Opinion: Who ‘lost’ Russia?

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Fred Hiatt has a curious column in today’s Washington Post entitled ‘Who’s to Blame for Russia?’ It is almost certainly more thoughtful than my response to it, so make sure to click on the link and read it first. I’ll wait.

Right. So Hiatt wants to know ‘Who lost Russia?’ My nuanced, geo-tastic answer -- Russia. For more five-cent analysis, read after the jump. That is, if Russia is even ‘lost’ to begin with. Fifteen-plus years since the collapse of Communism, I’d be willing to bet a mountain of rubles that the general outlook of Russians under the age of 30 is exponentially more liberal, more open, more capitalistic and more Western than it was during whatever post-Gorbachev high-water mark you prefer. Leaders and governments may backslide toward authoritarianism, but free and educated people rarely choose to be less free in the long run.

This is a phenomenon that has been repeated dozens of times throughout post-communist Europe -- some tinpot nationalist and/or ex-communist wins an election (in Slovakia, say); the international press and some greenhorn U.S. congressmen fret about a return to the Bad Old Days, and then a few years (or months) later, the local younguns bounce the thug out of office. Freedom continues to march on, if not in a 100% straight line. Countries that are seen as basket-cases (Romania or Bulgaria, say) suddenly wake up one day in both NATO and the EU. Russia has some major differences, of course, and therein lies the blame. As Hiatt points out, there are some cultural/historical peculiarities (like, 74 years of communism-by-choice) that create legitimate worry about future nationalistic spasms. But that’s precisely what makes the whole ‘who lost’ formulation so puzzling, and unintentionally revealing. When an American foreign-policy Deep Thinker asks ‘who lost’ or ‘who won’ some global and/or faraway conflict, that’s just Americanese for saying ‘Which Yank can I blame for having a foreign policy I find distasteful?’ The world is a complex place, and -- believe it or not! -- sometimes things happen that aren’t the direct result of one particular school of U.S. foreign policy thought. Sometimes I think instead of asking Who won the Cold War?, Brookings Institute types should read He’s Just Not That Into You....