Continuing with excerpts from:
STEPHEN COHEN
Reheating the Cold War
Interviewed by David Barsamian
New York, NY 3 December 2016
Stephen Cohen is professor emeritus of Russian studies, history, and politics at NYU and Princeton. He is a Nation contributing editor and author of many books including Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War.
SC: The standard description of Putin in the mass media—and
it’s not just the Times and the Post, it’s particularly
entrenched in the so-called progressive-left broadcast
outlets, like MSNBC, which is just flamingly a Cold War,
Putin-demonizing operation—is that Putin is an aggressor,
he’s pursued an aggressive foreign policy. So the word
“aggressive” is standardized. Though it’s meant to be
descriptive, it’s also analytical and prescriptive, because if
you’re an aggressor, I’ve got to do something about you.
That’s where you get the analogies with Hitler and all the
rest.
In reality, if you were to sit down and in either a
scholarly or an attentive way the study Putin’s foreign
policy since he came to power, it is fairly clear that he has
been primarily reactive, not proactive, that is, not an
aggressor but a reactor. In fact, the main complaint about
him among hardliners in Moscow is that, to adapt an
expression your listeners will know, Putin leads from
behind. He’s not out front on the dangers that lurk. I don’t
know if “hardline” is the right word, but the more hardline
Russian analysts and elite say to him, Look, the
Americans are doing this and doing that, they’re going to
screw you, and you run around calling them partners and
making nice with anybody who will talk to you. And then
the next thing you know, they’re at our doorstep. Look
what happened in Ukraine. They provoked that, and now
they say you provoked that. They want Putin to be more
aggressive, this lobby in Moscow, just like McCain wants
Obama or Trump to be more aggressive. But Putin, if you
look at him, has been a reactor.
Remember what was going on just before the
Ukrainian crisis. The Ukrainian crisis had been cooking
for a decade. We, the U.S., and our agents—the Soros
Foundation is [and?] the National Endowment on Democracy—
have been very, very busy in Ukraine. Victoria Nuland
told Congress we had spent $5 billion building democracy
there before the crisis. Probably it was more like $50
billion, because not all that money flows through budgets.
What does it mean, “build democracy”? It means to create
a country aligned with us, because there’s probably less
democracy in Ukraine today, in 2017, than there was
when they overthrew Yanukovych in February 2014.
So remember how it happened. In the months and days
leading up to the Ukrainian crisis, what was Putin doing?
He was presiding over an enormously successful Sochi
Olympics, which the U.S. did everything short of outright
sabotage to make turn out badly. We boycotted it. We
warned that Chechen or Dagestani terrorists were not far
from Sochi, it wouldn’t be safe. There was some attempt
to keep families from going, that they wouldn’t be safe.
But Putin—and when I say Putin, it’s not Vladimir Putin
alone, it’s the leadership team he created—one way or
another created an enormous successful Sochi Olympics,
now called into question by these doping charges, which
are themselves a kind of—what’s the old expression?—
the kettle calling the pot black or whatever it is. We’re the
leading dopers in the world, only we get a letter from our
doctor saying it’s okay. We’ve learned that recently, by
the way.
But why would a guy who had gone to all this effort,
$50 billion worth, to put on a Olympics in a climate where
it shouldn’t have really been and built all that
infrastructure—roads and railways and arenas and
hotels—and demonstrated that Russia was a worthy
member of Western civilization, the next day wake up and
say, I think I’ll invade Ukraine? This is the story: That he
went off and invaded Ukraine. He didn’t. He reacted to
what was going on in Ukraine, which was very much a
Western encroachment. And it wasn’t just a benign
economic partnership. It was part of the whole long-term
effort to bring Ukraine into NATO. The documents are
there to be read. And he reacted.
We could argue that he reacted unwisely. You might
say he overreacted. For example, Crimea. Was it
necessary to annex Crimea or, as Russians say, reunite
with Crimea so quickly? What was wrong with waiting?
Crimea’s status would have been a terrific diplomatic chip
to play with the U.S. and the new regime in Kiev. Look, if
you want X, Y, and Z, including Crimea in Ukraine,
you’re going to have to make concessions and guarantees
to us. Undoubtedly we know that was debated in the
Kremlin. There was a debate about Crimea. But we also
know that Putin was given intelligence information that
gravely worried him, that there was going to be a march
on the Russian historical and strategic naval base on the
Crimean peninsula. So he was presented with a scenario
by his intelligence people that there was grave danger.
People say, Putin is a former KGB guy. I say, good,
good. Because he knows how to evaluate intelligence. He
knows when he’s hearing bullshit from his people. You
remember what Eisenhower told Khrushchev when they
first met? Khrushchev said to him, My generals always
come to me and say we’ve got to build weapons because
you’re building weapons. And Eisenhower said, You
know, I’m going to tell you. I’m a general, and I tell them
to screw themselves because I know exactly what’s going
on. But you’re at a disadvantage, and I suggest you do
what I do, push back. But Putin, the fact that he’s
intelligent and he can read intelligence, he knows false
information from authentic information is a good thing in
this era, I think. But there was a debate. We could argue
that he overreacted; you can make a case. But he was
reacting.
