David Warsh: Sachs, Ukraine and the Harvard caper

Jeffrey Sachs

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

It is hard to feel much sympathy for Jack Teixeira, the Air National Guardsman from North Dighton, Mass., who is accused of sharing top-secret U.S. government documents with his obscure online gaming group. It was from there that, predictably, the secrets gradually slipped out into the larger world. Still, the news story that caught my attention was one in which a friend from the original game-group explained to a Washington Post reporter what he understood to have been the 21-year-old guardsman’s motivation.

The friend recalled that Teixeira started sharing classified documents on the Discord server around February 2022, at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, which he saw as a “depressing” battle between “two countries that should have more in common than keeping them apart.” Sharing the classified documents was meant “to educate people who he thought were his friends and could be trusted” free from the propaganda swirling outside, the friend said. The men and boys on the server agreed never to share the documents outside the server, since they might harm U.S. interests.

The opinion of a callow 21-year-old scarcely matters, at least on the surface of it. Discussions will quickly shift to the significance of the leaked information itself.  Comparisons will be made of Teixeira’s standing as a witness to government policy, and judge of it, relative to others of similar ilk: Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Reality Winner.

But Teixeira’s opinion interested me mainly because it mirrored views increasingly under discussion at all levels of American civil society. I thought immediately, for instance, of Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University.  Sachs is not widely understood to be involved in the story of the war in Ukraine.  But since 2020, and the death of Stephen F. Cohen, of New York University, Sachs has become the leading university-based  critic of America’s role in fomenting the war.

On Feb. 21, Sachs appeared before a United Nations session to present a review of the mysteries surrounding the destruction of Russia’s nearly complete Nord Stream 2 pipeline last September. The consequences were “enormous,” he  said, before calling attention to an account by independent journalist Seymour Hersh that ascribed the sabotage to a secret American mission authorized by President Biden.

Despite a history of previous investigative-reporting successes (My Lai massacre, Watergate details, Abu Graib prison), Hersh’s somewhat hazily sourced story was not taken up by leading American dailies. In an apparent response to the attention given to Sachs’s endorsement of it, however, national-security sources in Washington and Berlin soon surfaced stories of their investigation of a mysterious yacht, charted from a Polish port, possibly by Ukrainian nationals, that might have carried out the difficult mission. Hersh responded forcefully to the “ghost ship” stories in due course.  

Then on Feb. 28, at a time when English-language newspapers were writing about the year since Russia had boldly launched an all-out invasion of Ukraine, Sachs published on his Web site his own version of the story. “The Ninth Anniversary of the Ukraine War’’ is a concise account of Ukrainian politics since 2010.  Especially interesting is Sachs’s analysis of U.S. involvement:

During his presidency {of Ukraine} (2010-2014), {Viktor} Yanukovych sought military neutrality, precisely to avoid a civil war or proxy war in Ukraine. This was a very wise and prudent choice for Ukraine, but it stood in the way of the U.S. neoconservative obsession with NATO enlargement. When protests broke out against Yanukovych at the end of 2013 upon the delay of the signing of an accession roadmap with the EU, the United States took the opportunity to escalate the protests into a coup, which culminated in Yanukovych’s overthrow in February 2014. 

The US meddled relentlessly and covertly in the protests, urging them onward even as right-wing Ukrainian nationalist paramilitaries entered the scene.  US NGOs spent vast sums to finance the protests and the eventual overthrow.  This NGO financing has never come to light. 

Three people intimately involved in the US effort to overthrow Yanukovych were Victoria Nuland, then the Assistant Secretary of State, now Under-Secretary of State; Jake Sullivan, then the security advisor to VP Joe Biden, and now the US National Security Advisor to President Biden; and VP Biden, now President.  Nuland was famously caught on the phone with the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, planning the next government in Ukraine, and without allowing any second thoughts by the Europeans (“Fuck the EU,” in Nuland’s crude phrase caught on tape).

So, who is Jeffrey Sachs, anyway, and what does he know? It’s a long story. His Wikipedia entry tell you some of it. What follows is a part of the story Wiki leaves out.

Sachs was born in 1954. Having grown up in Michigan, the son of a labor lawyer and a full-time mother, he graduated from Harvard College in 1976.  As a Harvard graduate student, he soon found a rival in Lawrence Summers, the nephew of two Nobel-laureate economists, who had graduated the year before from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 Sachs completed his PhD in three years, after being appointed a Junior Fellow, 1978-81. Harvard Prof. Martin Feldstein supervised his dissertation, and, three years later, supervised Summers as well. Both were appointed full professors in 1983, at 28, among the youngest ever to achieve that position at Harvard. Sachs collaborated with economic historian Barry Eichengreen on a famous study of the gold standard and exchange rates during the Great Depression. Summers was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 1985, Sachs the following year.

Summers went to Washington in 1982, to serve for a year in the Council of Economic Advisers under CEA chairman Feldstein; in 1985, Sachs was invite to advise the government of Bolivia on its stabilization program.  After success there, he was hired by the government of Poland to do the same thing: he was generally considered to have succeeded. In 1988, Summers advised Michael Dukakis’s presidential campaign; in 1992, he joined Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. Sachs became director of the Harvard Institute for International Development.

In the early 1990s, Sachs was invited by Boris Yeltsin to advise the government of the soon-to-be-former Soviet Union on its transition to market economy.  Here the details are hazy.  Clinton was elected in November 1992. During the transfer of power, another young Harvard professor, Andrei Shleifer, was appointed to run a USAID contract awarded to Harvard to formally offer advice, thus elbowing aside Sachs, his titular boss.  Shleifer had been born in the Soviet Union, in 1962; arriving with his scientist parents in the US in 1977. As a Harvard sophomore, he met Summers first in 1980, becoming Summers’ protégé, and, later, his best friend.

In 1997, USAID suspended Harvard’s contract, alleging that Shleifer, two of his deputies, and his bond-trader wife, Nancy Zimmerman, had abused their official positions to seek private gain. Specifically, they had become the first to receive a license from their Russian counterparts to enter the Russian mutual fund business, at a critical moment, as Yeltsin campaign for election to a second term.  A week later Sachs fired Shleifer, and the project collapsed. Stories in The Wall Street Journal played a key role. And two years later, the U.S. Department of Justice file suit against Harvard and Shleifer, seeking treble damages for breach of contract. All this is describe in Because They Could: The Harvard Russia Scandal (and NATO Enlargement) after Twenty-Five Years, a book I dashed off after 2016 as I was turning my hand from one project to another.

Soon after the government file its suit, George W. Bush defeated Al Gore in the “hanging chad” election of 2000, and a few months after that, Harvard hired former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers as its president. Harvard lost is case in 2004 in 2005, and Summers’s defense under oath of Schleifer’s conduct played a role – who knows how great? – in Summers’s overdetermined decision to resign his presidency in 2006.  By then, Sachs had long since decided to leave Harvard. In 2002, after 25 years in Cambridge, he became director of Columbia University’s newly established Earth Institute, uprooting the pediatric practice of his physician wife as part of the move.

Sachs was always reluctant to talk about Harvard’s Russia caper. I haven’t spoken to him in 27 years. At Columbia, he enjoyed four-star rank, both in Manhattan, and in much of the rest of the world, serving for 16 years as a special adviser to the UN’s Secretary General, beginning with Kofi Annan.  Time put his book, The End of Poverty,: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, on its cover; Vanity Fair’s Nina Munk published The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, in 2013; glowing blurbs, from Harvard’s University’s Dani Rodrik and Amartya Sen, attested to his standing in the meliorist wing of the profession. In 2020, Sachs became involved, with a virologist colleague, in the COVID “lab-link” controversy, first on one side, then on the other.  His stance on the Ukraine war had earned him plenty of criticism.

Sachs will turn 70 next year. He stepped down from the Earth Institute in 2016.  As a university professor at Columbia, he teaches whatever he pleases. He writes mainly on his own web page, where he is always worth reading. But he is spread too thin there to influence more than occasionally the on-going newspaper story of the war.  As a life-long dopplegänger to Larry Summers, however, Sachs casts a very long shadow indeed.

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

Warren Getler: Constantine Menges and the threat from the Russia-China axis

Constantine Menges (1939-2004)

While China last week floated a relative non-starter of a peace plan to end Russia's unprovoked war in Ukraine, Beijing at the same time is reported to be preparing the sale of artillery shells and other munitions to Moscow. We take a look at the current dynamic through the lens of the late Constantine Menges, a former senior national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan.

Sometime in the next couple of months, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is expected to land in Moscow to meet with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. That meeting could push world events toward a negotiated settlement in the war in Ukraine; or, more likely, it could lead to a prolongation of that year-long conflagration through the supply of Chinese-made offensive weaponry to the struggling Russian military.

Whatever the outcome, the Xi-Putin meeting exemplifies a further solidification of the post-Soviet Russian-China alliance, something which my late neighbor and U.S. presidential adviser, Constantine Menges, predicted would take hold with a vengeance and would threaten U.S. national security interests on an unprecedented scale.

Those predictions date back some 20 years, and they seem to be very much worth addressing amid the current geopolitical landscape. We ignore Menges at our peril.

