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CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER COMMENTARY
SPEECH AT MUNICH COMMENTARY
PUTIN’S MESSAGE IS SIMPLE: RUSSIA AGAIN IS ADVERSARY
W ASHINGTON | Vladimir Putin — Russia’s president, although the more accurate title would be godfather — made headlines with a speech in Munich that set a new standard in anti-Americanism.
He not only charged the United States with the “hyper-use of force,” “disdain for the basic principles of international law” and having “overstepped its national borders in … the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations.” He even blamed the spread of weapons of mass destruction on American “dominance.”
There is something amusing about criticism of the use of force by the man who turned Chechnya into a smoldering ruin; about the invocation of international law by the man who will not allow Scotland Yard to interrogate the polonium-soaked thugs it suspects of murdering Alexander Litvinenko; about the bullying of other countries decried by a man who cuts off energy supplies to Ukraine, Georgia and Belarus in brazen acts of political and economic extortion.
Less amusing is the greater meaning of Putin’s Munich speech. It marks Russia’s coming out. Flush with oil and gas revenues, the consolidation of dictatorial authority at home and the capitulation of both domestic and Western companies to his seizure of their assets, Putin issued his boldest declaration yet that post-Soviet Russia is preparing to reassert itself on the world stage.
Perhaps the most important line in his speech was the least noted because it seemed so innocuous. “I very often hear appeals by our partners, including our European partners, to the effect that Russia should play an increasingly active role in world affairs,” he said. “It is hardly necessary to incite us to do so.”
Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko once boasted that no conflict anywhere on the globe could be settled without taking into account the attitude and interests of the Soviet Union. Gromyko’s description of Soviet influence constitutes the best definition ever formulated of the term superpower.
Putin’s bitter complaint is that today there remains only one superpower, the behemoth that dominates a “unipolar world.”
He knows that Moscow lacks the economic, military and even demographic means to challenge America as in Soviet days. He speaks more modestly of coalitions of aggrieved have-not countries that Russia might lead in countering American power.
Nonetheless, Putin’s aggressiveness does not signal a return to the Cold War. He is too clever to be burdened by the absurdity of socialist economics or Marxist politics.
He is a more modest man: a mere mafia don, seizing the economic resources and political power of a country for himself and his mostly KGB cronies.
He wants Gromyko’s influence — or at least some international acknowledgment that Moscow must be reckoned with — without the ideological baggage.
He does not want to bury us; he only wants to diminish us. Putin does not want us as an enemy. But at Munich he told the world that vis-a-vis America his Russia has gone from partner to adversary.
©2007 The Washington Post Writers Group
SPEECH AT MUNICH COMMENTARY
PUTIN’S MESSAGE IS SIMPLE: RUSSIA AGAIN IS ADVERSARY
W ASHINGTON | Vladimir Putin — Russia’s president, although the more accurate title would be godfather — made headlines with a speech in Munich that set a new standard in anti-Americanism.
He not only charged the United States with the “hyper-use of force,” “disdain for the basic principles of international law” and having “overstepped its national borders in … the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations.” He even blamed the spread of weapons of mass destruction on American “dominance.”
There is something amusing about criticism of the use of force by the man who turned Chechnya into a smoldering ruin; about the invocation of international law by the man who will not allow Scotland Yard to interrogate the polonium-soaked thugs it suspects of murdering Alexander Litvinenko; about the bullying of other countries decried by a man who cuts off energy supplies to Ukraine, Georgia and Belarus in brazen acts of political and economic extortion.
Less amusing is the greater meaning of Putin’s Munich speech. It marks Russia’s coming out. Flush with oil and gas revenues, the consolidation of dictatorial authority at home and the capitulation of both domestic and Western companies to his seizure of their assets, Putin issued his boldest declaration yet that post-Soviet Russia is preparing to reassert itself on the world stage.
Perhaps the most important line in his speech was the least noted because it seemed so innocuous. “I very often hear appeals by our partners, including our European partners, to the effect that Russia should play an increasingly active role in world affairs,” he said. “It is hardly necessary to incite us to do so.”
Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko once boasted that no conflict anywhere on the globe could be settled without taking into account the attitude and interests of the Soviet Union. Gromyko’s description of Soviet influence constitutes the best definition ever formulated of the term superpower.
Putin’s bitter complaint is that today there remains only one superpower, the behemoth that dominates a “unipolar world.”
He knows that Moscow lacks the economic, military and even demographic means to challenge America as in Soviet days. He speaks more modestly of coalitions of aggrieved have-not countries that Russia might lead in countering American power.
Nonetheless, Putin’s aggressiveness does not signal a return to the Cold War. He is too clever to be burdened by the absurdity of socialist economics or Marxist politics.
He is a more modest man: a mere mafia don, seizing the economic resources and political power of a country for himself and his mostly KGB cronies.
He wants Gromyko’s influence — or at least some international acknowledgment that Moscow must be reckoned with — without the ideological baggage.
He does not want to bury us; he only wants to diminish us. Putin does not want us as an enemy. But at Munich he told the world that vis-a-vis America his Russia has gone from partner to adversary.
©2007 The Washington Post Writers Group
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