Does the United States Have a Future?

Does the United States Have a Future?

By Gilbert Doctorow

Editor’s note: Gilbert Doctorow is a historian, political analyst and expert in Russian affairs going back to 1965. A graduate of Harvard College in 1967, Doctorow did his graduate research in Moscow as a Fulbright Scholar and got a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1975. He later worked in international business, including eight years as managing director of Russia for multinationals, beginning in 1994. Doctorow began writing on international affairs in 2008 and was a visiting scholar at Columbia in 2010-2011. Doctorow, who has a new book called “Does the United States Have a Future,” delivered the following talk at The National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 7. Following the talk was a Q&A with Doctorow and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern. Video can be viewed below. The Q&A begins at 1:05:10.

I am going to deliver a talk that will come in at 30 minutes in which I address in greater detail than you will find in the book the connection between the title question and the content of the book. To be more specific, I will explain why a book about the United States failing on the world stage deals so largely with what is happening in Russia.

This is not an overview of the book. It is essentially a new chapter of the book. For those of you who want a quick listing of the merits and highlights of the book, I refer you to the thorough review that appeared on Nov. 19 on the portal The Duran. This was republished the next day on Johnson’s Russia List, the digest of writings about Russia that is hosted by George Washington University and is received daily by all U.S. university centers and think tanks interested in Russian matters. I have several copies with me to distribute.

When I began preparation of this book six months ago, I never imagined the title and overriding concept would be so timely as it is today. Each new issue of The New York Times or The Washington Post provides additional material for the case. Each new revelation about “groping” or other sexual misconduct by U.S. Congressmen reveals the Nation’s capital as a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah. But that is today. The evidence has been piling up for at least as far back as the essays in this new book were being written.

In particular, the questioning of America’s future has become a mainstream issue ever since the election of Donald Trump.

The movement to obstruct and take down Trump began immediately. Open and public attacks not just on his policies but on his intellectual faculties and mental balance have appeared in our mainstream press every day. A beleaguered president is lashing out in all directions. We see chaos in policy formation. Executive staff contradicts one another and contradicts the president on a nearly daily basis. The president himself is flip-flopping on policy. He is issuing alarming tweets.

Some well-considered observers have drawn dire conclusions from all of this. I think of David Rothkopf writing in Foreign Policy magazine on May 10, 2017. The title of his article: “Is America a Failing State?“

The author was for five years chief editor of what is a respected international relations journal. He believes that the United States is well on its way to becoming a banana republic. And for this he blames Trump and his cronies in high federal offices. They are a threat to national security, a disgrace on the world stage. The cronies are feathering their nests at the expense of the broad public, while the commander in chief shows open admiration for thugs and authoritarians around the world and disparages his federal employees, mocks the Constitution.

In continuation of the same idea, an op-ed essay by E.J. Dionne, Jr. in the Washington Post on Nov. 30 was given the title “Our political foundation is rotting away.” Dionne concludes: “The longer this president is in power, the weaker our country will become.”

However, the gloom over the future of the U.S. also appears in other, still more moderate and respected establishment publications. I take as my marker Foreign Affairs magazine, which has a subscription in the USA and abroad of several hundred thousand and may be called the bedrock of the establishment. The essays there are issued in a neutral, scholarly tone, rather than deeply partisan attacks such as you find in the daily newspapers.

Tellingly, the September-October 2014 issue of Foreign Affairs ran on its front cover the headline: “See America. Land of Decay and Dysfunction.”

More recently, in mid-August 2017, an FA article entitled “Kleptocracy in America” takes us entirely away from the personality peculiarities of the 45th president into the broader and more important realm of the systemic flaws of governance, namely the extraordinary political power wielded by the very wealthy due to the rules on election financing and the self-serving policies that they succeed in enacting while the general public has stagnated economically for decades now, setting the stage for the voter revolt that brought Trump to power.

Then as one final straw in the wind, I would mention the remarkable op-ed piece in The Washington Post on Sept. 1, 2017, written by Senator John McCain. He described American politics at the federal level as simply not working due to overheated partisanship that compromises the national interest (a problem to which he has himself contributed handsomely) and due to a never-ending electoral cycle.

Indeed, a country which appears to be unable to govern itself is hardly the exemplar and all-powerful state suitable to govern the rest of the world.

However persuasive these points of analysis may be, they overlook what I believe is the main determinant of the onset of America’s decline as a world power that we are presently witnessing and of its possible withdrawal into true isolationism: the decision going back to 2007 to break the back of Russia.

