The Free Thinker

In Russia's Best Idiocratic Tradition

A couple of months ago, Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov, who had run the city for almost twenty years, and with great success even in the midst of the 1990s, was suddenly sacked by Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. The first problem is that Medvedev had authority to do that at all. A sensible Russian constitution would make it the prerogative of locals to elect the heads of regions and cities, and that's how it was before 2004, when Putin used the Beslan massacre as a pretext for abolishing gubernatorial elections. Instead, Medvedev was able to dismiss Luzhkov on a whim.  Luzhkov was certainly corrupt and authoritarian, but I was nonetheless horrified by the move.  The fact that Luzhkov had a power base independent of the ruling tandem was invaluable at a time when autocracy was bearing the fruit of sycophancy, and there was essentially no chance of a decent replacement for Luzhkov in a system where the only way to rise is to be a yes-man for Putin.  Now Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has just carried out the kind of carelessly idiotic assertion of centralizing power that has blighted Russian history for generations:

For years, shoppers had flocked to a row of ramshackle kiosks under a bridge near Moscow's Belorusskaya railway station to purchase goods like alcohol, cigarettes, pirate DVDs, and hot pies.

Today, however, the path under the bridge is bare and desolate -- a legacy of one of the earliest initiatives of Moscow's new mayor, Sergei Sobyanin.

Soon after Sobyanin was named mayor in October, he took a walk around the city to meet the people and get a feel for the metropolis he would be responsible for governing. Sobyanin was appalled by what he saw at the city's downtown Krasnopresnenskaya metro station.

The new mayor denounced the placing of kiosks around the metro, saying they obscured the view of a statue outside the station. Moreover, using colorful language, he pointed out that some kiosks had unsafe wiring hanging together "like snot."

Soon thereafter, Sobyanin sacked the heads of two Moscow city districts, sending a clear signal that change was on the way.

When I was in Moscow the first time in 2002-- and I fell absolutely in love with the place, to the extent that I felt wildly homesick for it long afterwards-- one of the features of the city that I admired was these kiosks that crowded the tunnels under the metro.  My admiration was both for their efficiency and convenience, and for a certain aesthetic appeal, the feeling of life and bustle.  I saw in them a sign that underneath it all, Russians are a clever and resourceful people, good at solving problems in voluntary, decentralized ways.  Alas, the country's development is forever stunted by boneheaded leadership.  The fundamental problem lies not so much in any innate character flaws the Russians have: that may be a factor, but there are crooks and thugs everywhere, it's just that in sensible nations the Vladimir Putins are picking parts in warehouses, or in jail, not running the country.  The real problem lies in Russian public opinion, the perennial perversity of ignoring human rights and approving of oppressors, which lets the crooks and thugs get away with it.  I think many Russians are starting to see through Putin now, yet there are so many layers of defensiveness one has to cut through, so much resistance to just admitting frankly that the liberals were right all along.  And anyway, it's too late: Putin is too entrenched now; it was necessary to knock him down in 2003, at the time of the Khodorkovsky affair, which should have been evidence enough of the need to overthrow him.  Russia is on another terrible detour through the wildernesses of tyranny.  Probably they will find their way back to the light of civilization at some point, but given the country's demographic decline, it seems doubtful whether Russia will ever shine in the firmament of the family of nations as, long ago in the age of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, she seemed to promise.

The disintegration of public order in Russia:

Krasnodar Governor Alexander Tkachyov recently acknowledged that every district of his region has criminal gangs similar to the one that massacred a dozen people in the village of Kushchyovskaya on Nov. 5. “Unfortunately,” he said, “such gangs exist to varying degrees in every city in the region. Some have more of them, some have fewer, but they’re present … and their lines of support stretch up to the regional level.” That’s a rare admission from a governor, but it would be naive to believe that other regions do not have the same problem.