In Washington-area policy circles, Menges (who worked in senior roles at the White House and the CIA) was known for being both persistent and prescient. “Constant Menace” was his light-hearted handle among those who respected his analytic skills and his passion for putting views forward on how to best protect U.S. national security and economic interests in an emergent tri-lateral world.

Menges, who died of cancer in 2004, made it his dying wish to his wife, Nancy, that his deeply researched work, China: The Gathering Threat, be published posthumously. Today, it’s extremely hard to find the book (published by Nelson Current in 2005,) and its ranking on Amazon is, sadly, way back in the dusty-shelf space.

Yet Menges’s unquestionably powerful and illuminating tome stands as the potential successor to statesman George F. Kennan’s remarkable article published under the pseudonym “X” in Foreign Affairs in July 1947. Kennan’s article, urging containment of the Soviet Union, set a course for U.S. foreign policy – rigorous Cold War policy -- in the immediate wake of World War II and throughout the closing decades of the last century. Menges’s overlooked work, which goes to the “big picture” kind of thinking that is often absent from today’s debates, should set descriptive swim-lanes for U.S. foreign, economic and military policy in the years running up to 2050. Kennan’s seminal article, entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” clearly has its 21st Century match in Menges’s work, a richly footnoted book that focuses in excruciating detail on the sources of post-Soviet Russian conduct and associated Chinese conduct on the world stage.

In these times of heightened geopolitical uncertainty amid the ongoing tragedy in Ukraine, I’m reminded of the over-the-fence talks in Georgetown I had in the early 2000s with Dr. Menges: about the new Russian leader, Putin, and about the emergent economic powerhouse, China.

Menges, in his quiet professorial way, would assert that while Middle East turmoil and state-sponsored terrorism would provide major challenges to American and Western interests, the “long-game” had to be focused on what he described as the coming dualistic challenge from both the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation, working in concert with each other.

Menges’s prescriptive book, written in 2004, lays out these key points, foreshadowing the current state of play.

*America’s most strategic challenge:  the “China-Russia strategic axis is explicitly intended to counter the United States around the world and provide the basis for a still undefined ‘new political and economic order’ that China has declared to be a major global objective and which Putin endorsed at his first summit,” with the then Chinese leadership some 20 years ago.

*The “China-Russia strategic axis makes the world more dangerous. For the first time in forty years, the U.S. faces these nuclear-armed major powers coordinating their international actions or secretly providing each other with military guarantees in the event of conflict with the U.S. or other countries.”

*China’s ultimate goal is “regional dominance,” including the South China Sea zone of influence, leading to potential hemispheric dominance stretching to Europe through both economic muscle (direct investment) and military presence. Taiwan – the forever hot-button target -- sits in the cross-hairs of China’s growing shore-based phalanx of ballistic-missile systems, and the U.S. strategic response to an invasion by Beijing remains less than certain.

*Putin, “since assuming the presidency of Russia ….in 2000, is an intelligent, disciplined and systematic leader. He has said Russia should become a ‘strong state’ under a ‘dictatorship of law’ and that it must again play a major role in world affairs.”

*Russia “now stands precariously at the crossroads of a democratic or autocratic future. Which road Russia chooses will have historic and long-term consequences for the United States. The path favored by China and hardline elements in Russia could well plunge the U.S. back into a replay of the darkest days of the Cold War.”

We should read Menges, dive into his probing analysis of the inner-thinking of the hard-boiled Tier 1 autocrats in Beijing and Moscow over the past half-century. And, most important, we should listen to his call to action: “It’s time to get serious about strategy toward China and Russia and about geopolitics. The United States ‘must manage the peace,’ in confronting an expansionist Russia and “the rising, globally active, nuclear-armed and increasingly wealthy Communist regime in China.”

This upcoming summit in Moscow, a tete-a-tete of the world’s top two “autocrats for life,” is of critical significance for peace in Europe and beyond.

If the summit’s true agenda is to prolong the war in Ukraine through advanced-weapon supplies from Beijing to Russian troops, it would severely deepen the suffering of the Ukrainian people and heighten the risks of an even broader war beyond current battlelines.

Putin, playing his China card like never before, would gain immensely from Chinese arms deliveries through a renewed ability to prosecute an invasion that keeps him in power as long as he is seen as having the upper hand on the battleground (currently very much in question by all observers.) Xi, in turn, would gain by keeping the global media’s focus on the hot war on Europe’s edge while quietly and steadily increasing the People’s Liberation Army presence in and around Taiwan and the South China Sea disputed territories.

How the Biden administration, and future U.S. administrations, deal with the “long-game” China-Russia challenge is first among priorities for America and the West. We would do well to consider the prescient wisdom of Dr. Menges, one of the key architects of the Reagan Doctrine and a most-thoughtful “framework” practitioner of big-picture foreign, economic and military policy.

Warren Getler, based in Washington, D.C., writes on foreign and military affairs. He has worked as a journalist at Foreign Affairs Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News.

David Warsh: About ‘The Untold Story of Russiagate’

Trump campaign manager and pro-Russia operator at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

In the summer of 2016, somebody, perhaps Vladimir Putin himself, sketched a peace plan for Ukraine. The provenance of the proposal remains deliberately vague. Had the suggestion been accepted, it would have avoided Russia’s war on its neighbor five years later. The so-called “Mariupol plan,” named for eastern Ukraine’s largest industrial city, would have split off four prosperous Donbass counties to form an autonomous republic, to be led by Viktor Yanukovych, the deposed president of Ukraine who had fled Kyiv for Russia two years before. In effect: East and West Ukraine

The trouble is, the proposal was conveyed, via intermediaries, amid elaborate secrecy, to just one man, U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump.  Rival candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former secretary of state, would certainly reject the plan were she to be elected. So the loosely worded proffer was said to be enhanced by a sweetener: Russia would take a hand in the American election, denigrating Clinton through a massive hacking campaign.

That’s the burden of a Sunday magazine article in Nov. 6 The New York Times Magazine: “The Untold Story of ‘Russiagate’ and the Road to War in Ukraine,” by reporter Jim Rutenberg.  It is a long and complicated tale, and sticks closely the NYT’s editorial position: that Russia’s war was unprovoked by NATO expansion.

In fact, the story of the  “Grand Havana Room meeting,” atop 666 Fifth Ave. in Manhattan,  between Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort , and Konstantin Kilimnik, manager of Manafort’s international consulting office in Kyiv, has been told before, though never as  concisely as has Rutenberg:  by the Mueller Report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, the thousand-page Senate Intelligence Committee report, and by The Atlantic’s George Packer in his review of Andrew Weissmann’s book about his service as a top aide to former FBI director Robert Mueller, Where the Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation.

Ruteberg drew on these accounts, and on his own reporting, in a mostly successful attempt to connect two narratives. “Thrumming below the whole (U.S.) election saga was another story – about Ukraine’s efforts to establish a modern democracy….”

From the platform battles of the Republican National Convention to the turmoil of the transition to the first impeachment, the main business of the Trump presidency all had to do with Ukraine. “Even now” he writes, “some influential voices in American politics, mostly but not entirely on the right, are suggesting that Ukraine make concessions of sovereignty similar to those contained in Kilimnik’s plan, which the nation’s leaders categorically reject.”

I was especially struck when I came across this passage:

As [Paul] Manafort rose to become Trump’s campaign chairman – and as Russian operatives were hacking Democratic Party servers – the candidate took stances on the region that were advantageous to Putin’s ambitions for Ukraine. Ahead of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July, Trump shocked the American foreign-policy establishment by voicing only tepid support for NATO. He also told aides that he didn’t believe it was worth risking “World War III” to defend Ukraine against Russia, according to the Senate intelligence report released in the summer of 2020.

That was, I thought, Trump in a nutshell. Candid, shrewd, perhaps even wise… and profoundly dishonest. After all, Manafort was a veteran political operative, who had served in the Reagan administration until leaving to form a foreign-relations consulting firm with his friend Roger Stone. He had been deeply involved in Ukrainian politics, mostly with pro-Russian factions, for more than a decade.  What in the world was he doing suddenly showing up as Trump’s campaign manager barely two months before the election?

Three weeks after the convention, Manafort was forced to resign, after his name turned up on a suspicious Ukrainian payroll ledger. Starting in 2017, he was charged with multiple felonies, and convicted of many of them, Trump pardoned him in December 2020.

Rutenberg’s story reinforced my conviction that the endless harping of the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal on “the Steele dossier” and Special Counsel John Durham’s lengthy investigation of FBI methods in dealing with it were red herrings of the first order.  The investigations that began even before Trump took office had almost nothing to do with the discredited campaign documents. The various probes were motivated by suspicions of extensive conflicts of interest, and the fact that his campaign and presidency were chock-full of persons who had done business with Russia.

It matters because, not for the only time, Trump’s political instincts were canny, reflecting the unarticulated preferences of many American voters, perhaps a majority, to live in a peaceful, if imperfect world. Had Trump been able to do a deal with Putin along the lines of the Mariupol plan, many Ukrainian and Russian lives would have been saved. Trump almost certainly would have been re-elected, American democracy would have been further damaged, perhaps irreparably. Things turned out as they should have, at least until Russia invaded Ukraine. .

