Humanity, you Killed Gorbachev’s Universalist vision; Prepare to Die.
On March 28, Robert Kagan published an expanded op-ed in the Washington Post under the title of, “Trump’s anti-Ukraine view dates to the 1930s. America rejected it then. Will we now?”. It is worth mentioning as the epitome of the rising American (during Biden’s administration) “Bluenecks” Zeitgeist — the Ukraine war hawks that campaign for the “Bully theory of international politics”; NATO didn’t expand, it was invited; Russia is out to first conquer Ukraine and then it will come for the EU and finish with America; Putin won’t dare to go nuclear; and abuse the ethically-sacred and so-rare historically “Moral Clarity” pennant, the way of Cheney’s justification for the Iraq invasion.
Kagan’s sweeping diatribe against the attempt (now weakening with every passing day) to stop the NATO-Russia conflict from escalating to “nuclear exchange” is founded on the vilest, twistedly unfounded historical analogy of depicting Putin’s Russia as today’s equivalent of Hitler’s Germany (I’ll elaborate on it, see, https://medium.com/@meirstieglitz/facing-the-gobbles-like-propaganda-moral-historical-observations-2c78946938ed. At the same time, his so-justified attack on the “America First” movement conceals the neo-Neocon (I term them ‘Bluenecks’) crusade to exploit Putin’s invasion of Ukraine (highly-provoked, yet, basically unjustified) to further NATO’s humanity-endangering (and EU debasing) expansion and achieve strategic “Escalation Dominance” (reminisces of R. Perle, “Prince of Darkness”, call for America to prevail in a nuclear war).
As historical analogies go, here’s one: In the winter of 1987, while doing my post-Doc work with T. Schelling at the Kennedy School, I was invited to a closed S. P. Huntington lecture. Huntington prophecy was definitive: Gorbachev’s Nuclear Abolition vision and his strategic disarmament proposals are nothing but a grand scheme to outflank the West — first, by manipulating gullible Reagan to dismantle Star Wars and then by launching a grand-strategic offensive to take over Western Europe.
My response was that Gorbachev was either a Historical Messiah (humanity’s savior) or a C.I.A. agent (the supreme “asset” of all time). I added that if indeed Gorbachev was on a mission to abolish nuclear weapons, as I strongly believed and still do, the nature of the U.S. reaction will determine whether he’ll end up like a Universalist Jesus or as a failed John the Baptist. The photo of Gorbachev, Reagan and G.H.W. Bush at New York is a remainder that for a while Universalism (and not global race to dominate) was the Zeitgeist. One of my first posts: https://medium.com/@meirstieglitz/the-waning-of-the-universalist-historical-moment-593eeb38eeb2
And a reminder of times lost, on April 17, 2010, on “Fox News” of all places, President G.H.W. Bush was speaking on the reasons for the end of the Cold War. After being goaded by the blond interviewer to claim that the decision to deploy Pershing missiles in Europe frightened Warsaw Pact into retreat and brought down the Soviet Union, he answered with exceptional integrity: “But it was Gorbachev, with his Perestroika and Glasnost, he carried the day. And if it was not for his vision it [the end of the Cold War] would not have happened.” In stark contrast, now, in a NYT’s Op-Ed [Feb 28. 2023] the neo-Neocon, B. Stephens, declares the Russian invasion as an attempt to mollify “the verdict of 1991”.
Now, under the guise of (well-articulated) anti-Trumpism, R. Kagan presents the outline of a neo-Domino theory and he is emerging as one of the most jingoistic among the Bluenecks which rule American foreign policy. Meanwhile, in Russia Putin’s regime is deteriorating incessantly from harsh authoritarianism to brutal tyranny and with every passing day, relatively to the course of the Ukraine war and Western encirclement, its historical course is resembling more and more the foulest depictions of it by the Bluenecks (on that nightmarish self-fulfilling prophesy another time).
Humanity, you’ve killed Gorbachev’s (and mine) Universalism; prepare to die. I doubt they’ll make a radioactive Princess Bride after that.