Friends,
Is this article and the one in the NYTimes sent yesterday, heralding a new look at our relationship with Russia? There are a few other less obvious aspects happening like Merkel going to Moscow to confer with Putin, Europe uncertain about how it will be led in the future, and other hints that things are not well with America’s role in the world.
However, I’m shocked that this scholarly piece below has been read, accepted and printed in Foreign Affairs, the American magazine of international relations and U.S. foreign policy published by the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, membership organization and think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international affairs.
For years, Foreign Affairs has held to the tenets that America is exceptional (in many ways it is), that its incursions into other countries’ politics has been necessary and that the unipolar world makes perfect sense to all thinking people.
Below, they allow Robert English, a distinguished thinker, the ability to go public with very different points of view––points usually not mentioned in their pages. He takes on the warped views of Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman and sloughs them off with the twist of a word or two. He knows where in he speaks about the horrendous decade of Russia’s 90s, which Clinton and Harvard intellects aided and abetted––which others in Washington and New York haven’t admitted.
In one after another, English sheds light on stereotypes that have been repeated ad nauseam for decades now. After mentioning “Distaste for Putin’s harsh rule” in earlier paragraphs, he gets to another assessment of Putin in the last paragraph which seems to me gives a perspective that meshes with those held by many who have worked with Putin over a period of years.
Enjoy and puzzle with me ….
Foreign Affairs
10 March 2017
Russia, Trump, and a New Détente
Fixing U.S.-Russian Relations
By Robert David English
ROBERT DAVID ENGLISH is Associate Professor of International Relations, Slavic Languages & Literature, and Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California.
In his first press conference as president of the United States, Donald Trump said no fewer than seven times that it would be “positive,” “good,” even “great” if “we could get along with Russia.” In fact, for all the confusion of his policies toward China, Europe, and the Middle East, Trump has enunciated a clear three-part position on Russia, which contrasts strongly with that of most of the U.S. political elite. First, Trump seeks Moscow’s cooperation on global issues; second, he believes that Washington shares the blame for soured relations; and third, he acknowledges “the right of all nations to put their own interests first,” adding that the United States does “not seek to impose our way of life on anyone.”
The last of these is an essentially realist position, and if coherently implemented could prove a tonic. For 25 years, Republicans and Democrats have acted in ways that look much the same to Moscow. Washington has pursued policies that have ignored Russian interests (and sometimes international law as well) in order to encircle Moscow with military alliances and trade blocs conducive to U.S. interests. It is no wonder that Russia pushes back. The wonder is that the U.S. policy elite doesn’t get this, even as foreign-affairs neophyte Trump apparently does.
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