That is emphatically not to say that peace negotiations shouldn’t be pursued in this dreadful war.  Republican opposition to continuing high levels of aid to Ukraine is growing, according to recent polls. Fifty-seven Republican congressmen and eleven senators voted against Biden’s $40 billion aid package earlier this year. New positions in both parties will take shape after the mid-term elections.

Meanwhile, Axios reports that Trump is eager to announce a third run for the presidency.  Bring it on!  American democracy learned a great deal about its weaknesses and strengths during the five years it was enrolled in Trump University. The experience produced a close call, but dangerous times make for lasting lessons. Two or three years of post-graduate education will produce still more insight into the inner workings of a strong democracy.

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

David Warsh: Blame Harvard

The Taubman Building at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

A “Freudian slip,” according to Wikipedia, is “an error in speech, memory, or physical action that occurs due to the interference of an unconscious subdued wish or internal train of thought.” Slips of the tongue are classic examples, but other manifestations include “misreadings, mishearings, mis-typings, temporary forgetting, and the mislaying and losing of objects.” The insight is a vivid reminder of what was learned from the 20th Century discipline known as psychoanalysis: some, definitely, but perhaps not as much as they thought.

I committed an act of misstatement that requires more explanation than mere correction when I recently wrote that “[Boris] Yeltsin…presided over a decade of ‘shock therapy,’ a massive helter-skelter privatization of government-owned Russian assets based largely on ideas propounded in College Park, Md., and Cambridge, Mass.”

College Park had nothing to do with what happened next.

Its IRIS Center, an economic strategy and development advisory service based at the Beltway campus of the University of Maryland, was founded in 1990.  Even the source of its acronym, if there was one, is now lost to history. IRIS was the loser to Harvard University in a brief, bitter contest for State Department patronage at the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Among IRIS founders were Mancur Olson, who might have been recognized with a Nobel Prize had he lived long enough, and Thomas Schelling, who lived long enough to collect one. The director was Charles Cadwell, a lawyer with plenty of experience with deregulation. Mostly involved in articulating proposals for Russia was theorist Peter Murrell, who advocated a considerably more cautious approach to industrial privatization and nation-building than the so-called “shock therapy” approach that carried the day.

Murrell’s 1990 book, The Nature of Socialist Economies: Lessons from Eastern European Foreign Trade (Princeton), had the advantage of being closely related to ideas espoused by Hungarian economist Janos Kornai, another member of the Nobel nomination league who died without recognition. Murrell is more than ever worth reading today.

What might have happened if independent businessman H. Ross Perot had stayed out of the 1992 presidential race?  Perot won 19 percent of the popular vote, enough to tip victory to the Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton.  Had George H. W. Bush been re-elected, former Secretaries of State George Shultz and James Baker and National Security adviser Brent Scowcroft and their team would have directed U.S. policy towards Russia for the next four years. Talk about NATO expansion “not one inch east” might have become carefully qualified. Russia’s proposed “big bang” transition might have taken a different path.  But Clinton won the presidency.  He and his advisers had ideas of their own.

I followed Murrell for a time but became swept up in the excitement surrounding the incoming Clinton administration, among other matters. Would-be Harvard advisers to Russia seemed to be everywhere in those days.  They included Kennedy School Dean Graham Allison and economists Marin Feldstein, Jeffrey Sachs and Andrei Shleifer. But it turned out that a 1989 conference in Moscow of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the tripartite National Bureau of Economic Research from the U.S. had formed relationships that led to the deal. In 1992, Harvard’s Institute for International Development obtained a State Department contact to advise Yeltsin’s government.

Five years later the U.S. Department of Justice sued HIID, after Shleifer, a Russian expatriate, and his wife, hedge-fund manager Nancy Zimmerman, were caught trying to enter the Russian mutual-fund industry on their own. The government got its money back, and HIID was extinguished, just as was IRIS. A few years later I began Because They Could: The Harvard-Russia Scandal (and NATO Expansion) after Twenty-Five Years (2018, Create Space).

Next week, back to the grim present day.

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

Llewellyn King: 'Hunger Winter' may loom amidst energy crisis caused by Putin

Dutch children eating soup during the famine of 1944–1945.

— Photo by Menno Huizinga

WEST WARWICK, R.I. 

Even as Europe has been dealing with its hottest summer on record, it has been fearfully aware that it may face its worst winter since the one at the end of World War II, from 1944 to 1945.

Electricity shortages and prices for fuel that are unpayable for many households are in store for Europe.

Industrial production in Germany, Europe’s economic driver, is threatened and governments from London to Athens are struggling with how they will help with energy bills right now, let alone in the dead of winter.

Electricity production on the European grid was already strained due to the change from coal and gas generation to renewables.

Germany worsened a tight supply by shutting down its nuclear plants, and the new reliance on wind was severely questioned by a wind drought last fall, especially in the North Sea.

After Vladimir’s Putin’s Russia attacked Ukraine with an all-out invasion on Feb. 24, things went from tightness of supply to impending disaster. Russia, through a complex network of pipelines, is the principal supplier of natural gas to Europe and all petroleum products to Germany. Now it has curtailed normal flows. 

Europe is heavily dependent on gas for heating and for making electricity. As things stand, all of Europe is hurting, especially Germany. The country may suffer as dreadful a winter as it did at the end of World War II when there was no coal, the essential fuel at the time.

The unknowns revolve around Russia’s war in Ukraine. These are possible scenarios:

-- Russia wins outright; Europe continues sanctions and is punished with gas interruptions. Result: Europe freezes this winter.

-- There is a political settlement, the rebuilding of Ukraine begins and the gas flows again.

-- Ukraine repulses Russia on the ground; Russia changes regime and abandons the fight. 

-- The conflict worsens, and NATO is drawn in. Europe rations fuel, including kerosene. It is a wartime footing for all of Europe.

-- Germany decides it has had enough and makes a deal with Russia. Ukraine figuratively is thrown under the bus.

While the United States and other gas-producing nations will export all they can to Europe in the form of liquified natural gas, those sources are already heavily committed. The United States, for example, has just seven LNG export terminals. These take years to license and build, and the same goes for the receiving terminals and LNG tankers. Additionally, most of the European receiving terminals are in the West and the severest shortages are in the East.

It is too late to change one certainty about the coming winter: high food prices everywhere, including in the United States, and starvation in developing countries. Ukraine is exporting grain haltingly, but those shipments are too small and too late. Afghanistan and Somalia are already in a food crisis, starting what is set to be a world run on grain provided in humanitarian relief.

The terrible European winter of 1944 to 1945 is known as the “Hunger Winter’’. Prepare to hear that term resurrected.

The world must brace for the coming winter in the Northern Hemisphere with political uncertainty and weak, inward-looking leaders in many countries. In the United States, the midterm elections are set to produce division. In France, President Emmanuel Macron has lost control of the National Assembly. Britain is seeking a new Tory prime minister to replace Boris Johnson. Italy is facing an election that some forecasts say will go to the isolationist fascists.

The democracies are riven with culture wars and other indulgences as a global crisis is in the making in Europe. For much of the rest of the world a new Hunger Winter looms. Many will be cold this winter, others will be hungry. Untold numbers will die.

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.

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

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.

David Warsh: Squeezed between pushing democracy and fighting global warming

The Fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, marked a huge turning point in NATO's role in Europe. Here you can see section of the wall displayed outside NATO headquarters, in Brussels.

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

Which is the more pressing concern: advancing the cause of democracy in the face of opposition, or combatting global warming?

NATO enlargement has been the policy of the United States since Bill Clinton was first elected president, in 1992. The course of action he adopted was embraced and extended by successors George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Was it a good idea?

Anne Applebaum thinks so.  The Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist has been among NATO expansion’s most ardent  advocates since becoming a correspondent for The Economist, in 1988, and moving to Warsaw. In a panel podcast last week for The Atlantic, where she is now a contributing writer, she said,

I think that the expansion of NATO was the most successful, if not the only successful, piece of American foreign policy of the past thirty years.  It created a zone of safety and security for sixty million people in part of the world that has been the source of two world wars…. We would be having this fight in East Germany now if we had not done it.

I have been on the other side of that argument for nearly twenty years, a thin voice in the back of a relatively small chorus of dissenters that included, in 1994, Defense Secretary Les Aspin, his deputy William Perry, and most senior American military commanders at the time; in 1996, diplomat George Kennan and a group of distinguished foreign-policy experts; and, that same year, Brent Scowcroft, a lone authority from the administration of George H. W. Bush.

In 2018, in Because They Could: The Harvard-Russia Scandal (and NATO Expansion) after Twenty-five Years, I wrote, “No aspect looms larger in these 25 years [of US-Russia relations] than the story of NATO enlargement.”

Now that Vladimir Putin has sent the Russian army to invade Ukraine, the reasoning behind NATO enlargement has become ripe for reassessment– not now, while  people are fighting,  dying and fleeing, but after the carnage has ended,  And then only gradually, calmly, without rancor.

Who know what drove Putin crazy enough to invade Ukraine? That’s for analysts, biographers and historians to puzzle out. Certainly apprehension over NATO expansion was part of it. So was his experience as “a boy once bullied in the back streets of Leningrad.” Meanwhile, the costs of his war are already staggering. Not just the loss of Ukrainian sovereignty. Nor Russian civil society’s forty years’ of gains since the former Soviet Union began to come apart.

