No. 1

From President Medvedev's vlog, via The Guardian, 25 October 2011.

Fred Kaplan of Slate, Rectification Central's go-to source of expertise on military matters, had a better-informed version of something I've been wanting to say, about old Willard Mitt Romney complaining in every quarter about how he deserves an apology, because when he said in 2012 that the Russian Federation was "our no. 1 geopolitical foe" and everybody made fun of him he was actually right. As a matter of fact he wasn't right, in the first place because he was ignorant or lying, as was the case with so much of what Romney was saying* during that campaign:

In his 2012 CNN interview [toward the end of Dmitry Medvedev's presidency, a couple of months before Putin returned to the office in May], Romney explained his characterization of Russia as “our No. 1 geopolitical foe” by saying, “They fight every cause for the world’s worst actors”—and referred specifically to Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria. In his recent Atlantic interview, he said, “They were opposing us at the U.N. whenever a critical measure came forward.” Both statements were simply untrue.

The fact is, quite apart from partisan bickering or revisionist history about the wisdom of Romney, the U.S. and Russia shared vital interests on a number of issues—and acted together to advance those interests, at least for a while. Medvedev and other Kremlin officials were also genuinely keen to bring Russia into the global economy—to diversify its economy beyond commodities like oil and gas, build up its tech sector, and expand its trade—which motivated them to build better relations with America and Europe.

More specifically, and more importantly in terms of the campaign, he was wrong to suggest that there was some deep defect in the Obama administration's treatment of the US-Russia relationship during the Medvedev presidency, the proof being in what he was able to achieve:

In fact, Obama’s policy to “reset” relations with Russia—signed in March 2009 by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov—was a resounding success, at least for a few years. Some results:

• In July 2009, Russia’s president at the time, Dmitry Medvedev, signed a release allowing U.S. planes to fly troops and military supplies through Russian airspace on their way to Afghanistan. More than 12,000 flights, including the transport of more than 35,000 troops and one-third of the fuel used by U.S. military vehicles, went through this route.

• In March 2010, Obama and Medvedev signed the New START, a treaty lowering the number of each side’s nuclear weapons and putting in place on-site inspection procedures that were tighter than those of any previous accord.

• In September 2010, Medvedev banned the sale of advanced S-300 surface-to-air missiles to Iran. Russia had signed a deal to sell Iran five batteries of these missiles, at a cost of $800 million. Medvedev even refunded the $166 million that Iran had paid as an advance deposit. This was a hugely important decision. Iran was building up its nuclear program. If the U.S. or Israel had decided to bomb the nuclear facilities, those S-300 missiles could have shot down the attacking airplanes. The cancellation drove home Iran’s vulnerability and convinced Tehran’s leaders to negotiate the Iran nuclear deal.

And some more, which you can go ahead and read at the link. When you think about it, Obama's foreign policy team, run by Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Clinton, and the president himself accomplished an extraordinary number of important things, and it's just wrong to say Russia was the "no. 1 geopolitical foe" of the US because it wasn't trying, at the moment, not to be a foe at all. Which seems to have ended, basically, when Putin decided to be president again. I'll get back to that below.

It's the "at the moment" that Romney's defenders don't accept. They figure that if Russia is a foe now, it must always have been a foe, secretly, and Romney was in on the secret. Just like the leftists who understood at the time of the Spanish Civil War that fascism was a bad thing and sarcastically called for recognition as "premature anti-fascists" after Germany invaded Poland in 1939, so are these guys claiming Romney was a premature anti-Russian, right about Russia before it was cool to be right about Russia, with the implication that Russia, like fascism, is always bad, but only the smart guys are aware of it.

Which I think is a terrible way of looking at it, really akin to racism; fascism is an ideological construct, composed of ideas, and you can say it's always bad because the ideas are evil; Russia is a construct of human geography, composed of land and people, and you just can't say that a people is always bad. (The idea that you can say it, that some national or ethnic group is a permanent enemy, like "the eternal Jew", is one of the evil principles of fascism.)

Anyway, Romney is also wrong about the present, if you take the words seriously: 

geopolitically, Putin's actions, and the political and economic isolation that they bring about, are reducing it to the kind of international irrelevance that you associate with failed states like Myanmar or Venezuela.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 4, 2022

Yep. They're even more powerful than Pakistan and North Korea. It's scary as fuck but it's not geopolitics, is what I'm saying.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 4, 2022

They're a foe now, in other words, but they're not good enough—not geopolitical enough—to be no. 1. For one thing, Putin doesn't know how to use nukes for anything other than blackmailing the world into letting him be the neighborhood bully. His efforts to boost Russia's power and influence in the world are complete failures: China is happy to accept his homage at the Winter Games but won't give him anything substantive in return. Most of the members of his ragtag collection of global allies—Cuba, Nicaragua, Sudan, Zimbabwe, can't even be relied on to vote with him at the United Nations (only four, Belarus and North Korea, Eritrea, and Syria, did in last week's resolution of support for Ukraine—the rest abstained or didn't show up at all, like Azerbaijan and Venezuela). His attempt to detach Germany from NATO through German dependence on Russian natural gas is a complete failure. And as is becoming clearer every day, he will never conquer Ukraine unless he kills everybody there. He's causing immense, terrible suffering—he's costing Russians a lot of pain, too, and large numbers of Russians are fleeing to Finland, by car since it's impossible to fly out—but he's not achieving anything. 

It's terrifying, but it's terrifying because of Putin's incompetence—his inability to pick an attainable goal and work toward it, which means irrationality is all he has. He may end up killing us all, but he's never going to win; he's already lost, in fact, not just in Ukraine, but everywhere.

Another thing Kaplan said reinforced some ideas I've had for a long time, about what Dmitry Medvedev and Obama were up to in 2009-12; apparently there's some truth to the theory that Medvedev was more than just a Putin puppet, and exercised enough autonomy to get up Putin's nose:

The fact is, quite apart from partisan bickering or revisionist history about the wisdom of Romney, the U.S. and Russia shared vital interests on a number of issues—and acted together to advance those interests, at least for a while. Medvedev and other Kremlin officials were also genuinely keen to bring Russia into the global economy—to diversify its economy beyond commodities like oil and gas, build up its tech sector, and expand its trade—which motivated them to build better relations with America and Europe.

Then things changed. Most importantly, Vladimir Putin was elected Russian president in May 2012 (two months after Romney’s CNN interview). He’d been president before, from 2000 to 2008, then stepped aside to become prime minister during Medvedev’s term. (Putin was still in charge, but he allowed Medvedev a lot of leeway.) Putin was spurred to take back full control because, from his point of view, Medvedev was meshing with the West too much.

That's why Putin decided to cancel Medvedev's planned second term in the rovirovka (the Russian term for "castling" in chess) of September 2011 and return to the presidency himself instead, the following spring. Obama, Biden, and Clinton were managing US-Russia relations so well (I don't give much credit to the mediocre and corrupt Medvedev, who cultivated Obama mainly because he's so fond of traveling in the US) that Vladimir Vladimirovich couldn't stand it.

*Speaking of what Romney was saying during the campaign, does anybody remember what The New York Times heard when young Matt Romney was on a business trip to Russia a week or so before the 2012 election?

But while in Moscow, Mr. Romney told a Russian known to be able to deliver messages to Mr. Putin that despite the campaign rhetoric, his father wants good relations if he becomes president, according to a person informed about the conversation.

We knew he was lying way back then, folks.