This book review will appear in the print edition of The Weekly Standard on January 18, 2016. Access the original post here.
During his traditional year-end press conference in Moscow, Vladimir Putin delighted in toying with America’s political process by touting Donald Trump as the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Less clear was whether Putin was delivering kudos or lumps of coal to the Trump campaign: Was this a burst of candor from an envious fellow politician (and friend of oligarchs), or an exercise in Soviet-style maskirovka, intended to achieve a more devious result? Or both?
Russian President Vladimir Putin looks on as he delivers his annual New Year address to the nation in Moscow, Russia, December 31, 2015. Reuters
Had anyone asked Garry Kasparov’s assessment of Putin’s pre-Christmas gambit, it would have been decidedly negative. Kasparov was an active participant in the tumultuous era that opened with the Warsaw Pact collapsing, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, and ending with Putin’s neo-authoritarian regime back in control of the Kremlin. Over a mere 15-year period, Russia emerged from autocracy, enjoyed a chaotic decade trying to establish representative government—and then lapsed back into authoritarianism.
Winter Is Coming tells how both Russia’s domestic ferment and its foreign policy affected (and were affected by) Western, particularly American, attitudes and actions. This is a richly complex story, well told, and illuminated by Kasparov’s personal travails, which led ultimately to his self-imposed exile in the United States.
His narrative is a stark refutation of the Whig interpretation of history, in which mankind inexorably progresses toward greater heights. Russia’s last quarter-century shows that there is no “arc of history,” certainly not one that “bends” inevitably in any direction, President Obama’s Oval Office rug notwithstanding. Those like Obama—on both left and right—who speak self-importantly about being “on the right side of history” should note Kasparov’s observation about Russia: “You can often do just fine being on the wrong side of history if you are on the right side of a pipeline.”
Correctly characterizing the 1990s as a decade of missed opportunities, Kasparov criticizes both the Russian reformers and foreign leaders who watched as Russia struggled, and ultimately failed, to emerge from the swamp left by communism. He is perhaps too hard on the former and too kind to the latter. When the Communist empire disintegrated, the world’s libraries were not bulging with treatises explaining how to dismantle and replace its wretched economic system and strangling expanses of government power. Russia’s reformers operated under a palpable sense of dread that, if they did not rapidly dismantle communism’s political and economic fortresses, the dictatorship would reemerge.
By contrast, the West in the 1990s, especially the Clinton administration, reflected insufferable smugness about the “end of history” and the triumph of the so-called Washington Consensus. Inevitably, the Russian reformers made mistakes, but their fears were far more realistic than the West’s blasé attitude that the Cold War’s end meant that malevolence had disappeared worldwide, and that a “peace dividend” of reduced military expenditures would last—perhaps forever. Kasparov reminds us of the Clinton campaign’s theme song, with its refrain “yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone.”
Not quite.
The troubling lessons of Russia’s recent history are not unique to Russia: The instability of states and regimes globally seems only to be increasing. Even countries that have experienced decades of quasi-democratic government may succumb to the totalitarian temptation, let alone those barely transitioned away from autocratic government. And rogue regimes such as Iran and North Korea play on the same gullibility Vladimir Putin knows so well, succeeding in equal measure, advancing their agendas while the West lounges benignly.
One of Kasparov’s insights is that determined authoritarians can often turn the West’s supposed economic leverage against it. Naïve policymakers, here and elsewhere, have argued endlessly that increased economic and cultural interaction will soften dictatorships. “In practice,” Kasparov argues, “authoritarian states have abused this access and economic interdependency to spread their corruption and fuel repression at home.” Consider the evidence: Has China’s authoritarian government really changed that much since it opened economically to the West? How are the Castro brothers doing after Obama’s capitulation to their preconditions for normalizing relations? And we will soon be able to ask Tehran’s ayatollahs precisely the same questions.
When “engagement” proponents point to Cold War arms control diplomacy with the Soviets to prove we should not hesitate to negotiate with adversaries, they are essentially missing the key point. They exalt the putative benefits of a process (negotiation) over the substance at issue (e.g., the territorial integrity of Ukraine). Indeed, to Kasparov, the West’s failed policies concerning Ukraine graphically illustrate how Putin uses our misperceptions to his advantage, already resulting in considerable danger to Ukraine and other former Soviet republics. Moscow has stolen Crimea’s sovereignty from Kiev, with barely a hint from the White House of a modern version of Secretary Henry Stimson’s 1932 doctrine of nonrecognition, which rejected Japan’s seizure of Manchuria from China.
Kasparov rejects the notion that Ukraine legitimately falls into Moscow’s sphere of influence, “as if 50 million Ukrainians should have no say in the matter.” And he stresses that “the Russian military commanders . . . in the field are not fools. They are aware that NATO is watching and could blow them to bits in a moment.” Yet Obama and European NATO members have shown virtually no inclination to train and equip Kiev’s forces—even for more effective self-defense. Putin is daily exploiting this failure of will through his continued belligerence in Ukraine and his exploitation of “frozen conflicts” elsewhere in former Soviet lands, not to mention more distant satellites such as Syria’s Assad regime.
Garry Kasparov has a final grave assessment that President Obama “crippled the power of the office he holds in many ways that will outlast his White House tenure for years.” This pessimism is incontestably correct. Obama has voluntarily walked America and its allies away from countless geostrategic positions of strength, leading to chaos in the Middle East, with governments dissolving into spreading anarchy and terrorism; with Iranian and North Korean nuclear proliferation unchecked and even legitimized; with Russia and China on the move in Eastern Europe and Asia; with the resurgence of anti-American authoritarianism in the Western hemisphere; and with our defense budget’s debilitating collapse.
These weaknesses will not snap back automatically on January 20, 2017. The real question for Americans is whether Obama’s successor will be content to dwell among the ruins, managing America’s decline, rather than reversing it and reducing the perils facing Washington and our allies. Right now, virtually all the Republican candidates are talking tough, particularly on terrorism. The real divide among them is whether they have the resolve and the stamina to struggle, in difficult straits, to reclaim and extend the high ground Obama has deserted. Measuring these leadership qualities is hard, and the candidates’ skills in reciting staff-generated, pre-programmed speeches and talking points alone will tell us little.
Republican voters would be squandering their patrimony if they believe that last month’s Las Vegas debate checked the box on national security issues. Quite the contrary; we have just begun the discussion, one that Hillary Clinton seems determined not to have at all. Americans must evaluate the candidates’ characters, not just their eloquence, and how their thought processes work on national security. And while that broader evaluation is underway, the candidates could do a lot worse than reading Garry Kasparov while jetting between Iowa and New Hampshire. Indeed, winter is here.
John R. Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 2005-06.
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