1 ) What’s the Matter with Russia?
2) A “Wonderful Life”?
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1) What’s the Matter with Russia? [Unpublished, October, 2016]
By Michael F. Duggan, Ph.D.
With one American presidential candidate comparing Vladimir Putin to Adolph Hitler and the other saying he would like to engage the Russian president in constructive dialog, it is understandable that the American people might be confused about United States policy toward Russia. When one considers that American and Russian warplanes are sharing the same crowded combat airspace while bombing different sides in the multi-sided catastrophe known as the Syrian Civil War, the confusion becomes even more pronounced (especially in light of the fact that Putin provided face-saving cover for American non-intervention in Syria by arranging to have the American “red line” casus belli for greater involvement removed1). In spite of this ambiguity and confusion, it is apparent which side much of the United States foreign policy establishment and the corporate media have chosen.2
Observers going back to Alexis de Tocqueville have observed that geographical factors and conflicting vital interests will probably prevent the United States and Russia from ever being close allies (our alliance with the Soviet Union in the Second World War was a marriage forced at gunpoint). Even the most cursory perusal of a map of the world will reinforce this observation. But it does not follow that just because the countries cannot be friends that they must necessarily be enemies, that they cannot as mature nations attempt to improve relations to their maximal positive extreme.
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 but is distrustful of outsiders and more concerned with buffer zones than with far flung expansion and conquest. An understanding of Russia’s tragic history of foreign invasion brings the impetus of this outlook into sharper focus. All of the immoderate talk in this country equating Putin with Hitler is therefore foolish, inaccurate, and very dangerous; Hitler was a phobic psychopath and Nazi Germany was a rogue state with designs on ethic warfare, 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 into the historical model of the Russian leader as strongman/woman (e.g. Ivan, Peter, Catherine). If Americans must compare him imperfectly to a German leader, a more fitting analogy would be to a consolidator and practitioner of real politick like Bismarck, rather than a madman like Hitler (and given that 27-30 million Soviets died fighting the Nazis, and that an estimated seven out of ten Wehrmacht solders who died in combat were killed by Soviet forces, ad hominin comparisons to Hitler will likely poison the well for meaningful future dialog3). The hallmark of Hitler’s military policies was invasion, bombing, and the occupation of other nations. When one considers the number of countries the United States has invaded and/or occupied, bombed, or has otherwise intervened in since 2001, generalized comparisons of others to German militarism of another time become decidedly uncomfortable.
Most Americans do not realize that Russia is probably too large and diverse to work as a liberal republic, and, even if they had a desire for representative democracy, the choice would be theirs and not ours. They have not known something akin to the American democratic tradition and likely equate freedom with anarchy and exploitation. The most notable Russian leaders have been those who have protected the nation from outsiders—from the West in recent centuries—or secured buffer zones between the behemoth nation and potential aggressors.
American leaders and policymakers should have realized that if they kept pushing NATO, the EU, and rule of law initiatives further and further into the Russian zone of influence, the Russians would eventually start to push back. The treatment of Russia as a vanquished foe and inferior, and the expansion of NATO began in the 1990s during the Clinton administration. In 1997 George F. Kennan noted that “[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 period” and “a strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.”4
The underlying cause of this aggressive stance toward Russia and the unnecessary renewal of U.S.-Russian tensions is a kind of export missionary zeal that has gripped the sensibilities of policymakers in recent decades, one which embraces a dubious universalist morality, “humanitarian intervention,” and neoliberal eschatology. It is an outlook of neoliberal policy by aggressive neoconservative means that has co-opted unwary progressives with whom soaring rhetoric on the inexorable march of democracy, rights, and free markets still resonates in spite of a record with very bad results.
In an article in The New York Review of Books, United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, points to how Russia “flagrantly trie[d] to expand its territory by lobbing off a part of a neighboring country,” but fails to mention U.S. support of a right-wing coup against a democratically-elected president in the same country and the positioning of heavy weapons in the Baltic States.4 To put these policies, and the expansion of NATO, into an empathetic counterfactual, one need only ask how those of us in the United States would feel if a revitalized Warsaw Pact had supported a coup against the Canadian government, was positioning weapons and supporting anti-U.S. rebels there, and was telling the United States to get out of Puerto Rico. We would tell them to go to hell, and would be justified to do so. If our conventional forces were outnumbered, it is conceivable that we might even position tactical nuclear weapons along the northern border.
