The Wages of Appeasing Putin Mount
“First, take the beam out of your own eye.” – Jesus Christ, as told by Matthew
The CIA’s belief that the Putinist regime deliberately put a thumb on the campaign scales to elect Donald Trump (USA Today) has engendered quite a bit of anger among Democrats. However, sadly so far, my new party hasn’t spent enough time (or nearly any time, for that matter) engaging in the self-awareness needed to truly recover from this election loss.
On the one hand, whatever Putin’s motives (and the CIA’s view – while not yet openly challenged – doesn’t have a lot of full-throated endorsers within the IC either), it is clear his dezinformatsiya chicanery undermined faith in our democratic process in general, and in the Democratic nominee for president in particular. Brian Schoeneman’s assessment of Mrs. Clinton’s own failings is spot on, but every little bit hurt, and in an election this close, every little bit meant something.
However, if the Democrats’ anger at Putin merely stops at the water’s edge, the party will not learn the proper lesson, which would be bad for the party and far worse for the country.
Putin didn’t play the dezinformatsiya card in a vacuum. This only came after years of seeing a president – one the Democrats got elected twice – give ground to him across the globe. When Putin first stretched his power into Georgia in 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama gave a vague statement steeped in moral equivalence. As president, Barack Obama deep-sixed planned missile defense deployments in Eastern Europe, engineered a disastrous “reset” with Putin, threatened action against Russia’s Syrian client regime before deciding he didn’t really mean it, and responded to the seizure of Crimea with a stern lecture and nothing else.
Does anyone really think Putin would have had the strength and breathing room to put so much into the dezinformatsiya if he were facing strong dissident movements in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, and Crimea? Or a seriously dangerous non-terrorist rebel force in Syria? Or louder questions to his regime’s legitimacy at home?
Of course, Donald Trump has no interest in any of this either, and this is where Democrats have to pick up the slack. If we are genuinely upset at Vladimir Putin, we can’t simply complain about the dezinformatsiya. We must confront his regime and their minions around the world, and challenge his Rube-Golderg-like ideological mish-mash of hierarchical Slavophilia and outright fascism wherever it rears its mis-shapen head. We have to remember the tools Ronald Reagan used against the Soviets (tools Bill Clinton rediscovered in helping the Serbian people rid themselves of Milosevic in 2000 – Ivan Marovic). We need to remember that opposing a hostile tyranny involves a spectrum of possible actions – up to and including, but not exclusively, military force.
By doing this, we can provide the voters an alternative to Trump’s coziness to Putin. Given that Trump’s strategy has already been proven a failure in Syria before he even takes office (As CNN notes, Putin’s client Bashar Assad is far better at killing civilians in Aleppo than fighting Daesh in Palmyra), the political dividends could come swiftly. More importantly, however, it will show America that as Democrats, we recognize that appeasement is a mistake we don’t intend to repeat, while showing the world that at least someone is concerned about genuine self-determination and will not force them to choose between tyrants and terrorists.
To do this, however, we need to realize that Putin’s dezinformatsiya wasn’t a bug, but a feature. I have long said the tyrants of the world consider America a threat, and have acted accordingly. Putin’s actions prove that. America must respond…
…and given Trump’s views on the matter, we Democrats will have to lead that response.
