Clarissa's Blog

The way I judge if a book on foreign policy has the potential to be intelligent is by looking at the part that discusses the FSU countries. I obviously don’t have enough information to say if an author understands Somalia but I assume that if s/he is saying something valuable about the FSU, there is a possibility – not a guarantee, of course – that the author is not an idiot and will also say something useful about Somalia.

Mandelbaum’s  Mission Failure says something very important about the FSU countries. The reason why they have not been able to build functioning societies and are drowning in corruption and authoritarianism, Mandelbaum says, has nothing to do with the US. It is enormously refreshing to read this because I’m truly fed up with people’s incapacity to analyze Eastern Europe without making the US the center of that discussion. Mandelbaum points out that it is insane to expect totalitarian states magically to become democratic, orderly, peaceful, and prosperous. This will take time, and the FSU countries will take as much time to arrive there as they need.

Unfortunately, Mandelbaum is not brave enough to make a clean break with the “we cause everything” mentality that everybody in this country shares. If he wants his book to sell, he has to pander to his self-centered readers. This is why he trots out the tired, ancient canard about Russia supposedly turning against the US because of the “treacherous” NATO expansion. The real reason that Russia turned virulently  anti-American since the very early 1990s, however, has nothing to do with the NATO or the US. 

The Russian Federation has 84 federal subjects. These are regions that are inhabited by people of different races, ethnicities, languages, cultures, histories and with very little connection to each other. None of these federal subjects feel anything but hatred and resentment towards Moscow and St. Petersburg. The territory is enormous, and huge, empty areas separate the capital from most of these federal subjects.

So what do people do when they need to hold such a disparate group together? We all know the answer: they invent a shared enemy, of course. The outlandish displays of hatred against the US have been the only shared hobby of the 140,000,000 inhabitants of Russia for decades. Recently, it hasn’t been enough, and the new shared hobbies of hating Ukraine and then Syria were invented.

I know it’s hard to believe that people can hate you not because of anything you’ve done but because of reasons of their own but that’s the case with Russians. A regular Russian person who burns an effigy of Obama with a monkey’s body or fantasizes about nuking the US isn’t being provoked into this hatred by the NATO. He does all of this crap in response to his own, deeply internal issues. Disband NATO tomorrow, and he’ll only hate the US more.