How can you say, after the stunt we pulled in Kiev,
overthrowing a government or abetting the overthrow of a
legally elected leader—and it was recognized that the
Ukrainian election of Yanukovych had been fair—and
bringing an unelected regime to power, that they wouldn’t
react? They didn’t even impeach Yanukovych. They just
frightened him to death. He thought he was going to suffer
Allende’s fate and he ran. Taking Ukraine over,
recognizing the new government immediately, bringing
these guys to Washington, with McCain and the others in
the streets egging them on, did we think Russia wouldn’t
react? Why is that Russian aggression?
Politics is probably 85% perception. If you were sitting
in Moscow, how would you see this, right on your
borders, as anything other than an aggressive act? So you
react. So the whole theme that Putin has been an
aggressor, if you say, “No, if you study it like a scholar,
he’s a reactor, he reacted to this, he reacted to that,” then
they say to you, “You’re a Putin apologist.”
It’s not about apologizing for anybody. It’s trying to
interpret history, in this case, for the sake of American
national security. Because if we keep getting it wrong,
there is going to be war for the first time with nuclear
Russia. We are closer to war with Russia than at any time
since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Just how dangerous
this is, there is something unprecedented. In the new Cold
War, by whatever name, there are now three fronts that are
fraught with war with Russia: the Baltic region where
we’re building up, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland,
Romania, right on his Russia’s borders a build up;
Ukraine, which remains the political epicenter of the new
Cold War; and Syria, where American and Russian planes
are flying. I don’t recall during the 40-year Cold War
there ever being a case where there were so many fronts
where hot war was truly possible. This is exceedingly
dangerous, and therefore we’ve got to get the story of how
we got here right.
We now are living through a moment when
absolutely—I wouldn’t say from the right, but from the
center and liberals and all the media they control,
including The New York Times, the Washington Post, the
cable stations, except Fox, which is so confused about
Trump that it doesn’t know what it thinks about anything,
but CNN and MSNBC and NPR and PBS, the answer is,
All this came about because Putin is an aggressor. We
played no role in this. So if we did nothing wrong in the
last 25 years, there’s no reason for us to rethink anything
or change our policy. That is the bipartisan position.
Analytically and historically, it’s not only incorrect,
it’s very dangerous. By the way, that’s one reason why
Trump so agitated these people, because he basically said,
I don’t believe anything these people have said for 25
years and I know more than the generals and I know more
than the foreign policy types, which he might. Since
they’ve gotten everything wrong, maybe he does know
something. I don’t know. They are clinging to this
orthodoxy of 25 years, particularly of the last 16 years,
and especially of the last three or four years, that it’s all
Putin’s fault. And if it’s all Putin’s fault, there is no need
to discuss anything, no need for diplomacy. That is, by the
way, the position that Obama, who will leave office as one
of the worst Cold War presidents we’ve had, took. Why,
I’m not sure, but he took it.
So what set off this civil war? The NATO Eastern
countries—Poland and others—came up with this idea—
first of all, they tried to get Ukraine and Georgia into
NATO in 2008, and it was vetoed by Germany and
France. But the idea of bringing Ukraine into NATO was
never given up, including in Washington. So they devised
this thing called the Eastern Partnership, where they
would offer these benign civilizational, economic
partnerships to these former republics of the Soviet Union.
But it wasn’t really membership but it really was a road to
membership but it was just the hand of friendship.
If you look carefully at the Economic Partnership
agreement, 1,000 pages, offered to Kiev by the European
Union in 2013, which the president rejected because he
figured out it would cost the country $80 billion—the EU
wasn’t giving anything except austerity, and if you’re up
for reelection in a year, that’s not exactly the gambit
you’re going to pursue—there was a section called
Military and Security Issues in there. It said that anybody
who signed the Eastern Partnership agreement had to
abide by the EU’s military and security principles, and
that was NATO. So it was lawyers’ small language, but
the Russians have lawyers, too, and they saw it. It meant
that if Ukraine signed this, Ukraine would be obliged to
side with or conform to NATO.
When Yanukovych didn’t refuse to sign it but just said
he wanted some more time to think about it, these protests
broke out, and by February he was gone. His electoral
base had been in eastern Ukraine, not only Donbass but
eastern Ukraine, all the way to Odessa and Crimea. So
they thought he was their president. We say he was a
corrupt bad guy. They’re all corrupt in Ukraine. You want
to argue whether Poroshenko is more corrupt than
Yanukovych? It’s how many angels on the head of a pin?
These people felt that their president, their representation,
had been illegally overthrown. When the government said
they were going to abolish the status of Russian as a
language—they backed off from that but it was already
too much even to pass it briefly—it precipitated resistance
there. Since then we’ve said that the Donbass rebels were
Putin’s puppets; in other words, they have no agency, no
autonomy. But this is a slur on a people who felt
aggrieved by events that we had helped to provoke.
