Stephen F. Cohen, War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate, New York: Skyhorse Publications, Inc., 2019. 225 pages.
Reviewed by Michael F. Duggan
With all of the partisan theatrics and bad media coverage of “Russiagate” it is difficult to know what the true state of U.S.-Russian relations is. One can infer that it is not good, but just how bad is it and what are the causes of its deterioration? To answer these and related questions, it is useful to get back to basics, to see what the Americans who know the most about Russia are saying about U.S.-Russian relations as a backdrop relative to the dangerous hyperbole we see in the news every day.
There was a time when a foreign policy outlook advocating détente was considered a mature, bipartisan position in this country. Times have changed. Today, when a (perhaps the) leading scholar of Russian studies and history—an emeritus professor at Princeton and New York University and long-term network media Russia expert—calls for parity and respect in our dealings with Russia and simple accuracy in media coverage, he is called “the most controversial Russia expert in America today” as well as some juvenile cheap shots like “a dupe” and “toady.”
The fact that Stephen Cohen is considered by some to be the most controversial Russia expert in the United States says far more about the times than it does of Cohen’s perspective. Getting history right matters and the unprofessional name-calling and unselfcritical media interpretations of U.S.-Russia affairs are not accidental. They amount to a kind of vulgar, propagandistic perspective that is well beyond the pall when one considers that getting history wrong can itself bring dire consequences.
Consider for example that in the nineteenth-century Germany led the world in the philosophy, theory, and practice of academic history. Universities in the United States sent their most promising students of history—men like Henry Adams, William Lothrop Motley, and Francis Parkman—to Germany to learn the newest ideas in historiography. And yet the outlooks of Hegel, von Ranke, and Treitschke were problematic—mistaken—and with the help of other nations and their geopolitical miscalculations, helped launch the world into the bloodiest period of its history.
Consider also that George F. Kennan, with a sensible historical perspective, a deep understanding of his subject—Russia—and a realistic view of Soviet Marxist-Leninism and human nature, devised a grand strategy that ended the (first) Cold War more or less on schedule even after considerable modification, tampering, and outright vandalism of his idea by lesser men. Even with such insight and understanding, luck played a major part.
Today, by contrast, it appears that the United States in its dealing with Russia is acting on an incorrect historical model—an equal and opposite eschatology (relative to Marxist-Leninism) of its own—one based on aggressive neo-liberal and neo-conservative policies, that have led us back into something like a new and potentially even more dangerous cold war. One senses that Professor Cohen just wants to get history and news coverage right. As we can see from the tragic history of the twentieth-century, the cost of getting it wrong is too high.
Premises
Depending on how you count them, War with Russia? is either the ninth or tenth book by Stephen Cohen (some of which he edited, co-edited, or co-authored), and it reads somewhat differently from much of his academic works. Taken from radio broadcasts covering about four-and-a-half years from August 2014 to August 2018, the book is essentially a sequential collection of short, punchy essays that chronicle the unfolding of what he calls (perhaps a little too often) the “new Cold War”—something he has seen coming since the 1990s. It is arranged in four chronological parts: Part I: The New Cold War Erupts 2014-2015, Part II: U.S. Follies and Media Malpractice 2016, Part III: Unprecedented Danger 2017, and Part IV: War With Russia?
His primary points are:
- The United States and Russia are now engaged in a new Cold War that is even more dangerous than the first. It is primarily the result of American triumphalism and its embracing of internal Russian elements that plundered the nation under Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s. He also blames the provocative expansion of NATO far into the Russian sphere of influence and the demonization of Vladimir Putin and all things Russian.
- Both American political parties and the mainstream press are engaging in a latter-day version of McCarthyism in which voices that dissent from the orthodox narrative condemning Russia and its president are maligned. Therefore, unlike the first Cold War, there is no robust multi-sided debate about Russia today—the media has completely abdicated on this point—and those who oppose the monolithic American position are shouted down, even by people who call themselves liberals and who for traditionally progressive outlets like the New Republic, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
- The mainstream reporting on Russia therefore is highly inaccurate and egregiously bad, one-sided, and shrill. Far from embracing the best traditions of investigative journalism and a fee press, coverage of Russia is characterized by lockstep conformity and a lazy acceptance of an unquestioned orthodoxy.
