UVB-76 Article

Check out Peter Savodnik’s article on UVB-76, in German, in Suddeutsche Zeitung Magazin here.

“Enigma” Podcast Available on iTunes

Listen to the free podcast of Peter Savodnik’s story, “Enigma,” from the October 2011 issue of Wired, about a mysterious shortwave radio station that’s been broadcasting from Russia since the days of Leonid Brezhnev. To see the full text of the article, click here.

Will Anyone Ask McFaul About the Reset Before He Becomes Ambassador?

Apparently, the Senate is on the cusp of confirming Michael McFaul, whom President Obama has nominated to be U.S. ambassador to Russia. Never mind that this marks a departure from tradition. (In recent decades, American ambassadors in Moscow have been career foreign-service officers; McFaul is a political appointee.) The future ambassador has the background one would expect of America’s top diplomat in the former Soviet Union. He studied Russian and international relations at Stanford, he was a Rhodes Scholar, and he was the leading voice on Russia policy at the National Security Council. He was publicly lambasted by Vladimir Zhirinovsky (which is always a good thing) and advised President Boris Yeltsin on his 1996 campaign (which suggests he knows a thing or two about domestic politics in post-Soviet Russia).

But all that is mostly beside the point. What truly matters is what kind of job Mr. McFaul will do once he’s ensconced at Spaso House. His record at the NSC is not encouraging. 

As special assistant to the president, Mr. McFaul spearheaded the so-called reset in relations between the United States and Russia. We can quibble about how, exactly, the reset has furthered U.S. interests. The only thing that is really important here is Iran. Russia does not matter that much to the United States: We don’t buy a lot from the Russians; we don’t sell a lot to them; we no longer fear Russia’s nuclear missiles; we don’t even have a vociferous, ethnic-Russian constituency in the United States that might lobby for this or that initiative or law (like, say, the Armenian diaspora). The one big thing that Russia has to offer us is its influence in Tehran. The Kremlin, in keeping with Soviet tradition, prefers sleeping with the bottom-feeders of the world, which means it’s happy selling arms to Syria, conducting joint military exercises with Venezuela and building a nuclear reactor at Bushehr, in Iran. And this means the Russians have leverage, which means that, presumably, they could do something to halt Iran’s march toward a nuclear arsenal. 

So, America’s No. 1 job when it comes to Russia boils down to: Getting the Russians to act against Mr. Ahmadinejad and the mullahs — diplomatically or otherwise. (Voting for sanctions at the United Nations, which almost no one believes will prevent the Iranians from acquiring an atom bomb, doesn’t count.) So, evaluating America’s policy vis-a-vis Russia entails asking just two questions: What is Russia doing to stop Iran? And to what extent can we attribute that to the reset? 

There’s little evidence that Russia is doing much. (Iran appears to be charging ahead with its nuclear-weapons program, indicating that whatever Russia is doing isn’t helping.) And that means there’s little, if any, evidence that the reset was worth its price tag: alienating allies in central Europe, allowing Russia to expand its influence in the post-Soviet space and ignoring the Russian state’s ongoing consolidation of power.

This is what Mr. McFaul should have to answer for when the Senate takes up his nomination.

Engage the BRICs

Suggestion for all Republicans running for the White House: Start talking about the BRICs — the big, rapidly growing, emerging markets in Brazil, Russia, India and China. That’s where the future is happening, and if we want the future to return to America, we ought to pay attention to what they’re doing in places like Beijing and Mumbai. We should also bear in mind that closed or even partially closed political systems — for example, those in China and Russia — will have a much harder time, in the long term, sustaining their growth. Americans are inclined to think that we’re always on the verge of being eclipsed by someone else. In the eighties, it was the Japanese; today, it’s the Chinese. Better to engage than to fear. Better to embrace the dynamism of the BRICs than to worry about what comes next.

