FROM TIGGER TO EEYORE

Settle down, this is going to take me a while.  I should like to attempt a thoughtful response to Robert Shore, who writes as follows:

“Prof. Wolff,
I don’t mean to minimize your fears about what we can expect from the Trump Presidency. However, along with many dreadful things it is possible that something important and positive may also come about; namely, a big step in the direction of normalizing relations with Russia. To provide some important background information the following interview, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/tavissmiley/interviews/emeritus-professor-russian-studies-stephen-cohen/ with Stephen Cohen, Emeritus Professor of Russian Studies at Princeton University is very much worth listening to for two reasons. One, he talks eloquently of the awful revival of something close to the Red Scare and McCarthyism that is going on at present in which anyone trying to say anything positive about Russia immediately gets smeared as a Putin puppet as the Clinton campaign did to Trump. Indeed the New York Times has been demonizing Russia for much of the past year. The second reason is that Cohen presents a picture of what the world looks like from the Russian point of view with NATO expanding to the very borders of Russia carrying with it the frightening possibility of a nuclear war with Russia. If Trump indeed follows through on his campaign promises and is able to put an end to the uncalled for and terribly dangerous hostility towards President Putin, he will have achieved something of great importance for which we should be grateful. Nothing of the sort could ever have been expected had Clinton won the election.

Robert Shore”

First of all, let me thank Bob for taking on the role of Blog Tigger.  I am usually the one who sees a drop at the bottom of a tumbler as evidence of a glass half full, but the election of Trump has turned me into an Eeyore, and I welcome his capacity to see light at the end of a wormhole.  I admire Stephen Cohen’s work and I thank Bob for the link to his piece.

In these remarks, I am going to take off from a single word in Shore’s comment, namely the word “normalizing” in the second sentence.  I think it reveals a point of view with which I have considerable disagreement.  Let me explain.

The United States is an imperial power.  That is not a moral judgment, it is a statement of geopolitical fact.  It is not the first imperial power, nor will it be the last.  There are other imperial powers at present – China comes to mind – as well as a number of regional powers that aspire to at least quasi-imperial status, but the United States is currently the richest and militarily strongest imperial power, a status it maintains by spending a much larger fraction of its Gross Domestic Product on its military than do its competitors.  Russia was an imperial power when it was the Soviet Union, and it seeks to reestablish itself at least as a regional hegemon.

Imperial powers expand their spheres of control in a variety of ways, depending in part on geography and in part on history.  Some, like Rome, the Mongols, Great Britain, and the United States, seek to project their power well beyond their borders, establishing and manning permanent military bases in the portions of the world they dominate.  Others, like China and Russia, extend their imperial sway to areas contiguous to their homeland and are hesitant to seek control of areas not reachable by land bridges from the homeland.  Imperial powers generate a wide variety of self-justifications for their quest for dominion, sometimes laying claim to cultural superiority [Rome, Great Britain, France], sometimes invoking divine sanction [China], sometimes claiming moral and political superiority [the United States.]

The earth being shaped as it is, imperial powers expand their spheres of control until they bump up against other imperial powers or reach natural boundaries [the Pacific Ocean, for the United States, the limit of the territories feasibly reachable with available technology, for the Romans.]  For the past several centuries, Central and Eastern Europe have been contested areas, over which wars have been fought repeatedly.  [I assume at least the outlines of this history are familiar to the readers of this blog, and I shan’t attempt a summary.]  At any moment in history, the relative weights of the constellation of forces establish a geopolitical balance, either stable or unstable.  This balance is always contested, always challenged, always undergoing revision as the power of the competing imperial nations shifts.

Quite often, after a major war, a new balance is established which those living at the time consider “normal” or “appropriate” or “inevitable.”  This was true after the Napoleonic Wars, after the First World War, and again after the Second World War.  WW II changed the prospects and opportunities for virtually all the aspiring or existing imperial powers.  It destroyed the imperial sway of Great Britain and France, put paid to the imperial ambitions of Germany, Japan, and Italy, and established the United States and the Soviet Union as the two dominant imperia of the post-war world.  The Soviet Union expanded farther into Eastern and Central Europe than it could ever have hoped to do, and the United States in effect took control of whatever the Soviet Union was not actually sitting on.

None of this has anything at all to do with considerations of what is right, or what is best for mankind, or what can be justified by appeal to heaven, to history, or to the ideals of the human spirit.  It is simply a description of what happened.  The United Nations, like its predecessor, the League of Nations, is an attempt both at formalizing the power relations that existed at the end of a great war, and at freezing those relations so as to protect the hegemony of the existing imperial powers and stymie the ambitions of imperia on the rise.

When the Soviet Union broke apart, a shift in the power relations of Eastern and Central Europe took place, and the United States, with its agent, NATO, moved to expand its influence into regions that Russia could no longer control.  Vladimir Putin seeks to recapture at least some portion of that region as part of Russia’s sphere of influence and control.  If the United States [under President Trump] agrees to this Russian move, the balance of imperial control will shift.  If Trump resists Putin’s move, then in all likelihood Putin will fail, because the worldwide fall in oil prices has substantially diminished Russia’s power.

What would it mean to “normalize” America’s relations with Russia?  Would it mean to freeze things as they now are?  Return to the spheres of control of the so-called Cold War period, with Russia dominating and perhaps reincorporating Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, and so forth?  Return to the situation that existed in 1933?  In 1918?  In 1818?  There is no coherent meaning that can be given to the term.

But, you ask, what ought America to do?  What ought we, on the left, to want America to do, regardless of how little ability we have to determine what it will do?  What is the right thing for America to do?  That is a very much more difficult question to answer than it might at first seem.  Consider the possibilities.

First, America could eschew all imperial aims, close the overseas bases it maintains in most of the nations of the world, and reduce its military establishment to what is required to protect its territory from invasion.  It could then claim that it had foresworn Empire [try telling that to Native Americans, by the way.]  What would be the result?  Other actual or aspiring imperial powers would expand their spheres to fill the gap.  We [i.e., we on the left] might consider the consequences good or bad, but we could tell ourselves that we have clean hands, we are morally above reproach, because no matter what happens we did not do it.  I leave it to the professional moral philosophers to consider that defense [I assume we are not falling back on religious justifications in the style of Sergeant York.]

Second, we could embrace America’s military power as a reality and argue that it should be put to good use – to advancing the prospects of socialism, for example, or stamping out the abuse of women in nations around the world, or punishing nations that criminalize homosexuality.  If that is our choice, then what is the argument for withdrawing our sphere of influence from territories over which Russia seeks to reestablish its Imperium?

Third, we could embrace imperialism in principle and throw our support behind some other imperial power which for some reason we prefer to the United States.

This would be an interesting and enlightening discussion, but I cannot see that the term “normalizing” would play a useful role in it.