- The United States, whose leaders negotiated with every Soviet leader during the Cold War, has abandoned the idea of parity in its negotiations with Russia and has given up on the idea of détente and the assumption that the other side has its own sphere of influence and legitimate regional interests. Instead the U.S. has preferred to treat Russia disrespectfully as a pathetic, defeated country.
- In short, the mainstream media has embraced the positions of U.S. intelligence agencies.
- What has become known as “Russiagate” can be more accurately described as “Intelgate” and is the product of U.S. intelligence agencies.
The essays are as varied as the events of the period 2014-2018 and can be read individually or sequentially thus allowing the reader to understand how events unfolded in the order they happened. Cohen’s fluency in Russian history and culture is humbling in terms of details, depth of understanding, and broadness of sweep. Although certain themes do recur throughout—as he has noted himself, there is some unavoidable redundancy—the book holds together as an unfolding episodic interpretation of events during this period.
The book is well-written and reads close to the spoken language—and although Cohen writes with clarity—this one is likely aimed at a broader audience and reads faster than previous books like The Failed Crusade and Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives. It is a threadbare tenet of conventional wisdom that news is “the first edition of history,” and when reading Cohen, one gets the feeling that he is writing a more settled interpretation of events as they happen. One does not have to agree with all of his points to realize the importance of his overall point of view, his diagnoses, and prescriptions (in a recent interview, his wife, Katrina vanden Heuven, editor of The Nation, and Dan Rather dissented on a number of Cohen’s points (as do I)).
In terms of niche, Cohen may not be completely unique as the rational man as heretical expert standing against the tide and armed only with the truth in an effort to set the record straight. But his stature as a scholar and journalist make him a Napoleonic figure on most issues regarding modern Russia and American relations with it. Despite continuing efforts to malign or marginalize him, his point of view cannot be dismissed. In some respects he is analogous to Alfred McCoy in regard to China (In the Shadows of the American Century) and Diana Johnston on the Balkans wars of the 1990s (Fool’s Crusade), but in some ways his timbre more of traditional centralist. It is the politics of our day that has made him seem like a radical (in this sense, he may be akin to Andrew Bacevich, who describes himself as a traditional conservative). All of these commentators provide precious alternatives of in-depth historical understanding to the unfounded clichés and bubbles and misreported accounts by the corporate media.
Adopting a Mature Stance toward Russia
Why should the United States adopt a more conciliatory stance toward Russia? For me the answer is simple: policy is about the pursuit of national interest and not the lording of moral superiority over others. It is about trying to achieve the optimal over the maximal. Quite simply (to paraphrase George Kennan on another topic) there is no reason why as a mature nation we cannot deal with Russia maturely as neither friend nor foe but as an important nation with its own legitimate interests and sphere of interest. Why not treat them with the same dispassion with which we treat other major countries like Germany and Japan? In other words we should improve relations with Russia because is makes no sense to antagonize them and because both the United States and Russia still have thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at each other on a hair-trigger, first strike basis (See Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine, and review of it in this blog).
To understand the dangers of treating a nation harshly after a bitter struggle one need only compare the results of Versailles with those of the Marshall Plan and the rebuilding of Japan. Such a comparison underscores the folly of our present course. Now add nuclear weapons to the equation. Our baffling vilification of Russia is also driving it closer to China at a time when the latter is attempting to devise a Eurasian economic sphere that would undermine U.S. economic standing in the world possibly allowing the Yuan to supplant the Dollar as the world reserve currency.
Cohen believes that the period we are now in is at least as perilous as the most dangerous periods of the Cold War, a new low. He sees the recent and ongoing situations in Georgia, Syria, and Ukraine collectively as the Cuban Missile Crisis-times-three. This may or may not be an overstatement or an imperfect equation; the Cuban Crisis was a rapidly-evolving direct confrontation characterized by poor communication between the U.S. and the USSR, and an American president give horrible advice by those around him. But when taken as a historical whole, U.S. policy toward Russia since 1991 has been unnecessarily provocative—even confrontational—and one quickly realizes the possibility that any of these crises could have easily turned into a direct confrontation very quickly. If this is Cohen’s point, then he is probably right. And now another unnecessary crisis potentially looms with Russian ally, Iran.