Ambassador Power also links U.S. interests to the domestic policies of other nations and advocates diplomacy with groups and organization inside other nations. Are we to infer from this a general right or to act or meddle in the internal affairs of other countries on a basis of moral indignation? Would we grant the same courtesy to foreign nations or groups when our domestic policies fail to live up to their moral standards and expectations? Would we allow Russia, China, or Islamic nations to conduct open diplomacy with their supporters in the United States? Again we see arrogance, superiority, and entitlement masquerading as modesty and superiority morality. A nation that has frequently failed to live up to its own first principles—that cannot lead by example—has no business telling others how to conduct their own domestic affairs.
Blinded or emboldened by their ideology, American officials do not appreciate that there are important nations and regions that do not, and will never accept U.S. military hegemony as the bulldog of globalization. The sooner that the United States starts taking these players seriously—the sooner we start taking Putin seriously and stop treating Russia like a defeated second-rate nation—the better things will be for all involved. As the British historian and philosopher, John Gray notes, “China and Russia may be able to live in peaceful coexistence with the U.S., but they will never accept American moral tutelage; the notion that they can be conscripted into service in a campaign to convert the world to American-style democracy is laughable.”6 This is but one of the white whales that the United States chases today, and the neoliberals of the Washington Consensus are fairly our delusional Ahab.7
The stated reasons for policy are oftentimes not the real ones; they are never the only ones. Commentators have suggested that just as the American plan to stir things up in Syria was in part an attempt to exploit the weakest link in the Russia-Iran-Syria chain. Likewise increased tensions with Russia might be a means to justify Cold War-size military budgets and new weapon systems (interventions in the Near East and elsewhere provide opportunities to test new weaponry). It has even been suggested that the more aggressive stance of the United States toward Russia generally is an attempt to re-enact a mythological interpretation of the final stages of the Cold War—to bankrupt Russia via an arms race of conventional land forces (i.e. by forcing them to match our own deficit military spending in hope that their economy will collapse first). An economy dependent on military production is an economy of decline, and the United States in 2016, with its $20 trillion deficit may spend itself into a position where the Chinese Yuan will replace the Dollar as the world reserve currency.
Beyond the inherent danger of letting military budgets dictate policy and letting arms races dictate the course of events, there is an even more immediate danger: Putin has already signaled that he will not take the bait, that invading forces from the west would be met with tactical nuclear weapons in the event of a pending Russian conventional defeat.8 If push came to shove in Syria or Ukraine, what would result would likely be a Guns of August-style crisis with “Missiles of October”+55 technology. It would be the rapidly-escalating out-of-control war that the United States and the Soviet Union successfully avoided fighting between 1945 and 1991.
Policies short of military action are also dangerous and unlikely to work. Every time the West slaps sanctions on Russia, Putin’s domestic number go up, and Russia is quite capable of economic autarchy if it means standing up to the United States and its allies (Russia can also turn off the flow of more than a third of the natural gas used by Europe any time it wants to, so one is left wondering who is really in the driver’s seat). The baffling rekindling of hostilities will likely drive Russia closer to China, perhaps as a key part of a greater Eurasian economic prosperity sphere whose massive capital programs have already begun (China is in fact a far greater threat than Russia).9
The inflexible realities of geography and history make the United States and Russia rivals. As with any rival—and any nation possessing nuclear weapons—Russia is potentially dangerous. But American officials and journalists should be trying to tamp-down tensions rather than exploit them for whatever perceived advantage. Above all the United States should not underestimate the very real danger posed by its own policy stance and overheated rhetoric. As long as there are large countries, there will be spheres of influence in which the legitimate interests of others trump our own. As Russian historian, Anthony Utkin observed, “Every great nation has its own Monroe Doctrine. Do the Americans really think that they are entitled to one and Russia is not?”10 And tensions, once ratcheted-up to the level of crises, may not so easily be brought down again.
The first step in devising a realistic foreign policy is to see things as they are in all of their subtlety and nuance, and to frame leaders, nations, and events accordingly in an accurate historical context. Vladimir Putin is a pragmatic Russian nationalist who knows his nation’s vital interests and who is both cautious and fully capable of hardball realism. Unprovoked, he will not attack the West, but it is only realistic to assume that at a certain point he will begin to push back in earnest if drawn into a game of brinksmanship. Just as we would not accept Russian forces on our border—we almost fought a nuclear war over Cuba in 1962—Russia will never accept U.S. military dominance in its sphere of influence, and they will only countenance the expansive tendencies of NATO for so long. Young nations may buckle and break under the weight of sanctions and other external pressures, but old nations with long histories and historical memory are likely to resist, radicalize, and eventually fight.
