Hibernation's End

The bear is back in the woods.

Know how you can tell? Their ex-KGB leader is trying to assure us otherwise:

President Vladimir Putin said [three] Thursday[s ago] that Russia's role should not be to counter the United States, adding that Washington was "our principal partner," with close positions on issues such as global security, nonproliferation and disarmament.

Answering questions in an Internet Web cast, Putin also called President Bush "a decent person" and a good partner, "with whom it is possible not just to talk but to reach agreement."

Putin slyly undercut his own assurance with this next comment:

But while he stressed cooperation with the United States, the Russian leader indicated that Moscow's former Cold War foe should not dominate the post-Soviet world, saying that because the planet is diverse, "it should be multipolar."

This can only mean in practice a lack of cooperation and working against American interests. And that is precisely what is taking place and has been ever since Putin got into power.

Remember that it was the Russians that helped move Saddam Hussein's WMD stockpiles to Syria; how deeply the Russians were involved in blocking UN approval of military action against Saddam as well as the Oily Food scandal that propped him up and funded his WMD programs; and that it was the Russians that were arming Saddam even during our three week invasion of Iraq in 2003.

There are other supporting factors that are less than encouraging as well. Such as reducing the number of radio stations carrying Voice of America broadcasts:

Russian authorities have dramatically curtailed the number of stations broadcasting Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America news programs, officials said Friday, sending an unsettling signal about the state of press freedoms in Russia.

News of the restrictions comes amid growing criticism about the state of democracy under President Vladimir Putin and a week before Russia hosts a summit of leaders from the world's wealthiest democracies.

Some European and U.S. lawmakers have called for Putin's government to be taken to task for closing down media outlets and squeezing opposition groups.

[R]adio station owners said the restrictions close down an essential source of information, particularly in far-flung regions where media outlets are fewer than in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

"In Moscow, there's still freedom in some sense. But in the regions, freedom has ended. There is none," said Boris Mazin, programming manager for a broadcast holding company in Kazan, about 450 miles east of Moscow.

Outright jamming of VOA broadcasts hasn't been revived (yet), but this does seem to harken back to the bad old days. As does a surprisingly caustic fusillade of words from every liberal's favorite Soviet dictator, Gorby himself:

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev says Americans have a disease "worse than AIDS” – the insistence on imposing a U.S.-style democracy in Russia.

A decade and a half after a coup removed him from power and the U.S.S.R. collapsed, Gorbachev spoke with an ABC News correspondent about American’s criticism of Russian democracy as President Bush prepared to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-8 conference in St. Petersburg.

"We have made some mistakes. So what?” Gorbachev said. "Please don’t put even more obstacles in our way. Do you think you were smarter than we are?

"Americans have a severe disease – worse than AIDS. It’s called the winner’s complex. You want an American-style democracy here [Russia]. That will not work.”

I'm not sure how "American-style democracy" is distinguished from any other "style." By definition democracy and freedom cannot be "imposed," because they are the absence of government oppression, not its presence. And nobody, least of all a United States that, under the first Bush Administration, "realistically" did everything it could to abort the emergence of Russian democracy in order to prop up Gorby's old Soviet dictatorship, ever tried to "impose" democracy in Russia or anywhere else. Or has the septuagenarian apparatchik forgotten ol' Boris "Absolut" Yeltsin rallying Muscovites from the turret of that T-72 tank fifteen years ago?

What Gorby was really saying is that democracy PERIOD will not work in Russia. Which, in turn, is another way of saying that there are simply too many forces at work in the Russian political scene - but primarily President Putin - that miss the status of being a global superpower more than they relish the freedoms their people have gained since they lost it.

Putin's principal problem is that his ambitions far outstrip his nation's actual power to attain them. Yet he cannot acknowledge this shortfall without also conceding its inherent futility. This conundrum has manifested itself in actual policy as Moscow maintaining many of its Soviet-era relationships with anti-American rogue states around the globe but with a role reversal where, to employ a Bismarckean aphorism, the Russians are no longer the rider, but the horse.

Case in point - North Korea:

Russia is facing criticism after secretly offering to sell North Korea technology that could help the rogue state to protect its nuclear stockpiles and safeguard weapons secrets from international scrutiny.

Russian officials touted the equipment at an IT exhibition in Pyongyang a fortnight ago - just days before the Communist state caused international alarm by launching a salvo of short and long-range missiles into the Sea of Japan.