As with the original Cold War, the danger today lays both in the possibility of accident and miscalculation: in mistaking boilerplate rhetoric and saber rattling (if you will excuse the mixed metaphor) for genuine brinksmanship and escalation and vise-versa (e.g. was the positioning of heavy U.S. weapons in Poland and some of the Baltic nations an escalation or mere symbolism, and how do the Russians see it? How would the United States regard an equal and opposite move by the Russian?). Policy makers in this nation and in Europe must realize that the Russia—like any old and proud nation—can only be pushed so far. What we might take to be just another round NATO expansion, might be a final straw to them. Cohen, like the rest of us, presumably does not know about the existence or the extent of back channels and secret diplomacy.
Americans may choose to live in a fool’s paradise and assume that there is always constructive communication and quiet and cooperative diplomacy between the U.S. and Russia that ameliorates all of the bellicose public posturing. But even if this is true, it is scant comfort to those of us who believe that history is often characterized by mistakes and screw ups. On this point, one would do well to research the origins of the informal military acronyms SNAFU and FUBAR.
When I spoke to friends about the obvious danger of American and Russian combat aircraft sharing the same airspace to bomb different sides of the civil war in Syria a few years ago, I was assured of the close communication and cooperation between U.S. and Russian planners. I was skeptical then and am still not felicitous about the coordination of opposing military operations between the backers of proxies in a vicious civil war. My reading of history is that accidents happen—especially in war. Friendly fire is vastly under reported in every conflict and incidents like the bombing of U.S. forces by American planes during Operation Cobra during the summer of 1944, or the airborne units shot down by Americans in Italy the year before may serve as cautionary example.
With the added element of relying on the cooperation of an adversary in a hot war that could easily turn into a war between nuclear powers, it becomes clear that we are playing with Promethean fire regardless of precautions. As I have noted before, in such cases, the potential exists for an August 1914 scenario with October 1962 (+57) technology and capacity for destruction. As a frustrated John Kennedy observed when a U-2 strayed far into Soviet airspace at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis “[t]here is always some son-of-a-bitch that does not get the word.” During the same crisis, U.S. destroyers rolled “practice” depth charges on nuclear-armed Soviet submarines.
History
In order to understand Russian behavior in recent years, I think those of us in this country should ask ourselves how we would feel if the U.S. had “lost” the Cold War and then a revitalized USSR began to act in an expansionist manner.
For instance, how would the United States respond if the Soviet Union broke a vow not to move “one inch” (as Cohen has stated) into the American regional sphere of influence and then pushed the Warsaw Pact deep into Canada, supported extremist anti-US forces there in a successful effort to overthrow a democratically-elected, pro-U.S. government in Ottawa? The mainstream media rightfully despises the thugs that showed up at Charlottesville two summers ago, yet is curiously silent about our Ukrainian “allies”—the most extreme of whom (including members of the Svoboda party) are more-or-less politically identical to them.
How would people in this country feel if after 1991 the USSR treated the United States as a defeated, second-rate nation, supported high-level bureaucrats (in Russia the Nomenclatura) as they plundered Federal pension funds and allied themselves with other internal elements that robbed our nation? Professor Cohen has written extensively about the post-Cold War era —a period that has transitioned from news into history. For a scholarly overview of the period from the 1980s until 2012, see: Failed Crusade, America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia [2000], and Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives, From Stalinism to the New Cold War [2009, 2011].
“A Strategic Blunder of Proportionally Epic Proportions”: The Expansion of NATO
The great misjudgment in American policy toward Russia begins late in the George Herbert Walker Bush Administration—Bush, who masterfully ended the Cold War only to start crowing about “victory” as the 1992 election loomed into sight—and then took off under Bill Clinton with a clean break from the past and the getting away from an assumption of parity in our dealings with Russia. Emblematic of the lack of sensitivity shown by the U.S. toward Russia was the (ongoing) expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization farther and farther from the North Atlantic.