I am confident that none of this will be interpreted as the language of appeasement (or as a single-issue endorsement of one of the presidential candidates). Appeasement is a position of weakness in the face of an aggressor, and as Russia has not threatened the West and nobody doubts the unequaled power of the U.S. military or its massive nuclear triad, comparisons to the beginning o WWII are fundamentally inaccurate. This is no more than a plea of moderate realism for American policymakers to awake from their dogmatic slumber and to attempt to restore a balance of power in regions far from the United States before it is too late.
Notes
- See Roy McGovern, “When Putin Bailed out Obama on Syria”, Counterpunch, September 1, 2016.
- Regarding the hostility of some State Department officials toward the Russian-allied Assad regime, see Mark Larder “51 U.S. Diplomats urge Airstrikes against Syria”, The New York Times, June 16, 2016. The “Dissent Channel” letter that is the subject of this article would seem to be a harbinger of greater U.S. involvement in the already dangerous war in Syria in the event of a Clinton victory in November. For an example of a propagandistic anti-Russian article in the mainstream press, see Timothy Snyder’s editorial, see Timothy Snyder’s editorial “How a Russian Fascist is Meddling in America’s Election”, The New York Times, September 20, 2016.
- These figures of Soviet casualties are given by Joseph Lelyveld in His Final Battle, the Last Month of Franklin Roosevelt, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016, p. 6).
- Quotes respectively from John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan, a Life, New York: Penguin, 2012, p. 681, and Frank Costigola (ed.), The Kennan Diaries, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014, 656. See also Stephen F. Cohen, Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives, From Stalin to the New Cold War, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008 (2011), p. 189. In order to see the expansion of NATO as an encroachment into the Russian sphere of influence, consider that since 1990 the list of new member nations has grown to include: East Germany (unified with West Germany in 1990), the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland (1999), Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia (2004), Albania, Croatia (2009), and Montenegro (2017). When one looks at this list in conjunction with a map of Europe, the point becomes even more clear. In regard to American and NATO involvement in the Balkans during the 1990s, see generally Diana Johnstone, Fool’s Crusade, Monthly Review Press, 2002.
- See Samantha Power, “U.S. Diplomacy: Realism and Reality”, The New York review of Books, August 8, 2016, pp. 52-54.
- John Gray, Black Mass, Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007, p. 166.
- Chris Hedges has compared the modern United States to the crew of the Pequod in Melville’s Moby-Dick. See Wages of Rebellion, New York: Nation Books, 2015, pp. 28-42.
- See Michael Hudson and Jessica Desvarieux, “U.S.-NATO Border Confrontation with Russia: Risking Nuclear War” Counterpunch, July 19, 2017. See also See also the 60 Minutes story “The New Cold War”, aired on September 25, 2016.
- Andrew F. Cohen, p. 189.
- See generally Alfred W. McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century, the Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, Chicago: Haymarket, 2017.
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2) A “Wonderful Life”?
I have always loved the 1947 Frank Capra seasonal classic “It’s a Wonderful Life”, but have long sensed that it is a sadder story than most people realize (in a similar sense perhaps to “Goodby Mr. Chips”). One gets the impression from the early part of the movie that George Bailey could have done anything, but was held back. Last year, after watching it, I tried to get my ideas about the film organized and wrote the following essay (please go easy, it’s a very rough draft):
In spite of its heart-warming ending, the 1947 Christmas mainstay by Frank Capra, It’s a Wonderful Life, is in some ways an ambiguous film, and likely a sad story. George Bailey, the film’s protagonist played by Jimmy Stewart (in spite of his real-life Republican leanings), is exactly the kind of person who gave the United States it’s most imaginative set of political programs from 1933 to 1945–that shephereded the country through the Depression and won WWII–and consequently its greatest period of prosperity from 1945 until the early 1970s. Bailey wants to do “something big and something important”–to “build things” to “plan modern cities, build skyscrapers 100 stories high… bridges a mile long… airfields…” George Bailey is the big thinker–a “big picture guy” and his father, Peter Bailey the staunch and sensible localist are the kind of people we need now.
