Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 20 – Hopes and
fears both spring eternal as to relations between Russia and the United States,
with each new development prompting discussions about a possible breakthrough
to some kind of permanent accord. But Vladislav Zubok says that “the radical
differences” between the nationalism of the two countries make that impossible.
In an article for Moscow’s “Vedomosti”
newspaper, the Russian analyst who teaches at the London School of Economics
and Political Science says that it is quite likely Putin and Trump will be
friends for a time and make that the basis for “deals on some important issues”
(vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2017/01/18/673416-rossiya-ssha).
“But this doesn’t
mean,” Zubok says, that a new basis for Russian-American relations will arise.”
The two radically different nationalist traditions of the two countries “will
remain just as they have been.” And those who forget that fact will experience
what others like them have in the past, “disappointment and a new
confrontation.”
All Russians
remember that in March 1983, Ronald Reagan called the USSR “the evil empire,”
but fewer of them recall that nine months later, in January 1984, he said that
if ordinary Russians and ordinary Americans could sit down together and
overcome the language barrier, they would find “a common language.”
That
second remark is one that “today the majority of Western journalists and also
the opposition in Russia” share. Both view “the authoritarianism of Vladimir
Putin and the criminal-corrupt pyramid on which he sits as the main obstacle
for ‘normal’ Russian-American relations,” the London-based scholar says.
But such
a view, Zubok continues, is fundamentally wrong because it ignores “the main
thing: the foreign policies of the US and Russia rest on two largely incompatible
models of national interest.”
“The US,” he says, “always was a country of
religious-national exceptionalism and messianism.” Since the first settlers
arrived in North American, “millions of Americans up to now believe that their
country is a promised land where good always triumphs over evil.” Cynics may
say that in the US, money won out, but this isn’t the case.”
According
to the Russian analyst, “the nationalism of the Americans is based on the idea
that their country is a beacon of freedom and good in a sinful world. What
freedoms? Above all freedom of entrepreneurialism and of religion.” And those
ideas informed the US decision to fight the Cold War against the USSR rather
than retreat into isolationism.
In the
ensuing decades, “the nationalism of the Americans became global and it
appeared reconciled forces and parties at odds with each other at home: conservative
Republicans, Southern believers, the white population of the small towns, the
Catholics of Chicago, the liberals of New York, the bureaucrats of Washington
and the intellectuals of the leading universities.”
To be
sure, Zubok continues, in order to convince the American provinces that
fighting the cold war was worth it, the US had to endure “several unfortunate years
of the flourishing of McCarthyism and anti-communist demagogy. But gradually,
the populist upsurge ended, and the establishment gained the upper hand.”
The rapid
growth of the American economy and the ability of the US to build a strong military
helped in this regard by promoting a more simple-minded patriotism among the
masses, but the values of the elite consensus remained those on which
Washington operated, Zubok argues.
Many
Americans to this day remain “convinced” that the US became a superpower “only
in order to “protect the free world from the communist threat,” and “eve
survival in a nuclear conflict with the US was understood by many in religious
and ethnical terms,” as was the case of Richard Pipes whose 1984 book was
titled significantly “Survival is Not Enough.”
Not everyone
agreed with this, of course; but when the Soviet Union collapsed, President
George H.W. Bush declared that “with God’s help, American won the cold war.” The world became a unipolar one, and that was
something he very much welcomed. It led to two decades of what one can describe
as “American ‘triumphalism.’”
“Russian nationalism and worldview
are rooted in entirely different things,” Zubok argues. Building a powerful
empire was always more important than business; indeed, business and trade have
always been viewed as a means to that larger end rather than values in and of
themselves.
To be sure, at least since Petrine
times, there has been a struggle within Russian elites between what might be
called “the party of business” and “the party of power.” But the latter
invariably wins when the Russian masses conclude that in some way their country
and its political stability are at risk.
“In the first years after the
collapse of the USSR, Russian foreign policy was in the hands of the young and
energetic ‘party of business,’” who believed that economic reforms would lead
to political ones and that Russia could thus “at one and the same time become a
democracy in the Western club and a great power.” At the very least, it would
be “’a second Canada.’”
But this project failed: “Millions of Russian citizens
never lost the conviction that a strong power and a strong president are the
most important medicine against a time of troubles and that precisely a
centralized and powerful state will save people from complete anarchy and
disorder.” And that took the form of a new conservative Russian national
consciousness.
Moreover,
Zubok says, “a strong state for many in Russia is not about trade balances or
GDP” except as those are needed for defense “as about the opportunity to rein
in obstreperous neighbors.” And they accept Putin’s view that the US project
would lead to the destruction of Russia and so must be opposed.
But
one thing that has changed since the cold war is this: now, the Russian threat
divides rather than unites Americans, while “anti-Americanism works for Putin
in Russia.” Even those who dream about the end of sanctions share in many of
its tenets.
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