Dionne sees a chance for Obama to build a new consensus in Washington:
We must confront Putin, but this will require a foreign policy consensus that has vanished. A new one will have to be based on principles that predate the Iraq engagement and involve a more measured use of American power.
Thus the final paradox: Putin has given Obama the opportunity to begin rebuilding this consensus — if the president decides to try, and if his critics are willing to help him do it.
This consensus has eroded for the last 50 years. For many years, the Washington consensus had been that politics stopped at the water's edge. But that consensus was eroded by Vietnam, when increasing protests and the long quagmire led Congress to finally end funding for it. The consensus was frayed even more by Ronald Reagan's military adventure in Lebanon, which was a disaster and led to knock-down drag-out battles over aiding the Contras in Nicaragua. In 1991, the Gulf War against Iraq was approved only after heated debate in which one Congressman said that he didn't want to have to look his kids in the eye after they were disabled from the war and explain why he voted to send them over there. And the whole world begged George W. Bush not to go to Iraq, with a million people taking the streets to protest, as opposed to 50,000 in Moscow this year.
We can and must build some sort of consensus, but we cannot go back to the days in which politics stopped at the water's edge. We have had far too much mismanagement of foreign policy from presidents of both parties. Instead, we have to have a policy that respects the wishes of the American people and which respects international law. Putin was correct when he said that the US has carried out foreign policy at the point of a gun for the last decade.
When the UN was formed following World War II, there was an implicit agreement between the five main powers that won the war, the US, UK, the Soviet Union, China, and France that we would cooperate and work together to solve the world's problems. That agreement soon fell apart as the Iron Curtain descended and nothing ever got done. There was another opportunity following the collapse of Communism; however, the US chose to engage in a belligerent foreign policy that involved the gunboat diplomacy that Putin says we are guilty of.
Now, there is another opportunity for cooperation. Despite all the bluster on both sides, the period of NATO expansion, which had continued unchecked over the past 20+ years since the collapse of Communism, is over. NATO is not likely to admit Ukraine even without Putin's interference; that country is simply too polarized politically for it to work. And given that Ukraine has no choice but to accept an IMF bailout and the draconian austerity measures that go with it, don't expect stability to return anytime soon.
The business elites are already starting to lean on Obama to cool it over Russia. For once they're right. We have invested too much in the integration of Russia into the rest of the world following the collapse of Communism to tear it all apart now. The world has far bigger problems to worry about than petty historical feuds that should be pushed aside.
We have fundamental philosophical differences with Russia and China over human rights and many other issues. But those are just differences. We were able to put aside our differences with the Soviet Union during World War II. We have to build a consensus that relies on seeing the big picture, not the heat of the present battle. We have to build a consensus on climate change, space exploration, eliminating poverty around the world, and respect for international law. These issues are too big for us to return to the old ways of thinking that brought us to the brink of nuclear catastrophe.
As Dionne notes, neocons like William Kristol are trying to gin up conflict with Russia as a way of waking a war-weary American public out of their current attitudes. But the problem is that nobody would ever win such a conflict. If either us or Russia got to the point where we were losing a conventional military conflict over Ukraine, the temptation would grow to launch missiles.
Certain people such as Hillary Clinton have compared Putin's actions to Hitler's. But that analogy does not hold water. Putin is a nationalist, but he is not a madman like Hitler. And he does not subscribe to the theories of racial superiority like Hitler did when he claimed that Germany was the "master race." The US has already drawn a red line with respect to its NATO allies. And Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland all have much more stable systems of government than Ukraine was. Russia simply does not have the sort of opportunity to ferment the kind of unrest that they did in Crimea, historically part of Russia.
However, as noted yesterday, Russia has complained about Estonia's treatment of Russian minorities, something they have complained about over the last few years. This sort of discrimination has been an issue since that country broke away from Russia. This gives us a choice and an opportunity. We have to build a world in which this sort of discrimination is not tolerated under any circumstances whatsoever. This applies whether it is homophobia here or discrimination against Russian minorities in Estonia or Ukraine or discrimination against any other minority anywhere else in the world. If we let this problem go, it will tear apart the fabric of the world elsewhere if it doesn't do so between Russia and the West. But if we address it, then we will build a new kind of consensus that will be much more sustainable than merely having politics stop at the water's edge.
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