Two preliminary proposals:

1. Eliminate, or dramatically scale back, visa restrictions for all BRIC citizens with a graduate degree. Russia, for example, is teeming with engineers, physicists, computer programmers, biochemists and mathematicians who make, at best, a few hundred dollars each month. These people would be a tremendous boon to the United States. But not just the United States. The federal government spends millions of dollars every year, via the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, trying to make places like Russia more democratic. The best way to make regimes democratize is to force them to compete for their human capital. Right now, Russia doesn’t have to compete for its human capital because, for the most part, it’s trapped in Russia.

2. Slash the U.S. corporate tax rate in half, from 35 percent to 17.5 percent. We can debate all day long the justice and desirability of a more progressive or regressive tax code, and there are plenty of legitimate reasons to redistribute some of the wealth (and no, Governor Perry, Social Security should not be abolished), but this much should (by now) be indisputable: Corporations will go wherever they have the easiest time making money, i.e., creating jobs. One of the great advantages that corporations, big and small, working in BRIC countries enjoy is the “slipperiness” of those systems. Corruption and a certain vagueness when it comes to the commercial-legal regulatory regime make for a much more energetic and fast-moving climate. Things happen, and fast, because there are no rules, or the rules are poorly enforced. We should be happy that bribe-taking is not nearly as prevalent in the United States as in the BRICs, but we should be very troubled by the relative cumbersomeness of doing business here. Creating things — widgets, jobs, capital, whatever — should be easier in America. We can start with our corporate-tax rate.

On President Obama’s “Libya Triumph”

Michael Tomasky’s latest dispatch, “President Obama’s Libya Triumph,” is embarrassingly dim-witted. Among Tomasky’s many utterly inane assertions:

1. President Obama’s handling of the recent turbulence in the Middle East resembles the approach favored by President George H.W. Bush vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. Please. Every policy springs from an idea or theory about how the world is, how it ought to be, and what the United States can or must do to progress from the one to the other. George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama may have arrived at a similar “what” — they may have employed restraint to arrive at some unstated goal — but that was largely accidental. The “ought” to which Bush subscribed, which was the same “ought” to which every president since Truman had subscribed, was that of a world free of authoritarianism, including Soviet authoritarianism. Not surprisingly, the “what” — the policy —that emanated from that “ought” was the same policy other presidents had employed, that of containment. By contrast, President Obama’s “ought” has been vaguely etched (see point No. 2) and, at most, seems defined by a general sense of (or support for) American retreat. How else should we interpret the president’s Iranian olive branch, Russian “reset,” jettisoning of plans for a missile-defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, and his widely reported criticisms (while overseas) of U.S. foreign policy. (Partisans can debate whether these amount to an “apology.” What matters is that they signal retrenchment.) In other words, Bush’s reluctance to meddle in Soviet affairs and Obama’s uncertainty about how to handle the Middle East may bear some superficial resemblance. But just beneath that veneer reside great differences in attitude toward America and American power. To draw any parallels is to confuse the meaning of both men’s actions.

2. Obama should be praised for his “doctrine of no doctrine.” According to Tomasky, Obama is wise to avoid hewing to some set of principles that might prevent him from seeing the nuances that separate one country from another. Actually, this is a terrible idea. Indeed, Tomasky misses entirely the whole point of doctrines, which have much less to do with other countries and their nuances and much more to do with our own. Presidents articulate visions for America not to describe a situation in some faraway land or how America ought to behave when that faraway land misbehaves. They do so to communicate to the whole world who, exactly, we are, and what we believe in. This is critical because it bolsters the democratic process — Americans should know what ideas inform their president — and because, ideally, it strengthens relations with our allies while putting our foes on alert. A doctrine is not a policy; it is a value system. Presidents and their advisers may apply that doctrine well or badly — they may derive good or not so good policies from their doctrines — but we should not confuse the two.