In a moment of frank honesty bordering on insensitivity, George tells his father that he does not want to work in the Building and Loan, that he “couldn’t face being cooped up in a shabby little office… counting nickels and dimes.” His father recognizes the restlessness, the boundless talent and quality, the bridled energy, big-thinking, and high-minded ambition of his son. Altho’ wounded, the senior Mr. Bailey agrees with George, saying “You get yourself and education and get out of here,” and dies of a stroke the same night—his strategically-placed photo remains a moral ominpresence for the rest of the movie (along with presidential photos to link events to specific years).
George’s being cooped up in the little town is exactly what happens as one local crises or turn of events after another stymies all of his plans to go abroad and change the world. Rather than world-changer, he ends up as a local fixer–a better, and more energetic version of a local hero, the status that confirms his “wonderful life” at the film’s exuberantly sentimental ending of a 1946 yuletide flash mob descending on the Bailey house and saving the situation by returning decades worth of good faith, deed, and subsequent material wealth. But what is it that sets George apart from the rest of the town that comes to depend upon him over the years?
At the age of 12 he saves his brother Harry from drowning (and by historical extension, a troop ship a quarter of a century later), leaving him deaf in one ear. Shortly thereafter, his keen perception prevents Mr. Gower, the pharmacist (distracted by the news of his son’s death during the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918-1919), from accidentally poisoning another patient. As an adult, George’s theorizing about making plastics from soybeans makes a less visionary friend a fortune, but not himself.
Other than saving the Building and Loan from liquidaiton, George’s primary victory is marrying his beautiful but wholesome sweetheart–“Marty’s kid sister”–Mary (Donna Reed) and raising a family. With a cool head and insight and the help of his wife, they single-handedly prevents a run on the Building and Loan with his own honeymoon funds. From there he goes on to help an immigrant family buy their own house and in fact builds an entire subdivision for the town’s earnest and respectable poor, all the while standing up to the local bully: the cartoonishly sinister plutocratic omnipresence and Manachiest counterweight to everything good and decent in town, Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore). Potter is the lingering, unregulated 19th.c predatory plutocracy that, in modified form, cooked the economy during 1920s thus creating the Great Depression. Even Potter comes to recognize George’s quality and unsuccessfully attempts to buy him off.
During the war, George’s bad ear keeps him out of the war (unlike the real Jimmy Stewart who flew numerous missions over Germany in a B-24), and makes himself useful with such patriotic extracurriculars as serving as an air raid warden, and organizing paper, rubber, and scrap drives. But all the while, even though he has adapted to his fate of being involuntarily tethered to the small financial institution he involuntarily inherited from his father, and therefore to the town.
Were George Bailey just another guy in Bedford Falls or the United States, this would indeed be a wonderful life, and indeed for most of us it would be. On the face of events, George seems to be a great success at the end of the movie. In case this is not apparent from the boisterous but benevolent 1940s yuletide riot of unabashed exuberence–a reverse bank run–at the movie’s end. His brother–now a Medal of Honor recipient– proudly proclaims “To George Bailey, the richest man in town”, something confirmed in the homey wisdom inscribed in a copy of Tom Sawyer by George’s guardian angel (and silly fictional device and concession to comic relief in a story about attempted suicide) Clarence that “no man is a failure who has friends”.
Of course Clarence is introduced into a minimally realistic story to provide George with the exquisite but equally silly luxury—“a great gift”—of seeing what would have become of the town and its people without him in a (altho’ to a jazz lover, the downtown section of Pottersville—an alternate reality to the occasionally overly precious, Norman Rockwell-esque Bedford Falls—looks fairly attractive, with its hot jazz lounges and jitter bugging swing clubs).
In this Hugh Everett-like alternate narrative devise and dark paralell universe, he sees that his wife Mary is an unhappy mouse-like spinster working in a (God forbid) library; that Harry drowned as a child and was therefore not alive in 1944 to save a fully loaded troop transport ship. Likewise, everybody else in the town is an embittered, anti-social, or outright bad or tragic version of themselves from the frustrating yet wonderful Rockwell version of George’s wonderful life.
The problem is that George is not ordinary: he is no mere careerist, conventionalist, or money-chasing credentialist–he is a maverick problem-solver with a heart of gold. He is exactly the kind of person we need now, but whom the establishment of our own time in fact despises.