The opportunities that mattered most had lain ahead. Good-faith cooperation among nations to control emission, adapt habitats and reduce solar radiation will be harder to organize than it would have been otherwise.

Even if the fondest dreams of the NATO expansionists are realized – if Russian elites and everyday citizens combine to overthrow Putin – this disastrous war makes the steadily increasing pressure on Russia’s borders seem like a hell of a risk to have run.

The problem of Taiwan is next.

Grounds for rapprochement can be found in the years ahead, but the search will require policy-makers of more sober temperament and, even then, many years will be required to restore the trust and mutual respect that has been lost.

                                                          xxx

Bill Clinton made it official in1994: NATO expansion would take place “not whether but when.” Harvard historian Tim Colton wrote in his 2008 biography of Boris Yeltsin, “A ticking time bomb had been set.” It took four more U.S. presidencies – George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden – for it to explode.

Meanwhile, Vice President Al Gore in 1993 persuaded Clinton to formally commit the nation to the Rio de Janeiro targets for greenhouse gas emissions, but conservative politicians continued to scoff.

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

David Warsh: Putin wants to get his foes thinking

Vladimir Putin in 2018

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

The first bright light on the murky  situation  in Ukraine shone Jan. 28, when Ukraine officials “sharply criticized” the Biden administration, according to The New York Times in its Jan. 29 edition, “for its ominous warnings of an imminent Russian attack,” saying that the U.S. was spreading unnecessary alarm.

Since those warnings have been front-page news for weeks in The Times and  The Washington Post. Ukrainian President Volodynyr Zelensky implicitly rebuked the American press as well. As the lead story in The Post indignantly put it, he “ [took] aim at his most important security partners as his own military  braced for a potential security attack.”

Meanwhile, Yaroslav Trofimov, The Wall Street Journal’s chief foreign-affairs correspondent, writing Jan. 27 in the paper’s news pages, identified a well-camouflaged off-ramp to the present stand-off, in the form of an agreement signed in the wake of the Russian-backed offensive in eastern Ukraine in February 2015. The so-called Minsk-2 had since remained dormant, he wrote, until recently.

Now, after a long freeze, senior Ukrainian and Russian officials are talking about implementing the Minsk-2 accords once again, with France and Germany seeing this process as a possible off-ramp that would allow Russian President Vladimir Putin a face-saving way to de-escalate.

I have had a long-standing interest in this story.  In 2016, in the expectation that Hillary Clinton would be elected U.S. president, I began a small book with a view to warning about the ill consequences of the willy-nilly expansion of the NATO alliance that President Bill Clinton had begun in 1993, which was pursued, despite escalating Russian objections, by successors George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The election of Donald Trump intervened.  Because They Could: The Harvard Russia Scandal (and NATO Expansion) after Twenty-Five Years appeared in 2018.

I was relieved when Joe Biden defeated Trump, in 2020, but alarmed in 2021 when Biden installed a senior member of Mrs. Clinton’s foreign-policy team in the State Department, as undersecretary for political affairs.  Seven years before, as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, Victoria Nuland had directed U.S. policy towards Russia and Ukraine and passed out cookies to Ukrainian protestors during the anti-Russian Maidan demonstrations in February 2014. At their climax, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, a Putin ally, fled to exile in southern Russia, and, in short order, Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.

A couple of weeks ago, I suggested that, when it came to interpreting the situation in Ukraine, it would be wise to pay attention to a more diverse medley of voices than the chorus of administration sources uncritically amplified by The Times  and The Post.  David Johnson, proprietor of Johnson’s Russia List, told readers he didn’t think there would be an invasion.  Neither did I. Russian and Ukrainian citizens seemed to agree; according to reports in the WSJ and the Financial Times, they were going about their business normally.

Why? Presumably because most locals understood Russian maneuvers on their borders to be a show of force, intended to affect negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow.

As for what Putin may be thinking and privately saying – his strategic aims and his tactics – I pay particular attention to Harvard historian Timothy Colton. His nuanced biography of Boris Yeltsin makes him an especially interesting interpreter of the man Yeltsin in 1999 designated his successor.

Colton, a Canadian, is a member of the Valdai Discussion Club, a Moscow-based think-tank, established in 2004 and closely linked to Putin. Its annual meetings have been patterned on those of Klaus Schwab’s better-known World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland. Membership consists mainly of research scholars, East and West.  A little essay by Colton surfaced 10 days ago on the club’s site, as What Does Putin’s Conservatism Seek to Conserve?

Colton observed that Putin’s personal ideas and goals, as opposed to his exercise of power as a political leader, are seldom discussed.  That is not surprising, he wrote, as Putin had relatively little to say about his own convictions during his first two terms in office, aside from First Person, a book of interviews published just as he took office in 2000.  That reticence diminished in his third term, Colton continued, especially now as his fourth term begins.  In a speech to a Valdai conference last autumn, whose theme was “The Individual, Values, and the State,” Putin borrowed a foreign term – conservatism – and used it four times, each time with a slightly different modifier, to describe his own fundamental views.  Colton wrote:

Putin noted at Valdai that he started speaking about conservativism a while back, but had doubled down on it in response not to internal Russian developments but to the fraught international situation. “Now, when the world is going through a structural crisis, reasonable conservatism as the foundation for a political course has skyrocketed in importance, precisely because of the proliferating risks and dangers and the fragility of the reality around us.”

“This conservative approach,” he stated, “is not about an ignorant traditionalism, dread of change, or a game of hold, much less about withdrawing into our own shell.” Instead, it was something positive: “It is primarily about reliance on time-tested tradition, the preservation and increase of the population, realistic assessment of oneself and others, an accurate alignment of priorities, correlation of necessity and possibility, prudent formulation of goals, and a principled rejection of extremism as a means of action.”

What of the wellsprings of Putin’s conservatism? Perhaps nothing more fundamental than the preservation of his own power. “Two decades in the Kremlin, and the prospect of years more, may incline him increasingly toward rationalizations of the status quo as principled conservatism.”  An alternative explanation would emphasize life experience. The fragility that Putin was talking about at Valdai was that of the present moment, Colton wrote, but, he continued,

Putin has commented more than once on the inherent volatility of human affairs. “Often there are things that seem impossible to us,” he said in the First Person interviews, “but then all of a sudden — bang!” He gave as his illustration the event that by all accounts traumatized him more than any other — the implosion of the USSR. “That is the way it was with the Soviet Union. Who could have imagined that it would have up and collapsed? Even in your worst nightmares no one could have foretold this.” Sticking with “time-tested” formulas would suit such a temperament [Colton wrote].

What sorts of time-tested formulas might the Russian leader adopt?  Colton, a player in many venues, is constrained to speak and write so carefully that it is hard for an outsider to know what with any confidence what point he was making to insiders in his recent essay. As journalist, I am not.

One time-tested formula Putin has employed frequently, to the point of habit, is a tradition I think of as having evolved in the West. This is the practice of setting out a frank public account of public-policy views. It is a rhetorical tactic set out with especial felicity by the framers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, to the effect that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” requires those undertaking dramatic actions to declare the causes that impel them to act. In general, this Putin has done.

There was, for instance, his frank appraisal of the situation of Russia at the Turn of the Millennium, published as one of those First Person interviews in 2000. After he failed to dissuade George Bush from invading Iraq, Putin lambasted the U.S. in 2007 in a widely publicized speech to a security conference in in Munich.  In 2014, after annexing Crimea, he delivered another blistering speech, this time to the both houses of the Russian parliament. And last summer, he published a long essay asserting his conviction that Ukrainians and Russians share “the same historical and spiritual space.

What might he do if his army goes home, having made its rhetorical point without firing a shot? My hunch is that he will give another speech.

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

Spiridon Putin, Vladimir Putin’s paternal grandfather, a personal cook of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin

Warren Getler: This most uncertain winter

Luce Hall (1884) at the U.S. Naval War College, in Newport, R.I. The institution is a center of the U.S. military’s war-gaming work.

—U.S. Navy photo by Jaima Fogg

Ukrainian troops in the threatened country’s Donbas region. Russia has been massively increasing its troop strength nearby in what some observers fear is a precursor to an all-out invasion.

America faces its most challenging year-end since its formal entry into the Second World War, in December 1941.

While we have been internally grappling with COVID for nearly two years, dark clouds have gathered on the geopolitical map.

Russia is mobilizing some 175,000 troops on its border with Ukraine; China is flying repeated bomber test-runs near Taiwan; Iran is using its proxies to hit its Arab neighbors as well as Israel and U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria with drones and missiles. Russia and China are exhibiting their closest military collaboration – in joint-training exercises and bilateral arms sales – in decades. And both have signed military and economic pacts with Iran in recent years.

Will there be war, indeed, continental war, on several fronts?

The risk may be  greater than at any time since World War II.

Authoritarian rulers-for-life in Moscow and in Beijing are testing the waters. Specifically, they are testing the mettle of U.S. President Joe Biden and his first-year administration. They’re gauging a Biden preoccupied with internal debates around vaccination policies, inflation, crime, supply-chain bottlenecks and other largely domestic, massively time-consuming matters.