3. While Libya was a good war, intervening in Syria would be bad. When it came to Libya, Tomasky says, the United States had an “R2P,” or “responsibility to protect.” (This is a frightening bit of shorthand. Will pundits soon start writing exclusively in Twitterese?) Since the Assad regime has not threatened to massacre thousands of Syrians the way Gaddafi threatened to massacre thousands of Libyans, the United States has no R2P in Syria. Interesting that. The United States has a checkered history when it comes to defending humanitarian interests abroad. That’s because, not unreasonably, our presidents have avoided humanitarian interventions that did not also serve some non-humanitarian cause. Never mind Assad (who may not be overseeing a genocide but is willing nonetheless to murder plenty of his own people). What about the many countries we have declined to bomb (or are declining to bomb) because doing so would undermine other U.S. interests? Where was President Obama in Darfur? The Ivory Coast? And when, exactly, does an “R2P” begin and end? Are there parameters to our moral obligations? Or is President Obama’s “doctrine of no doctrine” so nuanced or elastic — or unprincipled — that it’s impossible to say? The U.S. intervention in Libya not only marked an abuse of power (The president promised this would last days; it’s been months; if anyone’s upset about that, consult with White House counsel.), it also made American intentions, in the Middle East and elsewhere, murkier. It confused; it complicated. (This was exacerbated by the president’s odd, apparently contradictory comment that the United States now “leads from behind.” How does one do that?) No, the truth is that Libya cannot be so easily delimited from Syria. U.S. involvement in the one makes it that much harder to avoid the other — or to say, clearly and convincingly, why it is we do the things we do. The president hasn’t explained that much to the American people.

An Ontological Approach to U.S. Foreign Policy

The Republicans running for president don’t seem to grasp the central foreign-policy question of the moment: What should the United States be? This is the same question that was foisted upon America at the end of World War II, and that George H.W. Bush/Bill Clinton were confronted with after the Soviet implosion. (Bush was not in a position to forge a new, post-cold war order; Clinton sidestepped the challenge.) George W. Bush thought he answered this question after the September 11, 2001 attacks by declaring war on terrorism, but he didn’t. He simply found a new enemy to wage war against. The question remains: What is the meaning of America — what is our purpose — in a post-cold war, post-September 11 world? What should we be? The current commander-in-chief hasn’t been very instructive. His worldview consists of two, seemingly contradictory tenets: Reject the previous administration’s foreign policy; then, inch back from that rejection by reluctantly embracing some of the previous administration’s most controversial positions. (Exhibit A: Guantanamo. The Afghanistan surge and even the pursuit of free-trade agreements suggest a similar reappraisal.) This sort of fecklessness has led to a “policy” that is not so much a policy as a series of fumbles and unwelcome surprises. The administration’s misadventure in Libya, alienation of important allies (Britain, France, Israel, India et al.) and inability (so far as we know) to curtail Iran’s nuclear-weapons program are all reflections of a White House that seems unsure of what it wants. 

So, the question Romney, Pawlenty, Bachmann et al., ought to be tackling is: What do we want? Or, better put, what should we be? This is a more fundamental (even ontological) approach to the external world. It presupposes that the conventional interests and policies and even supranational organizations that have framed the whole, international system should be re-examined. 

Final thought: Implicit in President Obama’s worldview, however fragmented and poorly thought through that may be, is the assumption that America is (and ought to be) in a state of relative decline. Question: International relations abhor a vacuum. If America abandons (or is forced to abandon) its role as superpower, who will fill that vacuum? Is that a desirable outcome? If not, what can we do to avoid it?

A Reconfigured Immigration Debate

The so-called immigration debate is really a debate about Latin Americans streaming into the United States illegally. It is not about forging a more intelligent and rational policy for handling global flows of human capital — which is what it should be.

As this makes abundantly clear, the United States need not only address the negative of unwanted, illegal aliens; it must also address the potential positive of wanted, legal aliens from the BRICs and elsewhere, i.e., places with deep wells of highly educated, underpaid people with a great deal of capital-creating capacity. The isolationists, nativists, unionists and their fellow Luddites will protest that the last thing America needs is foreigners taking jobs. Please. Foreigners who are educated and determined to make money are exactly what America needs. What’s more, expanding the immigration debate in this way would strip it of its unseemly racial undertone. And it would force countries like Russia and China to compete for native talent, encouraging democratization. 