We’ve been through this before, in Ireland, in many
other countries. In the end, it’s the only way to end a civil
war—decentralization or federalization or degrees of
home rule. But Kiev has never taken these first steps. In
fact, according to Minsk, Kiev had to establish formal,
direct diplomatic negotiations with the leaders of the rebel
provinces. Kiev has refused to do that. They may meet
somewhere behind closed doors. Why has Kiev refused to
do that? Because Poroshenko is a candy maker, not a war
maker. He’s a looting oligarch. He’s not interested in war.
But the ultra-right, a significant part of it, flagrantly neo-
Nazi, has armed battalions. We’ve given them weapons.
Representative Conyers tried to push through a resolution
banning any American military aid to neo-Nazi battalions
such as the Azov battalion. It was defeated. I don’t know
how all the Jews in Congress can happily go along with
this or how the traditionally Jewish New York Times sees
fit not to report on the neo-Nazi factor in Ukraine, but
they’ve just deleted it. But Poroshenko has been told by
the ultra-right that if he gives Donbass any home rule,
they will hang him. They aren’t kidding. They’ve showed
up with 3,000 people occasionally outside the presidential
palace to wave their fists, and they commit violence
around the country. And he’s not enough of a leader to
figure out how to deal with this. So they’re frozen.
People say it’s Putin. In fact, it’s now said that we’ll
end the sanctions on Russia when Putin implements the
Minsk Accords. But Putin is not blocking the Minsk
Accords. It’s Ukraine.
Another thing that Russia has gotten no credit for,
because they’re blamed for it, is we’re now fixed on the
terrible refugee crisis emanating from the Middle East, not
only Syria but Libya and the rest. Refugees have become
the great victims of our age. But what about the refugees
from the Ukrainian civil war, which we abetted? Millions
went to Russia, naturally. It was close by, they had family
there, they spoke the language. But it was a terrible burden
on Russia, which was under budgetary strains because of
the sanctions and the halving of oil prices anyway. I don’t
see a single story in The New York Times or the
Washington Post about this, though they’ve got about the
eight correspondents there and it would be a very good
story, to go and spend a couple of weeks seeking how
Russia has helped. But most of the refugees have been
humanely, I can’t say happily for individuals, but
humanely resettled. Russia does do one thing: They try to
encourage them to go underpopulated cities, where
working-age people are needed, but they don’t force them.
There's a section on "What prompted the Russian intervention in Syria" I'll skip for now.
On Putin's popularity:
[...] no matter how much you mock
it, Putin is enormously popular among the people. He’s
popular for a very simple reason; it’s not complicated.
When he came to power, people were dying and Russia
was disintegrating. And then it wasn’t. I have heard Putin
repeatedly referred to by rank-and-file Russians but also
by members of the elite as Vladimir Spasito, Vladimir the
Savior, for the fact that he wasn’t Yeltsin and he stopped
the disintegration that occurred under Yeltsin.
On the anti-Putin hysteria, a dangerous trend feeding war fever even among liberal/progressive Americans (pertinent in another thread I can't find just now):
DB: You’ve had your own issues with the media.
SC: What happened to me is not important, but there was a
time when I had fairly easy access to the mainstream
media. I contributed fairly regularly to The New York
Times op-ed page, I was actually the paid consultant for, I
think, 18 years to CBS News. I was not supposed to go on
other networks, but they let me go on PBS. Somebody told
me I was once one of the most frequent guests on Charlie
Rose. I was on The News Hour occasionally. I was able to
speak on these forums, and reached a lot of people.
Beginning a little earlier—I think it goes back to the
1990s—I opposed the media and Washington embrace of
Yeltsin and what was going on in Russia. In 2014 I,
almost alone among people with some mainstream
credentials, Princeton and all the rest, began to say our
version of the Ukrainian crisis was only half the story, that
the Russians had a story that we had to hear. And a torrent
of abuse came and lasted for about two years from a lot of
mainstream places, including The New Republic, that I
was Putin’s best American friend, I think one article called
me “Putin’s toady,” Putin’s apologist, Putin’s client,
Putin’s agent. It greatly upset my family, but I kind of just
grimaced and went on. But it really was intense. I have a
carton full of these clips.
What happened was that they sort of lost interest in me
along the way, began to identify other threats to their
hegemony, and then unleashed it on Trump. A Nobel
Prize winner and former Princeton professor, Paul
Krugman, calls Trump something like the “Manchurian
Candidate.” You expect this from Anne Applebaum in the
Washington Post. That’s where she operates. But Paul
Krugman? Where is the dignity of your position, of your
reputation? He’s kept churning it out. And it’s not only
him. And it’s all coming from liberals. It interests me that
the language they unrolled against Trump was almost
identical to the language they used against me. But it
wasn’t just me alone. There was a group of us. They even
charged Kissinger with being a Putin apologist at one
time. They were in a complete panic in 2014, and it was
coming almost exclusively from the so-called progressive liberal
wing of the spectrum.