Putin and the Liberal Interventionist

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

06 August 14

didn’t go to foment revolution,” said Michael McFaul, the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia. “Obama people don’t sponsor color revolutions. Other administrations had done this.” But, he insists, not Barack Obama’s. That is a lie, as we have seen in Kiev, Cairo, and beyond, and McFaul has to know it, which shows how liberal interventionists overlap with and become every bit as dangerous as the neocons I love to hate.

McFaul was talking here with David Remnick, the eminently liberal editor of The New Yorker and a former Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post. Their several conversations form the backbone of Remnick’s latest attack on Russian President Vladimir Putin, which appeared in the magazine’s August 11 edition. Remnick speaks Russian, has an excellent ear for dialogue, and spins a good yarn, even if it remains a hatchet job, reworking for the umpteenth time the standard litany of charges against the Russian leader.

Putin runs an “unimaginably corrupt” system, stealing from public resources to enrich his favored oligarchs, kleptocrats, and former KGB pals, the siloviki. Putin has unleashed a dangerous right-wing nationalism based on blood and soil and blessed by the Russian Orthodox Church. Putin gives a platform to anti-Semitic extremists. Putin leads a campaign against homosexuals. Putin controls Russia’s mass media. Putin jails his political opponents. Putin uses covert political and military agents to fund, train, and supply insurgencies in surrounding countries, from the borders of Georgia, to Moldova, Ukraine, and the Baltic nations.

Remnick supports this portrait of Putin with evidence, anecdote, and a wide range of interviews with Putinistas from a variety of extremist positions. Remnick also concedes that Putin created a “relative atmosphere of stability, in which tens of millions of Russians enjoyed a sense of economic well-being and private liberty,” all unprecedented in Russian history.

But Remnick completely misses the plot in trying to explain Putin’s new anti-Americanism, which is arguably the most important question of all given a possible nuclear conflict over Ukraine. The journalist simply sweeps under the carpet what the U.S. and its European allies have been doing for decades to threaten Russia. Or, worse, he poses pieces of it as merely figments of Putin’s conspiratorial imagination. From hoodwinking Gorbachev and expanding NATO to the East to the “color revolutions” along the borders of the former Soviet Union to the coup in Kiev that the Obama administration put together and about which Ambassador McFaul lied, this is a whole lot of history to ignore. And if such willful ignorance is the best we can get from one of America’s leading liberal intellectuals, Cold War II could become even more dangerous than Cold War I.

McFaul, the liberal interventionist, offers little better. A political science professor at Stanford who advised Obama on Russian and Eurasian affairs before becoming ambassador, McFaul comes across as, in Remnick’s words, “a sunny, eager guy, with a wide-open expression, shaggy blond hair, effortful Russian, and an irrepressible curiosity.” A veteran leader of the anti-Apartheid movement at Stanford, he became a close friend of Susan Rice, now Obama’s National Security Advisor. Like Rice, McFaul was also fascinated by liberation movements in post-colonial Africa.

Studying and doing research in the Soviet Union from the early days of Perestroika in the 1980s, McFaul became friends with many of the “pro-democracy” reformers. He was, says Remnick, “determined to help establish liberal values and institutions – civil society, free speech, democratic norms – in a land that, for a thousand years, had known only absolutism, empire, and the knout.” He was also an incurable romantic high on revolution but completely without any sense of fatalism or irony, both of which pervade Russian culture.

But McFaul’s problem, which the usually perceptive Remnick fails to grasp, was less personal than political. The young scholar was mucking about in someone else’s society, and doing it at a time when Washington was making the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department’s “Democracy Bureaucracy,” and support for Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) central features of U.S. foreign policy. McFaul participated in this U.S. government-sanctioned movement. No wonder that, in Remnick’s words, “some Russian officials grew convinced that he was working for Western intelligence, doing what he could to hasten the fall of the Kremlin’s authority. They took his openhearted activism to be a cover for cunning.”

McFaul himself only begins to understand. “Has the U.S. used covert operations to foment regime change? The answer is yes,” he told Remnick. “Serbia is a paradigmatic case: direct money to the opposition to destabilize things, and it was successful.” Given all those who still deny that the Clinton administration covertly funded, trained, and supplied the OTPOR revolutionaries who overthrew Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevich, it is good to hear McFaul confirm a truth that the evidence has long supported.

According to Wikileaks documents from the global intelligence firm Stratfor, McFaul then lobbied for the U.S. government to support the OTPOR revolutionaries in creating their Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), which would play a major role in American-led destabilization efforts and color revolutions from Eastern Europe to Venezuela to the Arab Awakening.

To his credit, McFaul did raise the right question about the Orange Revolution in Ukraine that the Bush administration backed in 2004. “Did Americans meddle in the internal affairs of Ukraine?” he asked at the time in an op-ed in the Washington Post. “Yes,” he replied. “The American agents of influence would prefer different language to describe their activities – democratic assistance, democracy promotion, civil society support, etc. – but their work, however labeled, seeks to influence political change in Ukraine.”

McFaul found the meddling a good thing and defied overwhelming evidence to declare Washington innocent of any geostrategic agenda or covert coordination. This year, when Washington put together what organizers spoke of as a second Orange Revolution in Ukraine, McFaul simply denied that Obama people did that sort of thing. Is the liberal interventionist lying to the public, to his students, or mostly to himself?

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."

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