In another recent case, the police chief and his deputy in the Vladimir region town of Gus-Khrustalny were temporarily suspended because local residents wrote to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to complain about rampant crime in the city. Economically depressed cities in the Urals such as Nizhny Tagil have serious problems with drugs, not only because the locals want to shoot up, but because drug dealers have strong ties to local officials and police. In the Chelyabinsk region town of Miass, the situation is so bad that hundreds of thugs wielding metal pipes and baseball bats can be called into action at almost a moment’s notice. The peculiar relationship between the authorities and criminals in the Far East is such that former crime bosses have become political leaders and vigilante groups such as the self-proclaimed Primorye Partisans wage guerrilla warfare from the woods. In the Moscow region town of Khimki, inconvenient people are regularly beaten to within an inch of their lives.

We are deeply concerned that the Russian police have stopped performing their primary function — ensuring public safety. The tragedy that happened in Kushchyovskaya could have happened almost anywhere, and it shows that this problem cannot be isolated to a single public institution. Law enforcement agencies, the authorities and criminal business interests have become tightly intertwined. That commingling looks different from place to place, to be fair, it doesn’t always manifest itself as the savage mass murder of 12 people. Extortion in Moscow is different from how it’s done in Kushchyovskaya, and criminals shaking down business in the Far East have different methods than their “colleagues” in the North Caucasus. But despite the economic gains of the past decade, despite the years of stability and the government’s power vertical, criminal business interests continue to enjoy a wide range of opportunity.

The “banditry” of the 1990s is being repeated. Low levels of social development and education, severe poverty, the breakdown of morals, and so forth are all creating a supply of ready labor for criminal interests.

It is entirely possible for criminal businesses to evolve — to grow in scope, to acquire new property, and to come to the realization that it is more advantageous to make money legally. That’s exactly what happened to some of the businesses that got their start during “the wild ’90s.” In a normally developing society, the overall presence of legal business grows, criminal businesses become marginalized, and the use of gangland-style methods to resolve disputes gradually becomes ineffective.

That process has been very slow to take hold in Russia.

The gang operating in Kushchyovskaya was large, it owned property, and one of its leaders was even a deputy in the local legislature. And it should come as no surprise that the gang continued to use violent methods, since the current leadership has not made public safety a priority. Strong-arm methods not only work well in modern Russia; they inspire others to adopt the same tactics and become criminals.

The public has also failed to make strong enough demands that businesses clean up their act. That demand must be expressed through personal standards of behavior as well as through political action that would enable society to fight criminal forces, corruption and widespread injustice. But the current system only grants political license to the leaders at the very top. Ordinary citizens cannot, do not want and are afraid to try to influence the decision-making process.  

Russians seem to have decided, in the past few years, to provide a demonstration of how those who are willing to sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither and will lose both.

From a website called The Voice of Russia:

Russian Orthodox Church defends moral principles

The Russian Orthodox clergy have voiced opposition to what they described as cynical remarks by lawmakers in a bill on health protection in Russia, due to be signed into law shortly.

Representatives of the Moscow Patriarchate are against the wording which defines childbirth as “the separation of the product of conception from the mother’s body”. The deputy head of the Orthodox Church’s department for relations between the church and society, Father Georgy Roshchin, shared his views in an interview with the Voice of Russia:

"The bill’s wording regarding childbirth devalues the concept of personality, suggesting that an unborn child is nothing but a biological mass, whereas, according to religious teachings, a child is a person from the moment of conception. The church maintains that a human’s life starts not after birth but immediately after conception, which is enshrined in church holidays, such as Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Conception of the Savior. For this reason, the “product of conception” sounds cynical and may lead to dangerous trends in present-day society. People will thereby get a green light to have abortions because in this case they will know that they are getting rid of an unwanted piece of flesh, not a child."