And they perceive vulnerability in the Oval Office – with Biden, who just turned 79, coming off a grueling multi-year presidential campaign against incumbent Donald Trump and then seeing his approval ratings drop for months. What’s more, they sense a country deeply divided -- an American superpower at growing risk of civil unrest.

Are these  Russian and Chinese military maneuvers   mere provocations, mere signals of what could happen if  the West challenges their geopolitical  ambitions?

Or are these up-tempo deployments by Russia’s Putin and China’s Xi meant merely for domestic Russian and Chinese consumption? Possibly not.

This time, the activity around such large-scale mobilizations appears alarmingly furtive, and therefore open to wide interpretation, particularly regarding Moscow’s intentions toward Ukraine. These maneuvers (including rumors of a planned assault on eastern Ukraine in late January or early February) may invite retaliation and potential “miscalculations” by both sides. Putin and Xi may not appreciate the seriousness of  possible "kinetic" responses by NATO allies and our friends in Asia. Israel, meanwhile, uncertain of backing from Washington, is leaning toward taking things into its own hands to stop -- with direct military action from the air -- a nuclear-armed Iran from emerging.

America, as the world’s leading democracy, is slow to anger, which is a good thing. Yet we are also at times too slow in  confronting harsh realities beyond our borders. As a nation, we must focus on the  large-scale  threat scenarios developing in Europe, East Asia and the Middle East…with level-headed coolness and  a serious, sustained focus.

John F. Kennedy, in his Harvard thesis-turned book, Why England Slept, pointed out the danger of Britain ignoring for too long Nazi Germany’s growing war machine and the bellicosity of its totalitarian dictator, Adolf Hitler.

“We can't escape the fact that democracy in America, like democracy in England, has been asleep at the switch. If we had not been surrounded by oceans three and five thousand miles wide, we ourselves might be caving in at some Munich of the Western World,” writes Kennedy, the then 22-year-old future president of the United States.

“To say that democracy has been awakened by the events of the last few weeks is not enough. Any person will awaken when the house is burning down. What we need is an armed guard that will wake up when the fire first starts, or, better yet, one that will not permit a fire to start at all. We should profit by the lesson of England and make our democracy work. We must make it work right now. Any system of government will work when everything is going well. It's the system that functions in the pinches that survives.” 

To prevent  tipping into something recalling the 1939-45 cataclysm, we must show resolve – an unquestioned firmness that lets our real and potential adversaries know that we stand united --  at home and  with our key allies abroad. Such resolve deters dangerous opportunism among our foes,   setting up a bulwark against a lurch into regional war, indeed, into seemingly unthinkable inter-continental war below the nuclear threshold.

We must recognize that both China and Russia have been developing advanced missile systems – notably conventional-use hypersonic weapons – that could put us at risk in the same manner (or more at risk) as the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Back then, at least, we could surge into a mass production of armaments as never-before seen; today, given supply-chain restrictions and other factors, such an achievement would  perhaps be less certain after any potentially devastating attack on our military bases, ports and other critical infrastructure.

Lest we forget, while Britain slept in those years before the outbreak of WWII, Germany was able to secretly develop its , first-of-their-kind V-2 rockets  that would eventually rain down on London and cause widespread damage and terror. Today, Pentagon chiefs are repeatedly sounding the alarm about the yawning gap in U.S. vs. Chinese/Russian advanced hypersonic-missile capabilities, not to mention recently demonstrated Russian capabilities of destroying satellites in orbit with missiles fired from its territory.

To its credit, the Biden administration is slowly but surely turning its strategic military assessments and its inner-circle Pentagon planning toward our  China challenge, thus pivoting away from the “forever wars” of Afghanistan, Iraq and, going further back, Vietnam. And, just last week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had this to say about the massive Russian troop buildup, including more than 1,000 tanks, on the border of Ukraine. “We don’t know whether President Putin has made the decision to invade. We do know that he’s putting in place the capacity to do so in short order should he so decide.” 

As we approach the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor this week -- not to mention the 250th anniversary as a nation in less than five years -- America cannot afford to be ill-prepared for tectonic convulsions on the geopolitical landscape. We can not, as a society, spend too much time navel-gazing or being preoccupied with the likes of the latest crazes on Instagram, Tik-Tok or the Metaverse.

These times demand extraordinary leadership, no matter the internal challenges and pre-occupations of the world’s greatest democracy. As Americans, we will be roundly tested during this most uncertain winter -- and not merely by inflationary pressures or a new surge of the Delta and Omicron COVID-19 variants, which are eroding the fabric of civil society both here and abroad. 

Warren Getler, based in Washington, D.C., writes on international affairs. He’s a former journalist with Foreign Affairs Magazine,  International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News. His two sons serve in the U.S. military.

David Warsh: A smelly red herring in Trump-Russia saga

Herrings "kippered" by smoking, salting and artificially dyeing until made reddish-brown, i.e., a "red herring". Before refrigeration kipper was known for being strongly pungent. In 1807, William Cobbett wrote how he used a kipper to lay a false trail, while training hunting dogs—a story that was probably the origin of the idiom.

Grand Kremlin Palace, in Moscow, commissioned 1838 by Czar Nicholas I, constructed 1839–1849, and today the official residence of the president of Russia

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

A red herring, says Wikipedia, is something that misleads or distracts from a relevant and important question. A colorful 19th Century English journalist, William Cobbett, is said to have popularized he term, telling a story of having used strong-smelling smoked fish to divert and distract hounds from chasing a rabbit.

The important questions long have had to do to do with the extent of Trump’s relations with powerful figures in Russian before his election as president; and with whether the FBI did a competent job of investigating those charges.

The herring in this case is the Durham investigation of various forms of 2016 campaign mischief, including (but not limited to) the so-called “Steele Dossier’’. The inquiry into Trump’s Russia connections was furthered (but not started) by persons associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. {Editor’s note: The political investigations of Trump’s ties with Russia started with anti-Trump Republicans.}

Trump’s claims that his 2020 defeat were the result of voter fraud have been authoritatively rejected. What, then, of his earlier fabrication? It has to so with the beginnings of his administration, not its end. The proposition that Clinton campaign dirty tricks triggered a tainted FBI investigation and hamstrung what otherwise might have been promising presidential beginning has been promoted for five years by Trump himself. The Mueller Report on Russian interference in the 2016 election was a “hoax,” a “witch-hunt’’ and a “deep-state conspiracy,” he has claimed.

Today, Trump’s charges are being kept on life-support in the mainstream press by a handful of columnists, most of them connected, one way or another, with the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal.  Most prominent among them are Holman Jenkins, Kimberly Strassel and Bret Stephens, now writing for The New York Times.

Durham, a career government prosecutor with a strong record as a special investigator of government misconduct (the Whitey Bulger case, post 9/11 CIA torture) was named by Trump to be U.S. attorney for Connecticut in early 2018.  A year later, Atty. Gen. William Barr assigned him to investigate the president’s claims that suspicions about his relations with Russia had been inspired by Democratic Party dirty tricks, fanned by left-wing media, and pursued by a complicit FBI. Last autumn, Barr named Durham a special prosecutor, to ensure that his term wouldn’t end with the Biden administration.

There is no argument that Durham has asked some penetrating questions.  The “Steele Dossier,” with its unsubstantiated salacious claims, is now shredded, thanks mostly to the slovenly methods of the man who compiled it, former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele.   Durham’s quest to discover the sources of information supplied to the FBI is continuing. The latest news of it was supplied last week, as usual, by Devlin Barrett, of The Washington Post. (Warning: it is an intricate matter.)

What Durham has not begun to demonstrate is that, as a duly-elected president, Donald Trump should have been above suspicion as he came into office.  There was his long history of real estate and other business dealings with Russians. There was the appointment of lobbyist Paul Manafort as campaign chairman in June 2016;  the secret beginning on July 31 of an FBI investigation of links between Russian officials and various Trump associates, dubbed Crossfire Hurricane; Manafort’s forced resignation in August; the appointment of  former Defense Intelligence Agency Director  Michael Flynn as National Security adviser and his forced resignation after 22 days; Trump’s demand for “loyalty” from FBI Director James Comey at a private dinner a week after his inauguration, and Comey’s abrupt dismissal four months later (which triggered Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel to the Justice Department): none of this has been shown to do Hillary Clinton’s campaign machinations.

The Steele Dossier did indeed embarrass the media to a limited extent – Mother Jones and Buzzfeed in particular – but it was President Trump’s own behavior, not dirty tricks, that disrupted his first months in office.  Those columnists who exaggerate the significance of campaign tricks are good journalists.  So why keep rattling on?

In the background is the 30-year obsession of the WSJ editorial page with Bill and Hillary Clinton. WSJ ed page coverage of the story of John Durham’s investigation reminds me of Blood and Ruins, The Last Imperial War 1931-1945 (forthcoming next April in the US), in which Oxford historian Richard Overy argues that World War II really began,  not in 1939 or 1941, but with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Keep sniffing around if you like, but what you smell is smoked herring.

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

© 2021 DAVID WARSH

Llewellyn King: Wind drought, gas shortages suggest worrisome winter coming for Europe

British wind farm rated capacity by region
(installed 2015 and 2020, projected by 2025)

WEST WARWICK

If you are thinking of going to Europe this winter, you might want to pack your long undies. A sweater or two as well.