In 1990 Germany was reunited on terms aligning it with West. Beginning with the Clinton administration, NATO has expanded eastward, initially into the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (1999). Even though these are Central European nations that have frequently looked to the West (Poland is Catholic rather than Orthodox and uses the Roman rather than Cyrillic alphabet), some critics noted that even this violation of earlier assurances looked like Western expansionism. As George Kennan, observed after President Clinton announced this initial expansion: “[t]he deep commitment of our government to press the expansion of NATO right up to the Russian border is the greatest mistake of the entire post-Cold War era” and “a strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.”
In 2004 Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined NATO. In 2009 Albania and Croatia joined. In 2017 it was Montenegro. Although it is difficult to imagine a U.S. military commander saying something like “You don’t want to go into an all-out war with Russia without Montenegro on your side,” the inclusion of Eastern European nations in NATO actually makes war with Russia more likely, and now the U.S. is has a treaty obligation to defend them, even if it leads to a nuclear war.
Russian Psychology and History
What many casual observers in the United States apparently fail to understand about Russia is that it has the geographical qualities of a massive land empire (Cohen takes the “land empire” thesis to task in Soviet Fates) and is distrustful of outsiders and more concerned with buffer zones than with far flung expansion and conquest. In my opinion, an understanding of Russia’s tragic history of foreign invasion brings the impetus of this outlook into sharper focus. It also underscores why the expansion of NATO far into the Russian sphere of influence is so dangerous.
Media “Malpractice”
Cohen also takes to task the jaw-dropping hyperbole and outright falsehoods perpetuated by the mainstream media. On this point he is a virtual voice in the wilderness and encourages others to also call out often-repeated lies and exaggerations. The media’s getting it wrong goes beyond laziness, error, and even cynicism into what he calls “malpractice.” This malpractice includes the unhistorical characterization of the Russian “invasion” of Crimea (Crimea has long been an official or de facto part of Russia—how does a nation “invade” a region where it has already been for more than a century-and-a-half and where perhaps 80% of the people speak the language of the “invader”?).
Perhaps the most notable misinformation perpetuated by the press are the often personal smears against Putin himself (who supported the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and gave President Obama face-saving cover to walk back his “red line” rhetoric about Syria). Cohen believes that recent characterizations of Putin are on balance more severe than mainstream depictions of any of the Soviet leaders during Cold War.
Charges of Hitlerian despotism leveled against Putin are especially perplexing when one considers that Soviet Russia lost 25-27 million people fighting Nazi Germany and the fact that the war was mostly fought and won on the Eastern Front. Any equation of Putin with Hitler is therefore foolish, inaccurate, and dangerous; Hitler was a phobic psychopath and Nazi Germany was a rogue state with designs of ethic warfare, the extermination of entire peoples, continental conquest, and world domination (and the subtext of comparing a foreign leader to Hitler, is that he cannot remain in power, even if it takes world war to remove him).
Putin by contrast fits in well with the historical model of the Russian leader as strongman/woman (e.g. Ivan, Peter, Catherine). If the media must compare him imperfectly/superficially to a German leader, a more fitting analog would be to a consolidator and practitioner of realpolitik like Bismarck, rather than a madman like Hitler. Like Bismarck, Putin is an unsentimental hardball realist and consolidationist with a good understanding of his nation’s vital interests (there are obvious differences as well).
Is Putin the sensitive soul into whose eyes George W. Bush gazed wistfully? No. But that is not the point. If his past behavior is any indication, Putin is a national leader with whom we can do business, and beyond a certain point will not be pushed. Thus the danger Cohen sees in our recent policy toward Russia. And given Soviet losses during the Second World War, and the fact that an estimated seven out of ten Wehrmacht solders who died in combat were killed by Soviet forces, ad hominen comparisons to Hitler are not only in extreme bad taste, but but are likely to poison any hope for meaningful future dialog.