Meanwhile:

Investors Need Independent Judiciary (Moscow Times)

Throughout October, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has personally met with potential foreign investors to calm their fears about doing business in Russia. He has described Russia as an enormous market awaiting money and technology from developed countries. And that’s true: Russia is a huge and unique market with vast potential for modernization and the introduction of new technologies — and not just in the planned Skolkovo innovation hub.

We do need new standards and more efficient production. But how do we resolve the obvious problem of ensuring the safety of future investments? How can potential investors be guaranteed that the assets they create in Russia will remain theirs?

Without first resolving the situation for Russian businesses, there’s no way to attract foreign investors. It is impossible to trample domestic businesses while creating attractive conditions for foreign firms. Likewise, foreigners will only feel secure once Russia reforms its judicial system and passes legislation favorable to business. Raiders have attacked not only private property in Russia, but the entire judicial system. Property seizures of everything from individual plots of land and small buildings to major companies have become commonplace throughout the country.

Generally speaking, there are several clear categories of people ordering raids and actually conducting them. The people ordering the raids are, as a rule: a) monopolistic companies that seize ownership of independent businesses to swallow up their assets and neutralize any nascent competition; b) officials seeking property at practically no cost, which they then register in the name of a wife or other relative; c) former business partners who, lacking a legal tradition of civilized asset splits, opt to “eliminate their opponent”; or d) law enforcement agents who open criminal proceedings against businesspeople to coerce them into a forced takeover or as a means of confiscating goods or property that can be resold on the market.

State officials also go after entrepreneurs to punish them for not cooperating in corrupt schemes, which could mean interfering in the business or even initiating trumped-up criminal proceedings against the individual who refused to “cooperate.” Falsified evidence is widely used by the state to make its case, which is possible because of the complete absence of an independent judiciary. As a rule, judges at all levels side with the prosecution.

I admire the Church's efforts to morally reform Russia, but I'm not sure they always pick the right battles. It puts the idea in my mind of a homeowner setting mousetraps while his house is on fire.

On Georgia's Rose Revolution:

Mitchell feels that Georgians today resort too quickly to months-long street demonstrations and inflated rhetoric. (Actually, Georgian politics has always been lively, and protests were a part of the Tbilisi scene, to a limited degree, even during Soviet times.) Now, Mitchell argues, Georgians need to simmer down and work hard to consolidate civil structures and improve relations with their neighbors.

While Mitchell is genuinely sympathetic to Georgia, he has little patience for the ongoing David-versus-Goliath "narrative" with which Georgia woos US policymakers. Mitchell is skeptical about the political intentions of Mikheil Saakashvili (whose endorsement of the book, nevertheless, appears on its back cover)--and he questions the received wisdom that Georgia possesses unique strategic value, is a poster-boy for democracy, or even that it is, ipso facto, a Western nation.

Mitchell worries that America got suckered into an excessively "personal" relationship with Georgian officials, and that this led, ironically, to misperceptions about American intentions and capabilities in the event of a Georgian-Russian conflict. Now is the time, he asserts, for the United States to concentrate upon its fundamental interests in the region. Mitchell doubts that democratization is currently a top priority of the Georgian government, and says that it needs to keep its hands off the media, encourage free debate, and re-balance power between the legislature and the executive. (Steps, or at least promises of steps, in these areas have been taken.)

Georgia is not perfect, but Georgia does possess unique strategic value and America's "fundamental interests in the region" are identical with Georgia's.  Whatever the ethnic ambiguities of the region and its overlapping claims to national self-determination; whatever the doubts surrounding the events of August 2008; there can really be no question that Russia's actions constituted precisely aggression, and of a very sinister and globally destabilizing kind, since the intent and effect of the aggression was to create a credible threat of unpredictable future aggressions against whatever neighbors on Russia's borders do not tow its line.  This has been an age-old tactic of Russian realpolitik and has wrought untold woe for the peoples on Russia's borders and contributed to causing many European wars.  If we want-- and it ought to be the first priority of our foreign policy right now-- to restore in a new pro-democratic incarnation the international rule of law which was to some extent disrupted by the Iraq War (a price worth paying for the fall of Saddam's totalitarian regime and the delegitimization of dictators worldwide; but a high price nonetheless), Georgia is THE place to do it.  Hopefully in 2012 we'll get a president who understands that.