Question: The Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration, has proven utterly feckless when it comes to immigration policy. Will any of the Republicans vying for the Oval Office be so bold as to defy their base and propose a a course that might very well create jobs and expedite liberalization around the globe? 

Inanity on the High Seas

There are reasons aplenty to debate the morality and efficacy of Israel’s partial blockade of Gaza. The infamous Goldstone Report is not one of them. Alas, Jane Hirschmann (“An American Jew Sails to Gaza”) is unaware of this. Hirschmann claims that it was Israel’s “war on Gaza” and South African judge Richard Goldstone’s report on Israel’s so-called crimes against humanity during that war that prompted her to co-found a group called Jews Say No! and to take part in yet another international flotilla to try to break the blockade. She apparently hasn’t read Goldstone’s retraction of his report, in which he concedes that “if I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.” This is particularly important because, Hirschmann says, prior to the war and Goldstone’s sharp criticism of Israel’s prosecution of it, she “never questioned the relationship between the U.S. and Israel and their policies regarding Palestinians.” In other words, her decision to take part in a dangerous publicity stunt — the first of its kind led to nine civilian deaths — was sparked by a document its author won’t stand by. One wonders if Hirschmann is intentionally abusing the facts — she fails to hold the Mubarak regime responsible for its cooperation with Israel, without which there could not have been a blockade — or if she’s simply someone else’s puppet.

On the President’s Afghanistan Speech

The most curious part of the president’s roughly thirteen-minute speech last night on his plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan was not, in fact, his discussion of his plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. We’ve known from the beginning that President Obama’s commitment to the “surge” was not open-ended. What was more surprising — and more unsettling — were the president’s comments on next May’s “summit,” in Chicago, which will be co-hosted by the United States and its NATO allies. “We do know that peace cannot come to a land that has known so much war without a political settlement,” the president said. Actually, that’s not the way peace is usually achieved. Usually, peace, real peace, is imposed, not settled on. One side wins, forcing its will on the other side. (Some wars end when one side simply tires of fighting, as in the case of the American Revolution; we might call this a “passive victory.”) The president, and especially this president, should know that by now. What is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict if not a series of battles and uprisings punctuated by outside efforts to import an inorganic peace? The president’s plan to orchestrate a similar settlement in Afghanistan will spell, in the long run, more bloodshed and chaos. It is hard to see how this will secure Afghanistan against a future Taliban (or Taliban-like) regime or the United States against future terrorist attacks hatched in Kabul. Chicago will simply be the first in an endless cavalcade of talks, accords, settlements and summits intended to forge a peace that cannot, for now, be forged. 

Stephen Cohen on Kremlin-Run TV Lambasting U.S.

Russia expert Stephen Cohen recently appeared on Russia Today, a Kremlin-run television station based in Moscow, to criticize the “asymmetry” of U.S.-Russia relations. The problem, as Cohen sees it, is that ever since the 1991 Soviet collapse, U.S. leaders have insisted on viewing the United States as the winner of the cold war and Russia as the loser. (So have a lot of other people, including many Russians, but that’s beside the point.) Cohen counters that the cold war ended before the Soviet Union did and that America’s insistence that it prevailed in the tug-of-war between democracy and tyranny has fueled Washington’s one-sided policy vis-a-vis Moscow, whereby Washington takes but refuses to give. Failure to chart a truly post-cold war course will lead to a new cold war, Cohen says, echoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. True, there has been plenty of American ham-handedness when it comes to Russia. But to suggest that American triumphalism is responsible for a worsening of U.S.-Russian relations is a reach: Russia is and has always been run by a criminal syndicate — tsarist, Soviet or post-Soviet — and until Russia transcends its criminality, until it “grows up” and embraces the rule of law, there will be no long-term cooperation between the two powers. There may be moments when our interests coincide, but these will only be moments.

The link to Cohen’s appearance:
http://www.thenation.com/video/161169/reset-us-russia-relations-lacks-substance