In what appear to have been unguarded comments, Aleksei Grigoriev, the deputy director of Russia's Federal Information Technologies Agency, told a reporter that North Korea planned to buy equipment for the safe storage and transportation of nuclear materials, developed by a Russian government-controlled defence company.

The company, Atlas, also received interest from the North Koreans in their security systems and encryption technology - which were kept from display at the exhibition for security reasons.

In remarks made to the Russian Itar-Tass news agency - hastily retracted after publication - Mr. Grigoriev said that the main aim of the June 28 exhibition was "establishing contacts with the Korean side and discussing future co-operation".

Of course, the Russians, with their close ChiComm friends, blocked the UN Security Council resolution Japan wanted that would have barred missile-related financial and technology transactions with North Korea as well as endorsing retaliatory military action against further NoKo provocations in favor of a toothless alterative that preserves the unacceptable status quo.

The same is even more true of Islamist Iran, to which Moscow continues to sell billions in conventional arms, nuclear assistance, and UN Security Council protection. This has sinus-clearingly direct relevance given the proxy war Iran is now fighting against Israel in Lebanon as a ploy of goading a direct nuclear confrontation with the U.S.

Bruce P. Jackson, president of the Project on Transitional Democracies, is more of an optimist than I am. He sees Putinian Russia constructing a "soft" version of the old Evil Empire using its vast energy reserves as the hammer:

It is increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that what is underway in and around the former Soviet Union is a struggle between the "soft power" of Russia and the "soft power" of the West for the political orientation of the countries in Europe's East, for economic influence in these regions, and for the extension of their respective alliance systems and multilateral institutions. The West has a strong preference for liberal democracies, for free market economies integrated into the world trading system, and for countries that work well with the European Union's Neighborhood Policy, the OSCE's peacekeeping and election monitoring missions, and NATO. Putin's Russia seeks a Moscow-dominated system of authoritarian states and the odd dictatorship, a "Near Abroad" economy hostage to Russia's energy monopoly and trade within the Common Economic Space, and the complete rejection of European and Euro-Atlantic institutions. Both Russia and the West are prepared to organize their "soft power" - from economic and market influence, to democracy support and denial, to aggressive diplomacy - to create a region in their own image.

That's certainly a near-term objective. And if that was the extent of Putin's aims, it would not be a national security concern. But that won't get the Russians back to parity with the United States. That's what Moscow ultimately seeks, and the closest they can come to it is hitching themselves to every crazoid regime that wants to challenge America in bellicose ways that the Russians know they no longer can.

The, well, ultimate effect of this dynamic if not deflected or modified will be to drag the Russians into the wars their customers in Pyongyang and Tehran are attempting to start. Or, as it is written:

1 And the word of the LORD came to me saying, 2 "Son of man, set your face toward (A) Gog of the land of (B) Magog, the prince of (C) Rosh, (D) Meshech and (E) Tubal [i.e. modern Russia], and prophesy against him 3 and say, 'Thus says the Lord GOD, "Behold, I am against you, O Gog, prince of Rosh, Meshech and Tubal.

4 "I will turn you about and put hooks into your jaws, and I will (F) bring you out, and all your army, (G) horses and horsemen, all of them splendidly attired, a great company with buckler and shield, all of them wielding swords; 5 (H) Persia [i.e. Iran], (I) Ethiopia and (J) Put [i.e. Libya] with them, all of them with shield and helmet; 6 (K) Gomer with all its troops; (L) Beth-togarmah from the remote parts of the north with all its troops - many peoples with you.

7 "(M) Be prepared, and prepare yourself, you and all your companies that are assembled about you, and be a guard for them.

8 "(N) After many days you will be summoned; in the latter years you will come into the land that is restored from the sword, whose inhabitants have been (O) gathered from many nations to the (P) mountains of Israel which had been a continual waste; but its people were brought out from the nations, and they are (Q) living securely, all of them.

9 "You will go up, you will come (R) like a storm; you will be like a (S) cloud covering the land, you and all your troops, and many peoples with you."

The current Middle East conflict probably isn't the one prophesied in this passage. But it is part of the process that will lead to it. A miscalculation on the part of a former would-be world-conquerer that was never fully de-Sovietized and thus never internalized its Cold War defeat and accepted its new role in the world. One that will bring disaster upon themselves and their clients before it's all said and done.

Surely the "imposition" of an "American-style democracy" would be a more palatable fate.