The Putinization of American Politics

"Fox Wars: The Obama Administration Wants to Delegitimize Any Significant Dissent" (Charles Krauthammer, 10/23/2009):

Rahm Emanuel once sent a dead fish to a live pollster. Now he’s put a horse’s head in Roger Ailes’s bed.

Not very subtle. And not very smart. Ailes doesn’t scare easily.

The White House has declared war on Fox News. White House communications director Anita Dunn said that Fox is “opinion journalism masquerading as news.” Patting rival networks on the head for their authenticity (read: docility), senior adviser David Axelrod declared Fox “not really a news station.” And Chief of Staff Emanuel told (warned?) the other networks not to “be led (by) and following Fox.”

Meaning? If Fox runs a story critical of the administration — from exposing White House czar Van Jones as a loony 9/11 “truther” to exhaustively examining the mathematical chicanery and hidden loopholes in proposed health-care legislation — the other news organizations should think twice before following the lead.

The signal to corporations is equally clear: You might have dealings with a federal behemoth that not only disburses more than $3 trillion every year but is extending its reach ever deeper into private industry — finance, autos, soon health care and energy. Think twice before you run an ad on Fox...

Fox and its viewers (numbering more than CNN’s and MSNBC’s combined) need no defense. Defend Fox compared to whom? To CNN — which recently unleashed its fact-checkers on a Saturday Night Live skit mildly critical of President Obama, but did no checking of a grotesquely racist remark CNN falsely attributed to Rush Limbaugh?

Defend Fox from whom? Fox’s flagship 6 o’clock evening news out of Washington (hosted by Bret Baier, formerly by Brit Hume) is, to my mind, the best hour of news on television. (Definitive evidence: My mother watches it even on the odd night when I’m not on.) Defend Fox from the likes of Anita Dunn? She’s been attacked for extolling Mao’s political philosophy in a speech at a high-school graduation. But the critics miss the surpassing stupidity of her larger point: She was invoking Mao as support and authority for her impassioned plea for individuality and trusting one’s own choices. Mao as champion of individuality? Mao, the greatest imposer of mass uniformity in modern history, creator of a slave society of a near-billion worker bees wearing Mao suits and waving the Little Red Book?

The White House communications director cannot be trusted to address high schoolers without uttering inanities. She and her cohorts are now to instruct the country on truth and objectivity?

Nationalization of major companies, attempts to muscle out critics in the press, efforts to rewrite history in favor of mass-murdering Communist tyrants... Wow. Note that Obama and Putin go after TV rather than print media; the National Review is safe. It's OK to have small freethinking cliques, but you can't give the other guy access to public opinion. By the way, I made a break with CNN last fall. The last straw was a story last October about people losing money in non-FDIC-insured banks, which was all fine up to the sting: they mentioned that McCain's nephew worked in one of these banks, or something. It was such a low blow. A mere pundit would have been ashamed to make such an ad hominem attack on a candidate's family. I would have been ashamed to see freerepublic.com sink to that level. That was the end. I will simply never watch CNN. I don't think it should be shown in public places, but it doesn't hurt me, because I can look the other way, and I always have an iPod to drown out the sounds. I never watched Fox News either but now I feel guilty about that. If I want to keep my First Amendment freedoms, shouldn't I support the network that is standing up for them, even if I don't like it?

The Wages of Appeasement

"India's China Obsession":

On June 21, two Chinese military helicopters swooped low over Demchok, a tiny Indian hamlet high in the Hima-layas along the northwestern border with China. The helicopters dropped canned food over a barren expanse and then returned to bases in China. India's military scrambled helicopters to the scene but did not seem unduly alarmed. This sort of Cold War cat-and-mouse game has played out on the 4,057-kilometer India-China border for decades. But the incident fed a media frenzy about "the Chinese dragon." Beginning in August, stories about new Chinese incursions into India have dominated the 24-hour TV news networks and the newspaper headlines.

