"I cannot forecast to you the
action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but
perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest."
—Winston Churchill
Equally
enigmatic is how Mr. Trump went about representing the national interest of the
United States at Helsinki. Until Mr. Mueller is ready to provide possible clarification,
the fog around the president’s motivation persists: narcissistic ineptitude almost
surely; perhaps also kompromat, collusion,
and/or fear of money laundering becoming exposed.
All
the confusion provides an object lesson in the plasticity of enemy-imaging. As someone
old enough to remember the lame British-American interference in Iran in the
fifties, the hysteria of McCarthyism, Hoover’s clandestine harassment of Martin
Luther King Jr., and far greater debacles like the wanton destruction of
Vietnam and Cambodia, I persist in my skepticism concerning the degree of competence
we can expect from the bureaucrats and generals to whom we reluctantly entrust
our safety.
But
now, with the executive branch demonstrably willing to gallop bareback off the
established foreign policy reservation, the knee-jerk adversary of progressives
for decades, the so-called “deep state,” with its reflexive fear of Russian
totalitarian infiltration and its perpetuation of military dominance in all
earthly spheres, may at least be providing a sorely needed element of restraint
and integrity.
The
plot is further thickened by an interesting analysis
in The Nation magazine by Stephen Cohen, a Princeton professor emeritus and
lifetime Russia watcher. He asks us to take a deep breath in the midst of our
anxiety about the president’s apparent capitulation to his authoritarian friend
in power.
Cohen
asserts that when the president states that "I hold both countries responsible. I think that the United States
has been foolish. I think we've all been foolish. ... And I think we're all to
blame," he is onto something:
Cohen continues: “For the past 15 years, the virtually
unanimous American bipartisan establishment answer has been: Putin, or “Putin’s
Russia,” is solely to blame. Washington’s decision to expand NATO to Russia’s
border, bomb Russia’s traditional ally Serbia, withdraw unilaterally from the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, carry out military regime change in Iraq and
Libya, provoke the Ukrainian crisis and back the coup against its legitimate
president in 2014, and considerably more—none of these, only “Putin’s
aggression,” led to the new Cold War. This explanation has long become a rigid
bipartisan orthodoxy tolerating no dissent.”
Tragically,
the president’s compulsive willingness to lie, his thin-skinned, possibly
guilt-motivated defensiveness, his Kissingeresque
lone-cowboy-riding-to-the-rescue style, along with the appallingly
short-sighted withdrawal from the Paris Accords and the Iran nuclear deal, has pretty
much destroyed his credibility as a heretical and possibly creative
anti-establishment actor. When he assigns blame equally between America and
Russia for the new Cold War, all most of us can see is an echo of the false
equivalence of his assigning blame equally to the neo-Nazis and the civil
rights protesters in Charlottesville.
Where
does a citizen go in all this craziness for an authoritative sense of context? One
useful perspective is the long-term history of the nuclear arms race, out of
which came a bracing truth from another apparent adversary of progressive
thinking, Ronald Reagan: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be
fought.” In spite of our finding ourselves, more than a half-century beyond the
Cuban missile crisis, still building new nuclear weapons on all sides, we
humans have not gotten the message: continuing the arms race on the basis of
deterrence prophesies not greater security but only inevitable mass death
through error, misinterpretation, or miscalculation.
The
“establishment” is well aware of this. They are designing new nuclear weapons
to be less powerful so that they
become strategically more “flexible” and “useful,” and presumably can avoid
fatal consequences like nuclear winter. But smaller weapons only make the
nuclear threshold easier to cross, and once it is crossed, who will prevent
escalation to the larger, world-ending weapons?
As
Churchill said, the key to Russia is national self-interest. Planetary self-interest
in the nuclear age provides a common-sense context for our contemporary circus.
When Mr. Trump persuades Mr. Putin to join him in convening an international
conference of the military leaders of the nine nuclear powers to discuss
joining the 122 nations who have outlawed nuclear weapons as self-destructive
and unusable, I will be among the first to commend him as an anti-establishment
hero. Meanwhile—the mind reels.