Paul Goble
Staunton,
August 5 – At the end of 2014, Moscow commentator Yevgeny Ikhlov posted on
Livejournal a comment entitled “Molotovs in Search of Ribbentrops” in which he
argued that Moscow hoped to find the kind of partners in the EU and the West
more generally who would agree to draw a line through Ukraine (e-v-ikhlov.livejournal.com/91961.html).
But that policy
has failed, he writes today, because however much Vladimir Putin has imitated
Hitler or Stalin, he hasn’t been able to create a situation in which Barack
Obama will play the role either of Churchill or Chamberlain but instead is reprising
the role of John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=55C19839C242E).
“The
conflict of the US and the Russian Federation has reached the point where is
has acquired an ideological character on both sides, with the State Department
now calling the Putin regime ‘authoritarian,’” Ikhlov says. Up to now, it would
only say that Putin’s Russia was “extraordinarily centralized with growing
authoritarian tendencies.”
He
notes as an aside that Washington is clearly “lagging behind” the Russian
liberal opposition “which for a long time has recognized Putinism as
authoritarianism with totalitarian, that is fascist-like, tendencies.” Were the
State Department to take the next step, it would have to use a term like “’the fascist
Kremlin junta.’”
But
even what it has done so far, Ikhlov says, matters and matters profoundly. “Having
called Putin a dictator, America has deprived itself not only of the chance to
maintain dialogue with the Kremlin but to seek compromises with it, for any
compromise with dictators now in the Free World will lead to the moral
ostracism of those who engage in it.”
That
makes impossible the kind of exchanges Putin succeeded in getting only two
years ago. According to Ikhlov, “it is not difficult to understand the American
logic: if England in 1939-1940 had had the military potential of America in
1943-45,” London would not have made the concessions it did to Hitler and
Stalin.
Now,
“on the ruins of PAX RUSSICA,” when the US has pulled both Cuba and Iran out of
“the Kremlin orbit,” Putin is proposing a grand alliance with the West in which
Obama could play the role of Franklin Roosevelt. But Russia not only does not have the
resources but the ideological legitimacy to form such a grouping – and the
Americans know it.
“The
very idea of dragging America, which has been declared the primary cause of all
misfortunes in Ukraine and in the Middle East into a single holy military
alliance with Holy Rus as it seems the Russian World will soon be renamed is
already a recognition of complete foreign policy and ideological bankruptcy.”
Moscow
feels compelled to try it because it has few other cards to play, but now the cynical
new Molotovs in Moscow, the Russian commentator continues, aren’t going to find
equally cynical new Ribbentrops in the West.
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