China claims some 90,000 square kilometers of Indian territory. And most of those claims are tangled up with Tibet. Large swaths of India's northern mountains were once part of Tibet. Other stretches belonged to semi-independent kingdoms that paid fealty to Lhasa. Because Beijing now claims Tibet as part of China, it has by extension sought to claim parts of India that it sees as historically Tibetan, a claim that has become increasingly flammable in recent months.

Ever since the anti-Chinese unrest in Tibet last year, progress toward settling the border dispute has stalled, and the situation has taken a dangerous turn. The emergence of videos showing Tibetans beating up Han Chinese shopkeepers in Lhasa and other Tibetan cities created immense domestic pressure on Beijing to crack down. The Communist Party leadership worries that agitation by Tibetans will only encourage unrest by the country's other ethnic minorities, such as Uighurs in Xinjiang or ethnic Mongolians in Inner Mongolia, threatening China's integrity as a nation. Susan Shirk, a former Clinton-administration official and expert on China, says that "in the past, Taiwan was the 'core issue of sovereignty,' as they call it, and Tibet was not very salient to the public." Now, says Shirk, Tibet is considered a "core issue of national sovereignty" on par with Taiwan.

When Russia got away with naked aggression in the Caucasus, it showed bad guys everywhere what's possible. If this catastrophe happens, the West will be to blame for, as McCain put it in the last great statement of American purpose we're likely to hear for years, his brilliant Republican National Convention speech, "turning a blind eye to aggression."  Meanwhile, Russia's delusional insolence is accelerating:

"Let Medvedev Share Nobel with Obama":

It is a pity that President Dmitry Medvedev will not share the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize with U.S. President Barack Obama. In my view, he deserves it no less than Obama, whose principal accomplishments are still in the future.

Together with Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Medvedev is responsible for changing the tone and direction of international politics to craft a better world.

Not unlike Obama, Medvedev inherited a foreign policy plate that was driving his country into isolationism and debilitating self-pity.

In fits and starts in less than two years, he has managed to transform Russia’s international role from that of an estranged spoiler to that of a constructive problem-solver with a stake in a functional world order. Medvedev has gradually steered Russia away from the unilateralist initiatives taken by his predecessor.

He shares Obama’s penchant for multilateral diplomacy and has worked to make international institutions — from the United Nations to the nascent Group of 20 — stronger and more efficient.  His more pragmatic position on Iran is likely to make global efforts to stop Tehran’s secretive nuclear program more effective.

Medvedev commanded a successful war that was forced upon him. Like Obama in Afghanistan, he did not go wobbly in Georgia and proved his resolve to defend Russia’s interests and citizens. Medvedev’s toughest foreign policy decision has been to unilaterally recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Despite broad international criticism, Medvedev’s perseverance on this issue casts him as a world leader with a strong set of values. He does not crave popularity, just respect for his country.

I think it's true that Russians crave respect. That's why rolling back Russia could be so cheap: merely to send a loud signal that the world despised the cowardly, lying, thieving thugs and bullies of the Putin-Medvedev regime-- merely to, for example, announce a boycott of the 2014 Olympics-- while stating a justifiable high regard for the country's historic cultural and scientific achievements which contemporary Russia's aggression is sadly eclipsing, just might do the trick. But that would require a degree of geostrategic insight not seen since... well, the Bush administration.

From The Moscow Times:

In his speech before the United Nations General Assembly last week, U.S. President Barack Obama said we are entering a new historical era. He declared that the United States would cease taking unilateral actions and called on all people of all nations to join together in combating the challenges facing the world. Obama said we need the “cooperative effort of the whole world.” His foreign policy leitmotif has become the call to cooperate based on shared values. He made similar appeals during visits to Prague, Cairo and Moscow...