Europe is facing its largest energy crisis in decades. Some countries will simply have no gas for heating and electricity production. Others won’t be able to pay for the gas which is available because prices are so high -- five times what they were. Much of this because Russia has severely curtailed the flow of gas into Europe, following on a wind drought.

Things are especially bad in Britain, which has been hit with a trifecta of woes. It started with a huge wind drought in and around the North Sea, normally one of the windiest places on earth. For the best part of six weeks, there simply wasn’t enough wind, and Britain is heavily invested in wind. Also, it has never installed much gas storage, which is one way of hedging against interruption.

Britain took to decarbonization with passion, confident of its great wind resource in the North Sea, where the wind is measured in degrees of gale force by the Met Office. The notoriously rough sea off Scotland hasn’t been getting its usual blow. Most European countries are 10-percent dependent on wind, but Britain relies on it for 20 percent of its power.

One result has been to propel gas prices into the stratosphere; consequently, the price of electricity has soared. Of 70 British electricity retailers, 30 have failed and others are expected to shut up shop as well. These aren’t generators but buyers and sellers of power, under a system which had been encouraged by the government when it broke up the state-owned Central Electricity Board during the Thatcher administration.

Britain, which opened the world’s first nuclear power station at Calder Hall in 1956, has been indecisive about new nuclear plants. Those now under construction are being built by Areva, a French company, which is partnering with the Chinese. This has raised questions about Chinese plans for a larger future role in British nuclear at a time when relations have soured with Beijing over Hong Kong and Chinese criticism of Britain’s right to send warships to the South China Sea, which it did in September.

One way or another, the input of electricity from nuclear in Britain has fallen from 26 percent at its peak to 20 percent today.

The biggest contribution to Britain’s problems, and to those of continental Europe, come from Russia limiting the amount of gas flowing into Europe. The supply is down 30 percent this year, and Russia looks set to starve Europe further if this is a cold winter as forecast.

Russia is in open dispute with Ukraine, which depends on Russia’s giant gas company, Gazprom, to supply gas for the Ukraine distribution system to other parts of Europe. At the heart of the Russian gas squeeze is the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which has been completed but isn’t operating yet. It takes gas directly – 750 miles -- to Germany under the Baltic Sea and parallels an older line. Its effect will be to cripple Ukraine as a distributor.

The United States opposed the pipeline, but President Joe Biden reversed that in May. Ukraine feels betrayed, and much of Europe is uneasy.

Going forward, Europe will be more cautious of Russian supplies and less confident that the wind will always blow. Its Russian gas shortage has put pressure on international liquified natural gas markets, and counties are hurting from China to Brazil.

Britain has a separate crisis when it comes to gasoline, called petrol in the United Kingdom: There is an acute shortage of tanker drivers to get the fuel, which is plentiful, from Britain’s refineries to the pumps. British service stations are out of fuel or facing long lines of unhappy motorists.

This problem goes back to Brexit. Driving tankers is a hard, poorly paid job -- as is much road haulage -- and Britons have stopped doing it. The average age of British drivers is 56 and many are retiring.

The slack was taken up by eastern Europeans when Britain was part of the European Union. But after Brexit, these drivers were sent home as they no longer had the right to work in Britain.

So, the electricity and gas shortages are compounded by a gasoline shortage, which is quite a separate issue but adds to Britain’s woes as a winter of discontent looms.

Llewellyn King, a veteran columnist and international energy expert, is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

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: On Russia saga, what did the ambassador say?

Sergey Kislyak in December 2016, when he was Russian Ambassador to the U.S. and talking with Trump man Michael Flynn.

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

In a 2017 book, Because They Could: The Harvard Russia Scandal (and NATO Expansion) after Twenty-Five Years, I argued that the U.S. had unwisely bullied Russia for 25 years, chiefly by extending NATO to its borders. I was therefore sympathetic to Atty. Gen. William Barr’s assertion earlier this month that National Security Adviser-designate Michael Flynn had been within his rights in talking to the Russian ambassador five times on Dec. 29, 2016.

That was the day the Obama administration announced new sanctions in retaliation for Russian cyber meddling in the American election. Apparently Flynn urged Putin not to respond.  Putin didn’t.

But that was before it became known  that Flynn had been present at a Trump Tower meeting earlier in December at which Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner asked Russia’s ambassador about the possibility of setting up a secret communications channel using Russian diplomatic facilities, in an apparent attempt to shield their communications from monitoring by U.S. officials. It was before the U.S. Intelligence Community’s joint statement on the scope of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election was released; before Flynn lied to Vice President Pence, denying he had discussed the sanctions; before Trump fired FBI Director James Comey; before the White House photo-session with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak the next day; before Michael Cohen’s revelations of Trump’s Russian business dealings; before the extent of Trump associate Roger Stone’s connections with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange were exposed; before the  investigation of Trump’s Deutsche Bank holdings was paused; before Putin’s ambitious overture of a possible US-Russian anti-hacking treaty came to nought.

In “The Vindication of Michael Flynn,” editorialists at The Wall Street Journal stated that Barr’s motion to drop the government’s case against Flynn “further undermines the credibility of James Comey’s FBI, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and the entire ‘Russia collusion’ investigation.”  None of that seems right to me.  Mueller delivered a credible investigation of the narrow point and found no explicit collusion. Instead it uncovered conflicts galore.

Trump’s conduct of Russia policy has been so inept that it almost seems fair that Attorney General Barr is attempting to give him a do-over – despite the damage Barr has been doing to long-standing Justice Department traditions. Barr’s life story is  related here and here,  His philosophical suppositions are clear, if unconvincing. A finished presentation of his argument awaits the submission of another invited reviewer’s re-examination of the entire Russia investigation.

The only thing that will vindicate Flynn – or fail to vindicate him – is the release of the transcripts of his conversations with Ambassador Kislyak.  Although he has declined to do so before, U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan apparently has the power to require their disclosure.

Meanwhile, what about the problem of establishing an appropriate baseline for U.S.-Russian relations? It remains all jumbled up.  The COVID-19 pandemic is hard in Russia, too.  A realistic and proper reset awaits the pre-inaugural beginnings of the next administration.

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

David Warsh: The other Russia story

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

It may seem like an odd time to bring up the other Russia story, this being the first anniversary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. But as it happens, there has been a break in this neglected case – or, rather, two of them.  

It was slightly more than a year ago that President Trump fired   FBI James Comey and, the next day, told Russian officials visiting the Oval Office that Comey was “crazy, a real nut job.” He continued, “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” Two weeks later Mueller was appointed, and his Russia investigation has only escalated since then, sprawling into several unexpected corners.

The New York Times offered readers a helpful graphic last winter: “Most of the stories under the ‘Russia’ umbrella generally fall into one of three categories: Russian cyber attacks; links to Russian officials and intermediaries; alleged obstruction.”

There is, however, another aspect of the Russia story, a category altogether missing in the Times’ classification scheme, an obviously thorny topic that almost no one wants to discuss: the proverbial elephant in the room. 

It concerns the extensive background to the 2016 campaign – the relationship between the United States and Russia over the long arc of the 20th Century, and, especially, the years since the end of the Cold War. This aspect is complicated, involving all five U.S. administrations since the Soviet Union dissolved itself at the end of 1991. It is a difficult story to tell.

I backed into it slowly, having followed for many years the Harvard-Russia scandal of the 1990s. In 1993, the U.S. Agency for International Development, a semi-independent unit of the State Department, hired Harvard University’s Institute for International Development to provide technical economic assistance to the Russian government on its market reforms. Eight years later, the Justice Department sued Harvard for having let its team leaders go rogue.

Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer and his deputy, Jonathan Hay, were accused of investing in Russian securities, and of having established their wives at the head the line in the nascent Russian mutual-fund industry. The suit was settled in 2005. The government recovered most of the money it had spent. The incident played a part in Harvard University president Lawrence Summers’s resignation the following winter. As Shleifer’s friend and mentor, Summers had distanced himself via recusal.

After Boris Yeltsin had died, in 2007, I wrote a column about the failures of U.S. policies in the 1990s. Thereafter I followed developments with increasing interest and alarm, particularly after the Ukraine crisis of 2014. And in the summer of 2016, when it seemed likely that Hillary Clinton would be elected president, I set out to collect some of the columns I had written and to add some additional narrative material in order to call attention to the entanglements she and her advisers would bring to the job. That project was supposed to take one year. It took two. 

Because They Could: The Harvard Russia Scandal (and NATO Expansion) after Twenty-Five Years (CreateSpace) was finally published on Amazon last week – 300 pages and a relative bargain at $15. The book consists of three main parts. 

The first is a recap of the scandal as it appeared in the newspapers, from the front page of The Wall Street Journal, in August 1997; to Harvard’s decision, in March 2001, to try the case rather than settle the government suit; to September 2013, when Summers withdrew from the competition with Janet Yellen to head the Fed. These 29 columns, written as the story unfolded, introduce first-time readers to the scandal, and remind experts of what and when we knew and how we knew it.

The second part concerns the Portland, Maine, businessman whom the Harvard team leaders inveigled to start a mutual fund back-office firm in Russia, then forced out of its ownership. It turns out there was a second suit, overlooked for the most part because Harvard settled, paying an undisclosed sum in return for a non-disclosure agreement. This now-familiar tactic insured that John Keffer, whose Forum Financial at that point was one of the largest independently owned mutual fund administrators in the world, and a significant presence in Poland, would be unable to tell his story. Only his filings and the massive documentation of the government case remained.