In literary terms, he is not a typical beaten-down loser-protagonist of the modernist canon; he is not a Bartleby the scribner, a J. Alfred Prufrock, Leopold Bloom, or Willie Lohman, but then neither is his stolid father (George is perhaps more akin to Thomas Hardy’s talented but frustrated Jude Fawley or a better version of James Hilton’s Mr. Chips—characters who might have have amounted to more had they not been limited or constrained by external circumstances).
George, in my opinion, is more in keeping with the great tragic-heroic protagonist of the Greeks and Shakespeare (i.e. a person who could have pushed the limits of the humanly possibility). He might have done genuinely great things, had his plans gotten off the ground, had the unforeseen chaos of life and social circumstances not intervened. Just after breaking his father’s heart by revealing his ambitions, George correctly assesses and confides and that the old man is a “great guy.” True enough. But the conspicuous fact is that the older Bailey is much more on the scale of a local hero, a “pillar of the community”–a necessary type for any town to put out the day-to-day brush fires and is therefore perhaps more fully actualized, but George has bigger ambitions and presumably abilities to match.
In a perfect world, someone like Mr. Bailey, Sr. would have been better cast in the role to which his son is condemned (in fact he is cast in that role), and George would have found an even more wonderful life in charge of a large New Deal project or managing war production against the Nazis and Imperial Japanese, rather than admonishing people to turn off their lights during air raid drills. In a better world, a lesser man could have handled all the evils of Bedford Falls.
The point is that we needs both kinds of Mr. Baileys—both the father and the son—and it is clear that in spite of numerous local victories, George could have done far more in the broader world (his less-interesting younger brother, Harry, seems to have unintentionly hijacked George’s plans: goes off to college, lands a plumb research position in Buffalo as part-and-parcel of marrying a rich and beautiful wife, and then to help win a world war–and returns, amazingly, as the same chipper person complete with our nation’s highest military honor after lunching with Harry and Bess in the White House). George is the Rooseveltian top-down planner and social democrat while Mr. Bailey is the naturalistic, Jane Jacobs localist.
Even if we accept Capra’s questionable premise that George’s life is the most wonderful of possible alternatives, the ending is not entirely satisfactory for people used to Hollywood Endings: George’s likable, but absent-minded, Uncle Billy inadvertently misplaces $8,000 dollars (perhaps tenfold that amount in 2017 dollars) into Mr. Potter’s hands (seen and abetted by Mr. Potter’s silent, wheelchair-pushing flunky, who, even without a single line in the entire movie, is arguably the most despicable person in it), and his honest mistake is never revealed nor presumably is the money ever recovered.
Mr. Potter’s crime does not come to light, and George is very nearly framed by the incident and driven to dispair. Instead he is happily bailed out (bailey is bailed out after bailing out the town so many times), by the now propserous town of the immediate postwar, and the fact that his rich boyhood chum, the affable Sam ”hee haw” Wainwright, is willing to forward $25,000 of his company’s petty cash puts the crisis into broader focus and perspective and makes us realize that George was never was really in trouble (although the SEC might have found such a large transfer from a close friend with a mysterious $8000 deficit to be suspicious). It is a comforting wink from Capra himself. Had he not been so distracted from an accumlation of trying circumstances, this is something George might have intuited himself thus preventing his breakdown in the first place. The bank examiner (district attorney?), in light of the crowd’s vouchsafing George’s reputation, tears up the summons, grabs a cup of punch and heartily joins in singing Hark, the Hearald Angel Sings.
At the movie’s end, George is safe and obviously touched by the outpouring of his community and appreciates just how god things realy are (and you just know that any scene that begins with Donna Reed clearing an entire tabletop of Christmas wrapping pharaphenalia to make room for charitable cash contributions is going to be excessively heart-warming), but presumably remains as local, provincial as before. His wonderful life has produced a wonderful effort to meet a (still unsolved) crisis. But just imagine what he could have done with 1940s federal funding and millions of similarlly well-intended people to manage–like those who engineered the NEw Deal, the WWII mobilization, and the Marshall Plan. Would his name rank with the likes of Harry Hopkins, Rex Tugwell, Adolph Bearle, Raymond Moley, Frances Perkins, John Kenneth Galbraith, Thomas Corcoran, Benjamin Cohen, Averell Harriman, George Marshall, George Kennnan, and Franklin Roosevelt himself?
What is the lesson of all of this? I think that it is that this wonderful movie is also cautionary tale, and that if we are to face the emerging crises of our own time, we will at the very least require a Brains Trust of George Baileys in the right places and legions of local people like his father.