power balance
Putin returns He’ll prevent some of the West’s worst excesses, writes Philip Kraske
While Clinton never really had much of a foreign policy, he did have enough sense to stay out of trouble
32 ColdType | April 2012
J
ohn le Carré, that sage Solzenitsyn of the West, was right when he wrote, “There were even voices – mine was one – that suggested Mr. Putin join Slobodan Milosevic on trial in The Hague. Let’s do them both together.” But since Vladimir Putin has returned to centre stage in Russia again, having retaken the presidency, let’s look at the silver lining of this political cloud. Of course, to do so, we’ll need to look beyond what Pepe Escobar calls, “the relentless demonization of Putin and the myriad attempts to delegitimize Russia’s presidential elections,” which he says come from the mouthpieces of “some very angry and powerful sections of Washington and Anglo-American elites. What silver lining? The possibility that the neocon agenda, started under George W. and continued vigorously under Barack, might be blunted for a few years. Putin has twice been suckered by tricky language in the United Nations, once to allow an invasion of Iraq and second to allow “humanitarian intervention” in Libya to turn into the resistance-movement’s air force and special-ops teams. Well, good-bye to all that. As Russia’s veto on Syria showed, there will be no more monkey business at the UN. In a sense, Putin and the Cold War are the political equivalent of the Glass-Steagall Act. This law, which separated normal
banking operations from investment business, allowed a half-century of smoothly functioning financial markets. But it was repealed, and the financial barons soon made a hash of things. Similarly in the political realm, when the Cold War ended, the little Napoleon neocons that populate America’s foreign-, security-, and military-policy circles, joyfully proclaimed America “the world’s only superpower.” But with Bill Clinton in the White House, the 90s were a seething, frothing, bitter decade for neocons, desperate to take the only superpowderdom out on the open road and let it run. And while Clinton never really had much of a foreign policy, he did have enough sense to stay out of trouble. So he allowed bombing runs over Iraq for years after the first war there ended, but resisted the many calls from the right to go back to Iraq and finish Saddam off. This period ended with 9-11, which was the foreign-policy equivalent of the dismissal of Glass-Steagall. If 9-11 hadn’t come along, the neocons would have had to invent it, and they probably did. We now know how these ambitions, political and financial, have ended: disaster for the planet, with those responsible tiptoeing away from the mess – fortunes and reputations intact – all screaming defenses of the