A recent survey by the Levada Center revealed that only 2.1 percent of all Russians consider the United States a friend, but 50.2 percent see Belarus as one, 17.6 see China that way and 17.4 percent consider Germany a friend. By contrast, 61.8 percent of respondents considered Georgia as Russia’s enemy, with the United States in second place at 45.4 percent.

The survey also found that 50.4 percent of Russians had either a “basically bad” or “very bad” attitude toward the United States, with only 1.4 percent holding a “very good” attitude and 34 percent feeling “basically good” toward Washington. What is most surprising to me is that Russians’ attitudes toward the United States have actually worsened during Obama’s first year in office compared with what they were during the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush, Russia’s heretofore-favorite whipping boy.

"His foreign policy leitmotif has become the call to cooperate based on shared values."  Wow.  It's the most damning summary I've read yet, precisely because it's so decorous and superficially favorable.  How provincial, how uncurious, how narcissistic, how trapped in an echo chamber of admirers do you have to be not to realize that much of the world doesn't share the values that America has traditionally stood for.  If we want to live by and promote values like freedom, democracy, and peace, that will sometimes bring us into conflict with others.  It would certainly bring us into conflict (though well short of war) with Putin's Russia.

Russians are right to continue mistrusting us.  Obama may wish to conduct an amoral foreign policy for the next four years, but he can't commit America permanently to ignoring democratic freedoms and appeasing aggressors.  The first order of business for the next Republican president will be to apologize for Obama's apologies and for shabby treatment of our allies in eastern Europe and elsewhere.  Then get back to leading the Free World.

Biden Gets It

"New Biden Criticism Surprises Russia" (NY Times, via Brothers Judd):

Just weeks after a summit meeting intended to show a thawing in relations between the United States and Russia, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. made blistering references to Russia’s failing economy, loss of face and a leadership that is “clinging to something in the past,” in an interview published on Saturday.

Speaking on the heels of his trip to Georgia and Ukraine, Mr. Biden said flatly that the Obama administration would make no deals and accept no compromises with the Kremlin in exchange for better relations.

Russia itself, he said, should find it in its own interest to repair relations.

The Kremlin immediately responded to the comments, made in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, with a demand for a clarification of the administration’s intentions toward Russia, saying essentially that it was receiving a mixed message so soon after President Obama had visited Moscow for the summit meeting.

Calling the criticism “perplexing” in light of the diplomatic overtures initiated by the United States and described as “pressing the reset button,” the chief foreign policy adviser to President Dmitri A. Medvedev told the Interfax news agency, “The question is: who is shaping the U.S. foreign policy, the president or respectable members of his team?”

The adviser, Sergei Prikhodko, said the atmosphere between the countries had improved since Mr. Obama’s visit early this month.

“If some members of Obama’s team and government do not like this atmosphere, why don’t they say so?” Interfax reported him as saying. “If they disagree with the course of their president, we just need to know this.”

In the interview, Mr. Biden set aside diplomatic finesse and offered an unflinching analysis of the state of affairs in Russia.

With falling oil prices, a corruption-ridden banking system and failing courts, Russia has seen the steepest swing from growth to recession of any major economy in the financial crisis.

Mr. Biden has a reputation for speaking volubly, and sometimes going beyond official policy. It was not immediately clear if he was sending an officially sanctioned message.

Well done!  More talk like this from Biden could erase the damage from Obama's biggest foreign policy error so far, his trip to Moscow, with its cowardly, sinister, and strategically inept signal of appeasement (calling for a "reset" in relations when the deterioration of relations was wholly due to unprovoked Russian aggression in the south Caucasus).  Biden is far better than Obama in foreign policy.  Obama should recall that it was largely thanks to Biden that McCain's massively superior foreign policy experience was neutralized.  In foreign affairs, November 2008 was as much Biden's victory as Obama's.

