as ambassador to Russia.  It is the beginning of a long journey back to common sense.

David Warsh is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this first ran. He is a long-time columnist and economic historian.