The third consists of six short essays on aspects of the U.S. relationship with Russia since 1991. These relate a brief history of NATO expansion, which took place despite the administration of George H.W. Bush pledging in exchange for Russia agreeing to the reunification of Germany that the US would not further enlarge NATO; tell something of the U.S. press corps in Moscow during those 25 years; identify a key issue in Russian historiography; express some sympathy for ordinary Russians and even for Vladimir Putin himself; and seek to separate the accidental presidency of Donald Trump from all the rest, the better to understand why he has so little standing in in the matter. 

Also included is a short paean to the news values of The Wall Street Journal and two appendices. One is Shleifer’s letter to Harvard provost Albert Carnesale as the USAID investigation built to its climax. The other is the heavily-annotated business plan, drafted by Hay’s then-girlfriend, Elizabeth Hebert, later his wife, to make it appear to have been written by Hay, and backed financially by Shleifer’s wife, hedge-fund proprietor Nancy Zimmerman, offering control of Keffer’s company to Thomas Steyer, of Farallon Capital (who had been Ms. Zimmerman’s principal original backer), and Peter Aldrich, of AEW Capital Management, a director of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Preparing to espouse these unpopular views has made me snap to attention on the rare occasions when they are expressed in the mainstream press – not on the op-ed pages, where they mostly represent reflexive ballast-balancing, but in the news pages, where some deeper form of institutional judgment is at work. That was the case last Sunday, when an 8,600-words article in the SundayNew York Times Magazine presented the case that the United States shared the blame for the current disorder. “The Quiet Americans” startled me (though not the designer, who illustrated it with a standard what-makes-Russia-tick? design). The dispatch itself was a significant advance in the other Russia story. 

Keith Gessen, 53, is a Russian-born American novelist (A Terrible Country: A Novel) and journalist, a translator of Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich (Voices from Chernobyl). He is coeditor ofn+1, a magazine of literature, politics, and culture based in New York City as well\ and an assistant professor of journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is a younger brother of Masha Gessen, 61, author of The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia(2017) and The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2013); their parents emigrated, with four children, from the USSR to the US in 1981. (As an adult, Masha Gessen returned to Russia in 1991, leaving for a second time in 2013.)

In the article, Gessen writes that “behind the visible façade of changing presidents and changing policy statements and changing styles, [those who influenced U.S. policy toward Russia] were actually a small core of officials who not only executed policy but effectively determined it.” Getting out of the mess requires retracing the steps by which we got into it, he writes; that means starting with the small group of experts known as “the Russia hands.”

Gessen identifies and interviews many of the analysts who were in the vanguard of NATO expansion: Victoria Nuland, former NATO ambassador under Bush who became assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia under President Obama; Daniel Fried, her predecessor under Bush; Stephen Sestanovich, ambassador to the Newly Independent States of the Former Soviet Union under President Clinton; Richard Kuglar, a strategist who co-wrote an influential  1994 RAND Corp. report advocating NATO expansion; and Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state for seven years under President Clinton, “the first-high level Russia hand of the post-Cold War.” 

Interleaved with their stories are those of their critics, analysts “deeply skeptical of the missionary impulse that has characterized Ameican policy toward Russia for so long”:” Thomas Graham, of Kissinger Associates; Michael Kimmage, of the Catholic University of America; Olga Oliker, of the Institute for Strategic Studies;Michael Kofman, of the Wilson Center; Samuel Charap, of RAND Corp.; Timothy Colton, of Harvard University; Angela Stent, of Georgetown University; and the former Brookings Institution duo of Clifford Gaddy, of Pennsylvania State University, and Fiona Hill, now serving as an advisor to President Trump. 

Conspicuously missing from Gessen’s account are veterans of the first Bush administration, Jack Matlock, ambassador to the USSR, in particular. Compensating for their absence are the anonymous quotations (in March) of a “senior official” of the Trump administration, “deeply knowledgeable and highly competent,'' which fits the description and the mindset of former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. For something of Gessen’s take on Putin, see his long article last year in The Guardian: Killer, kleptocrat, genius, spy: the many myths of Vladimir Putin,

Many of these names also appear in the second half of my book. The story is broadly the same: that bedizened by its “victory” in the Cold War, the United States has consistently overreached. But there is an important difference. Gessen concludes that the servants did it. I ascribe the blame mostly to the American presidents who hired the hands, to Bill Clinton in particular, who with his Oxford roommate Talbott and friend Richard Holbrooke began the process of NATO expansion over experts’ objections; George W. Bush, who continued and ramped it up with his “Freedom Agenda”; and Barack Obama, who may have been more concerned with the limits of American power than his first secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, but who continued the policies of his predecessors. 

On the central point, however, Gessen and I completely agree. We both think the U.S. debate is seriously out of kilter. He quotes the legendary George Kennan, from his “Long Telegram” of 1946, which framed the long-term strategy of containment: “Much depends on the health and vigor of our own society.” Gessen then concludes:

"[American] society now looks sick. The absence of nuance on the Russia question – the embrace of Russia as America’s new-old supervillain – is probably best understood as a symptom of that sickness. And even as both parties gnash their teeth over Russia, politicians and experts alike seem to be in denial about mistakes made in the past and the lessons to be learned from them.''

He might also have mentioned the mainstream press: The Washington Post, the WSJ, the Times itself, at least until last week. That’s why I depend on Johnson’s Russia List for my coverage of the topics. For instance, I admire Bloomberg News columnist Leonid Bershidsky. I might not otherwise have seen his account of the “Who Lost Russia” debate last week between historian Stephen Cohen and former Obama Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul. Bershidsky is right when he states, “These days, Russia is merely a big football for Americans.” More revealing than the yardage between the opposing goalposts that are McFaul and Cohen is the scrimmage taking place somewhere in between, as, for instance, in the difference of opinion between Gessen and me. This other Russia story is just getting started. 

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

The Green Party's Dr. Stein; the Russians, and Michael Flynn

Jill Stein, M.D.

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

It was pleasant to read that the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee is investigating Jill Stein, M.D., the leader of the leftist Green Party and its 2016 presidential candidate, for possible “collusion’’ with Russia before the election last year.

Among other things, Dr. Stein, who lives in Lexington, Mass., attended a  December 2015 tenth anniversary dinner in honor of RT (formerly called in English Russia Today), the Kremlin’s international propaganda TV network. Intriguingly, at the same table that festive night was Michael Flynn, Trump’s former (very briefly) national security adviser, and none other than Vladimir Putin.

The whole thing makes one speculate on whether the Trump campaign, and the Russians, had anything to with propping up the campaign of  Stein, who took votes away from Hillary Clinton, who won the overall national popular vote by a substantial margin but lost it narrowly in three states that handed the Electoral College victory to Trump. In any event, Stein and Flynn should be ashamed of themselves for in effect honoring the murderous thug Putin and his most important international propaganda outlet. The GOP-controlled committee also is digging into reports that Clinton’s campaign paid for research in report with allegations about Trump’s behavior during a 2013 business trip to Moscow. That’s generally called “opposition research’’ and is virtually universal in American political campaigns for major offices.
 

The Kremlin.

David Warsh: U.S. Russia policy -- containment or cautious engagement?

The abrupt deterioration in U.S.-Russian relations that began in February 2014, when Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych fled Kiev on the last day of the Sochi Olympics, just as Russia sought to show its best face to the world in an elaborate closing ceremony,  is the most serious crossroads in the relationship of the rival nations since the Cuban missile crisis.

The parallels are imprecise. This present episode is much more complicated than those famous thirteen days in October 1962 for having unfolded much more slowly, and for having affected the interpretation of a U.S. presidential election in the process.  Yet for all of that, it has the potential to be as dangerous as the Reagan buildup/Soviet collapse of the early 1980s, given the impetus it has imparted to a new race to manufacture easy-to-use nuclear weapons equipped with hair triggers.

It is important, therefore, to frame properly the events before and after. “Putting Putin in Perspective’’(revealingly retitled “The Putin Problem” by the editors), a useful contribution by two specially well-qualified authors, appeared in the Boston Review earlier this month.

Thomas Graham, a managing director at Kissinger Associates, was senior director for Russia on the US National Security Council 2004-07. Rajan Menon, a professor at the City University of New York, is author of The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention (Oxford, 2016).

“At the core of Russian identity,” they argue, “is the deeply-held belief that Russia must be a great power and that it must be recognized as such. Ever since Peter the Great brought Russia into Europe at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the belief in Russia’s predestined role in the world has informed Russian thinking and actions.”

This is particularly true of the last three Russian leaders, they say – Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and Putin, explaining that Dimitri Medvedev, president from 2008-12, never escaped Putin’s shadow. “All three were – or are – consumed by Russia’s future as a great power.”

The article is the best-informed and most persuasive narrative of the last 35 years of U.S.-Russian relations that I have seen. It bears reading by anyone seriously interested in the situation today because, as the authors note, their argument is almost completely at odds with “mainstream thinking” in the U.S., as reflected in political debate and much press coverage: to wit, the conviction that all the blame belongs on Putin.