UPDATE: It is worth noting that even (to take a random example) the following comment by Obama during his Russia visit, seemingly a throwaway truism, isn't strategically sound at the present time:

Obama delivered a commencement speech Tuesday at a Moscow graduate school.

"America wants a strong, peaceful and prosperous Russia," he told a large crowd at the New Economic School. "This belief is rooted in our respect for the Russian people, and a shared history between our nations that goes beyond competition."

The August 2008 invasion of Georgia showed the use to which Russian strength will be put, if the Putin regime and the paranoid nationalism that underlies it are not transformed.  Prosperity in Russia only strengthens the regime and magnifies the menace that Russia poses to its neighbors and to world peace.  It's not even quite true to say that "America wants," or that America should want, a "peaceful" Russia.  Some kinds of turmoil and upheaval in Russia-- liberal protest movements like those that have recently taken place in Iran-- would be very good for America and the world (and the Russian people), and in a rather grim and roundabout way even violent separatist movements like those in Chechnya and Ingushetia may serve not only America's interests but those of mankind as a whole by helping to tie Russia's hands.  A "strong" Russia in the only sense in which Russians can at the present time understand the phrase is bad for everyone concerned, not least the Russian people who take senseless pride in aggressive foreign adventures masked by lies that do no one any good.  One has to stretch words a lot to think of any sense in which a strong Russia is a good thing.  But at the moment even a prosperous Russia is not really something to be wished for.  Every drop in Russian GDP, every uptick in unemployment, weakens the Putin regime within Russia and weakens Russia in the world, and makes Russia's long-suffering neighbors a little safer and world peace a little more secure.  That has to be balanced against the harm to Russians, of course, but we should bear in mind that Russia is not really a poor country like India or Africa, or even China.

Only when Russia repudiates its Soviet past as Germany has repudiated its Nazi past can the world unambivalently wish well to the Russian economy.  America can indeed respect the Russian people, just as a man may respect a talented and courageous friend who, however, has been driven by depression to alcoholism and beating his wife.  Respect should take the form of an overriding insistence that Russia's regime and people mend their ways.

"The Russia/America summit" (Economist)

THE body language said it all. When Barack Obama arrived in Moscow for his first summit with the Russian president on July 6th, he sat on the edge of his chair, his eyes fixed on his host, Dmitry Medvedev. Mr Medvedev sat back, revealing a mix of reserve and polite attention to what Mr Obama had to offer. 

This scene reflected Russia’s general response to Mr Obama. America made the first approach and offered to “reset” the relationship. Although suspicious of Mr Obama’s intentions, Moscow nevertheless did not want to miss a chance. As Moskovsky Komsomolets, a tabloid, put it: “Why should we make a step towards Obama? Not least, because it is in our interest. Having won a war against Georgia, we confirmed our status as a great power, but ended up in isolation. Of course, we could live like this. But why not stop this isolation without ceding past achievements?”...

Mr Obama’s speech at the New Economic School in Moscow was an attempt to engage Russian society without trying to lecture it. He addressed the more neuralgic elements in Russia’s self-perception. He praised the Russian people for ending the cold war. He insisted that America wanted “a strong, peaceful and prosperous Russia”. But he stressed that “pursuit of power is no longer a zero-sum game” and that Georgia and Ukraine were entitled to their sovereignty. He talked up the rule of law and freedom of speech “because they are moral, but also because they work”. And he added pointedly that “governments which serve their own people survive and thrive. Governments which serve only their own power do not.”

Mr Obama’s speech was broadcast live by only one cable TV channel with limited reach. The main channels highlighted his endorsement of a “great Russia” and managed to turn his comments about “dominating and demonising other countries”, a reference to Russia’s behaviour to its former republics, into a case of American self-criticism. Even students remained largely indifferent to Mr Obama’s speech. “I take what he said on board, but I am not going jump to a conclusion,” said one.