One need only read the prologue of the book, “The Putin Spector: Who He is Not” and the first chapter, an essay dated August 27, 2014 titled “Patriotic Heresy vs. Cold War: to get a fair sample of mainstream “Fallacy” versus Cohen’s scholarly “Fact” about the Russian president.
“Russiagate” vs. “Intelgate”
Cohen’s most controversial position is his assertion that what the media and political parities have characterized as “Russiagate” is really “Intelgate,” that the scandal alleging collusion with Russia and its interference with the 2016 U.S. elections was in fact a conspiracy hatched and pulled off by U.S. agencies. On this point I am agnostic; his claim seems unlikely and conspiratorial, but then we are living in strange times. Without giving the story away—an account Cohen explains in detail—I will simply recommend reading the book and judging for oneself.
I will only add that the Intelgate thesis is, in my opinion, intriguing and suggestive but unproved. At the very least, Cohen’s positing of this theory is a striking and singular instance of an important scholar going out on a limb and possibly staking his reputation on a single claim, even if one does not agree with it. But even if this theory proves to be “a bridge too far” beyond the other premises of this book, the rest of it holds up well with or without it and I think Cohen’s overarching interpretation about U.S.-Russia relations and their recent mutual history is mostly correct.
Solutions: Parity and Détente
So what are the solutions posited by a man who calls himself a “national security patriot” and a “patriotic heretic” in regard to tensions of a new cold war? By historical standards—i.e. by the standards of the first Cold War—they are the most reasonable, the most conventional imaginable. By the standards of the locked-brain ideology of the Washington Consensus, they are radical, scandalous, and perhaps even amounting to a kind of appeasement: the embracing of détente based on parity and respect over the baffling and ill-considered provocation that has led the two countries into a new cold war that could go hot in the worst possible way at a moment’s notice. As for loaded epithets like “appeasement,” I would contended that a moderate and rational approach to a potentially dangerous nation from a position of strength—the position of a nation with a one trillion-dollar military backed by thousands of nuclear weapons—could be better characterized as measured maturity in the interest of maintaining peace. Besides, what is the reasonable alternative?
Cohen’s solutions are straightforward: the United States does not have to be allies or enemies with Russia, but it should deal with them productively and for mutual benefit via détente, as we did in negotiations with communist leader between the 1950s and the end of the Cold War (if we were willing to talk to communists, why not to Putin?). We should deal with them fairly and evenly like we would any other nation.
Cohen’s point of view might be akin to that of de Tocqueville in recognizing that, due to their size, geography, history, and national interests, the United States and Russia will never be close friends. His view is like that of Kennan, that as a mature nation we should strike a balance with them as neither allies nor enemies, a balance that from our perspective recognizes that they (like the U.S.) are entitled to a sphere of influence (an unfortunate fact that will persist as long as there are large and powerful nations).
There is certainly a long and well-documented set of historical precedents for fair dealing with Russia, even if we regarded their system to be a bad one in terms of rights and representation. As with Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and post-Reykjavik Reagan, and the first president Bush prior to the summer of 1991, Cohen advocates a strategy of live-and-let-live détente based on an assumption of parity and mutual legitimate interests. But even a policy of mutual accommodation does not guarantee peace—there were numerous times when the first Cold War almost turned hot—and some historians are now saying that in retrospect the fact that the world survived the first great U.S.-Russian struggle is nothing short of miraculous.
There appears to be no agenda to this book other than to set things straight in the name of accurate reporting and policy that promises a less dangerous course. Cohen seems to be a man dedicated to the truth, a clear sighted person in an age of The Emperor’s New Clothes who sees clearly when others are content to not see at all.
I recommend Cohen’s new book, War with Russia?. It reads quickly and can be read profitably in conjunction with his academic writing on Russia, especially Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives (on the post-Cold War period and the subsequent events leading to the new Cold War). The overall message appears to be that the unnecessary ratcheting-up of tensions by heavy-handed policy and media misrepresentation risks transforming the new cold war into a hot war between major powers that would likely turn nuclear. He might have a point.
For discussions with the author about his new book, see the links below.