For purposes of a column I will condense their argument to two main themes – Russian humiliation since the collapse of the USSR in 1991; and U.S. top-loftiness, especially in the form of NATO enlargement since 1995. I compress in order to emphasize an important inflection point in the relationship that Graham and Menon add to a standard list of five others since 1999.  Each of these accounts Russia gave of itself was little noted and much less widely understood. (One was somewhat indirect.) They should have been plain for all to see, since, in each case, Putin was addressing and seeking to persuade a global audience.

·       Putin’s broadside, “Russia at the Turn of the Millennium,” issued in 1999, just as he took the reins of government, in which he sounded an alarm: “Russia is in the midst of one of the most difficult periods in its history. For the first time in the past 200-300 years, it is facing a real threat of sliding to the second, and possibly even third echelon of states in the world. We are running out of time for removing this threat.”

·       Putin’s Munich speech, in February 2007, when, with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham in the audience, he excoriated the United States for having invaded Iraq without winning widespread consent; threatening Russia with NATO expansion; encouraging nuclear proliferation by behaving lawlessly; and for touching off a missile defense arms race.

·       The first hack – when Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland’s famous “fuck the EU” cell-phone conversation with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine was recorded by Russian security officials during a street demonstration in Kiev, and posted on the Web in an appeal to world opinion via YouTube.

·       Putin’s speech in March 2014 to a room full of dignitaries in Moscow explaining the decision to annex the Crimean peninsula after what he described as a coup in Ukraine. “If you compress the spring, it will snap back hard,” he said.

·       Putin’s March 2017 private offer to President Trump via diplomatic channels of an extensive re-set, disclosed to BuzzFeed earlier this month, presumably by the Russians, conceivably by the Americans, quickly confirmed by both sides, and reported by CNN, the WSJ, and Economic Principals last week. The offer seemed to demonstrate how little the Russian understood the situation as it had developed in the United States.

The sixth inflection point, the one that Graham and Menon added to the standard list, may be the most important.  It has been much less hashed over because Putin spoke to a Russian audience about one episode and on the eve of another.

·       “The turning point,” they write, “came in Fall 2004, with the September terrorist attack in Beslan in the Caucasus and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, which started in November.” To that point the U.S. and Russia had cooperated successfully in dealing with Islamic extremists. Putin was the first to reach out to the U.S. after 9/11, and Russia provided valuable support in the early stages of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

That autumn Chechen terrorists seized a school in Beslan, in the Caucasus, and held it until negotiations broke down. Nearly 400 persons were killed, most of them children, in the rescue attempt. The U.S. had refused to work closely with Russia against the Chechen rebels, some of whom were moderates in Washington’s eyes, their secessionist grievances legitimate. Not long after the tragedy, Putin spoke obliquely to a television audience about the U.S. and what he considered its goals:

“Some want to tear off a big chunk of our country. Others help them do it. They help because they think that Russia, one of the greatest nuclear powers of the world, is still a threat, and this threat has to be eliminated. And terrorism is only an instrument to achieve these goals.’’

A month later, the Orange Revolution began in Ukraine. In Moscow’s reading, the United States had master-minded the protests and streets scenes in order to install a pro-Western figure as president instead of Yanukovych, the candidate Putin had endorsed. He soon came to view it as a dress rehearsal for regime change in Russia itself. (The authors don’t mention it, but this was the very zenith of George W. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda”: having taken Baghdad, the administration was being urged by neoconservative strategists to drive on to Teheran.) Soon after Viktor Yushchenko was installed, Putin warned,

“It is extremely dangerous to attempt to rebuild modern civilization, which God had created to be diverse and multifaceted, according to the barracks principles of a unipolar world.’’

So it has proved to be.  Around the corner, in 2008, were the short war with Georgia, on behalf of a couple of small self-proclaimed republics (South Ossetia wanting to remain within the Russian sphere, Abkhazia simply wishing to be free of Georgia);  and, in 2011, the beginning of the Arab Spring. Russia developed two policies to resist the United States abroad, Graham and Menon observe: preserving Russian preeminence in much of the former Soviet space; and supporting alternative global institutions.

Domestically Putin cracked down, especially after winning election to a third term, in 2012. He blamed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for encouraging protests beforehand. Opposition leaders were arrested; Western-funded non-governmental organizations were shut down; laws were passed narrowing the scope for political debate. Putin then embarked on “a wide-ranging cyber and disinformation campaign in the West to tarnish the image of Western democracy and sow domestic discord, of which the interference in last year’s presidential election is only the most prominent example,” the authors say.  Nearly everyone in the West agrees the Russians went too far with their cyber-measures, it seems to me, but no such rough consensus has yet emerged as to the intent, scope, tenor and effect of the campaign.

What’s next? The authors list three options:  treat Russia as an adversary and pursue containment; return to the minimalism by which the U.S, dealt with Moscow from 1920 to 1933  during which time it didn’t even have diplomatic relations with Russia; or undertake what Graham and Menon call engagement leavened by realism. Pretending that Russia doesn’t exist is no longer an option in the modern world, so the choice is basically between containment, with the risk of confrontation, and cautious cooperation. The authors warn of the risks of the former:

“[of] a future of freewheeling rivalry punctuated by intermittent crises, which will have to be managed in an atmosphere of mutual mistrust, even hostility. Moreover, they could spiral into a confrontation. The breakdown in communication and bellicose back-and-forth rhetoric would increase the probability of misperception and miscalculation during dangerous episodes. Given the conventional military power Russia now wields – to say nothing of its nuclear weapons and cyber capabilities – the dangers should be obvious and are already presaged by the hair-raising encounters in the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea between U.S. ships and aircraft and Russian warplanes.’’

Engagement leavened with realism would, they say:

“{W}elcome the emergence of democracy in Russia but wouldn’t allow quotidian policy to be shaped by the attendant hope. It would assume that the internal differences between Russia and the United States and the dissimilar geopolitical circumstances each faces would inevitably produce divergent interpretations of, and responses to, events – the wars in Ukraine and Syria being examples. It would expect Russia to regard itself as a great power, defend its interests as defined by its leadership, and, even in times of weakness, act on the premise that recovery and resurgence are inevitable.’’

Crises would continue to erupt, but with the expectation that they could be resolved. Meanwhile, they say, shared interests would accumulate and opportunities accrue.

Consider, for instance, advancing arms control and nuclear non-proliferation; averting war on the Korean peninsula or unregulated rivalry in the Arctic, the thawing of which has made it a maritime passageway as well as a new energy frontier; coordinating policies against terrorism and climate change; avoiding accidental military clashes; stabilizing Syria; and preventing bilateral crises from escalating into armed, especially nuclear, confrontations.

Now, if only we had a president capable of saying as much in his own words – or even persuasively reading speeches written by others! Their prescription is, the authors point out, not very different than how the United States and the USSR dealt with one another (and China) during much of the Cold War – an approach that produced notably soft landings. It may even be Donald Trump’s instinctive response to the situation, but it has been quite beyond him to deliver.

To refresh my memory of the Cuban missile crisis, I went back to Graham Allison’s famous book: Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (1971). It’s as good as I remember it, with its overlay of what modern political scientists had to say, mostly then new-fangled rational-actor theory, superimposed on a commonsense interpretation, with a substrate devoted to comparing the two accounts (those of “scientists” with “artists”) and fashioning a third model, in search of a satisfying explanation. Allison’s analysis had its good effect, none greater than when he emphasized the gospel of his mentor, Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling:  It helps to regularly put yourself in the other person’s shoes before acting.

Most distressing at the present moment, however, is the role of two leading U.S. newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post, in preferring condemnation and confrontation at every turn (The Times throughout the paper, The Post mainly on its editorial pages).  Granted, the situation has been further confused by Donald Trump’s election as president. 

But long before that, the coverage of Putin reminded me of the demonizing of Saddam Hussein in the build-up to Iraq (or, for that matter, The Times’s initial cheerleading for the Vietnam War, 40 years before). Truth-seeking, in the form of listening to the other side, is often severely wounded before the war begins.

Certainly it is not auspicious that The Times abolished the position of public editor, its in-house critic, just as the controversy heated up.  “Our followers on social media and our readers across the internet have come together to serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful that one person could ever be,” wrote publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., explaining the decision.  

In her final column, public editor Liz Spayd replied:

“It’s not really about how many critics there are, or where they’re positioned, or what Times editor can be rounded up to produce answers. It’s about having an institution that is willing to seriously listen to that criticism, willing to doubt its impulses and challenge the wisdom of the inner sanctum. Having the role was a sign of institutional integrity, and losing it sends an ambiguous signal: Is the leadership growing weary of such advice or simply searching for a new model?’’

We’ll find out soon enough.

Incidentally, I wouldn’t have known about either of these articles, the BuzzFeed scoop and the Boston Review narrative, but for Johnson’s Russia List, the compendium of Russian and Western news reports prepared almost daily by the independently minded scholar David Johnson.

When the history of the Ukraine crisis is finally written, Quaker-raised Johnson will, I think, be a major hero of the story. Neither The Times nor The Post – nor, for that matter, The Wall Street Journal– has yet cast light on his long and invaluable reconnaissance throughout the borderlands of democracy.

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