Such a reaction reflects the culture of cynicism and nationalism that has flourished in Russia in recent years. But it is also the result of Russian disillusionment with America. Vladimir Putin, Mr Medvedev’s prime minister, spent much of his two-hour breakfast with Mr Obama venting Russia’s grievances over America’s policy. He blamed George Bush for letting Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s president, twist American support into a green light for a war. But he allowed his talks with Mr Obama to be twisted by his own side. According to Yury Ushakov, Mr Putin’s chief foreign-policy adviser, “President Obama pledged to consider the regional significance of these countries for us.”

This line was amplified by Russia’s main TV channel, which presented it as America’s concession and Russia’s victory. It quoted Vyacheslav Nikonov, Russia’s main pro-Kremlin commentator, as saying: “All the sanctions that were imposed against Russia after the war in August 2008 are in the past. This shows that America realises the necessity to work together with the Russian Federation. America has understood what was going on last August. Today nobody in Washington would shake Saakashvili’s hand.”

In short, Obama's visit to Moscow achieved nothing substantive but was a propaganda victory for the Russians. And this was perfectly predictable. 

Obama's "reset" meme was the very opposite of what was needed. It implies that America is to blame for the deterioration of relations, whereas in fact the blame lies entirely on Russia's illegitimate ambitions and naked aggression against Georgia. "Reset" is another word for appeasement.

The Economist:

An opportunity lost

The end of the cold war in 1989 brought a sense of relief and satisfaction to America. As Jack Matlock, America’s ambassador in Moscow, described it in his memoirs, “The way we looked at it at the time, and the way Gorbachev looked at it, was that we all won the cold war. We ended it.” When the Soviet Union crumbled two years later, America was caught unprepared and scrambling for a policy. Its biggest concern was removing nuclear rockets from former Soviet republics. Yegor Gaidar, Russia’s former prime minister in charge of economic reform, says this was one of the most successful operations Russia and America have mounted together.

America’s policy towards Russia was not triumphalist. But nor did the West offer Russia a Marshall Plan to stave off a catastrophic collapse in living standards. As Mr Gaidar says, it was more concerned about recovering the Soviet debts which Russia had inherited than with stabilising its financial system. Poland’s debt was written off, but Russia’s was not. By 1993, when Bill Clinton took office and actively engaged with Boris Yeltsin, the crucial window of opportunity had closed. The funds Mr Clinton managed to accumulate for Russia were too little, too late.

For most of the 1990s, the thrust of Russia’s relationship with the West was about Russia’s transition to a normal, civilised country. But that clashed with NATO enlargement, which presupposed that Russia was a threat. For the West, enlargement was about bolstering security in Europe. In Moscow it was seen as a sign of mistrust and neglect of Russia’s aspirations. A new security structure could have been built to include a democratic Russia, but never was. Instead, NATO enlargement was coated in soothing language about Russia’s co-operation with the alliance inside the Russia-NATO council.

There is nothing legitimate about Russia's objections to NATO expansion and never has been.  The "mistrust" that motivated NATO expansion was perfectly understandable in light of 20th-century history and was proven wise by Russia's invasion of Georgia in August 2008.  "Russia's aspirations" which we were "neglecting" were aspirations to dominate its neighbors; if they were anything else, NATO would not have been a threat.  The root problem is that Russia has not repudiated and repented of the Soviet episode the way Germany has of the Nazi episode, or the way America has for slavery and segregation.  Only when Russians reject the Soviet legacy, and to some extent the tsarist legacy too, will they deserve the world's trust.  And they should accept, without resentment, that it may be a decade or two or three before the justified mistrust and contempt of their western neighbors for them fades.  By suggesting that "an opportunity" was "lost" through Western mistakes, The Economist is making very unwarranted concessions that can only encourage Russians in their unjustified sense of grievance.