Gilbert Doctorow. (The National Press Club)

Why Russia? Because it has been the only major power to publicly reject the U.S. global hegemony both in word and in deed.

The U.S. has applied all imaginable efforts to put Russia in its place, as Washington sees it—namely as just another regional power, a European state that is in decline, that nods approvingly to whatever policy line comes out of Washington.

These endeavors have mobilized American soft power and hard power.

Soft Power—attempts to foment a color revolution in Russia that removes Vladimir Putin from power by financing opposition figures, by imposing personal and economic sector sanctions in the hope of splitting the Kremlin elites from the broad population and from Putin, by denigrating the president of the Russian Federation in terms that no one would have dared to use during the original Cold War in addressing Leonid Brezhnev, for example. I think of Hillary [Clinton] and her repeated description of Putin as a “Hitler.”

In parallel, there have been our attempts to contain Russia by our physical presence at its borders and off its shores through expansion of NATO going back to 1996 and more recently through positioning of NATO brigades in Poland and the Baltic States, and holding large-scale military exercises in these advanced positions, within easy striking distance of St. Petersburg and other Russian population centers.

Then there has been the U.S. drive to achieve a first-strike capability, namely development of weaponry and systems intended to decapitate Russia or any other enemy, systems which are globally positioned and in space.

Less dramatic technically, but from the Russian perspective equally threatening, has been the construction in Poland and Romania of U.S. installations that are nominally designated as elements in a missile defense shield but are easily usable for the launch of intermediate range missiles, i.e., offensive weapons systems that can strike Russian targets in minutes. This, despite the oft-repeated Russian objections and finally threats to respond effectively if asymmetrically.

The end result of these several intertwined policies has been to create the very Frankenstein monster we have talked up.

The few politicians and Pentagon generals who have identified Russia as the single greatest threat to American security are entirely correct. Today, as in the past during the original Cold War, Russia is the only country on earth capable of reducing the entire continental United States to ashes within a day.

But it is also, as was not the case during the Cold War, the state most capable of deterring American military action against it by its advanced conventional warfare men and materiel, meaning precision bombs and cruise missiles launched from air and sea, with global reach. This conventional capability was developed from virtually zero in the past 15 years and implemented throughout the Russian armed forces over the past five years with very specific target metrics for modernization of the fighting units, not just parade units.

This has been noted by U.S. security analysis. An article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine by Ivo Daalder, who was for several years the U.S. ambassador to NATO, makes precisely the point I just described about the new military capabilities of Russia. However, Daalder gives you the end result of Russia’s modernization program and does not give you the information essential to respond appropriately: namely how and why this threat came about. That is precisely what you find in my books: the action, reaction that has brought us to the present.

Moreover, an article like Daalder’s is not what the general public is reading.

Although Russia’s threat to American well-being features daily on the front page of our newspapers of record, this military threat is not what we read about. Instead, we are told about alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential elections with the aim of discrediting Hillary Clinton and so promoting the electoral chances of Donald Trump, about Russian attempts through social media advertising and otherwise to discredit the institutions of the American political system and to call into question the reliability of the voting procedures.

This is fake news that obscures the far more ominous problem of Russian military forces and the dangerous confrontations with Russia over the past year that were played down to the American public by the very same Pentagon sources.

The closest that the media has come to identifying a Russian military threat is talk of cyberwarfare, itself only a small part of non-nuclear strategic and tactical means being deployed by Moscow.

Let me be specific about how the U.S. attempts to contain and control Russia over the past 25 years have backfired:

Objective One—Cripple the Russian economy by reducing its single biggest source of export revenues: gas and oil sales to Europe. You can trace this economic warfare back, as I did in my 2012 book “Stepping Out of Line,” to the policies of the second Clinton administration that are widely called the “Pipeline Wars” or “New Great Game.” This entailed U.S. promotion of new energy suppliers to Europe—Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and finally, most recently, the USA itself—and its promotion of new paths to the European market, whether pipelines that bypass Russia or LNG, as is the case today.

The second dimension of this economic warfare has been sanctions, which the U.S. first imposed in 2012, under the guise of punishing Russian violations of human rights—the Magnitsky Act—and which were vastly expanded in 2014 up to present to punish Russia for alleged violations of international law and of the post-Cold War world order by its annexation of Crimea and intervention in the Ukrainian civil war, in Donbass…..more here

Click here for reuse options!
Copyright 2017 Hiram's 1555 Blog