No, Russia is Not a Cream Puff

Dmitry Prigozhin, not just Putin's "chef" with military food contracts and support of paramilitaries (the Wagner group), but creator of the Internet Research Agency which the Mueller Investigation rightly indicted as responsible for attempts to interfere in American elections.

The New Yorker capitulation to Moscow today is a turning point for the left, and not a good one, and I've had some short comments on Twitter about it. I'll get to more linear rebuttals in due course, I hope. But meanwhile I was moved to answer Some Guy on Facebook who was a friend of a friend, someone I don't know, who basically articulated the "received wisdom" you hear a lot these days here and there, to wit:

 

I would like to point out before I give my opinion, modestly at best, that I am a college graduate for a small state school with no where near the academic background of most of the people putting out their opinions herein. So, with that in mind and to keep it really brief, here is my point. You all are concerned about the wrong enemy! Russia is a cream puff in the world today and not much else since it has a GDP is less than the state of Texas by itself. It does have the worlds largest nuclear capabilities followed by the United States and in a smaller part so does India, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, France, North Korea and probably Israel as well as one or two other countries that suspected to have a few themselves. China ain't our friend, it is a communist country and has created the largest navy in the world and is boosting up it's creation of nuclear weapons at a fever pace today. It has hacked our internet services more than the Russian or North Korean hackers, it has stolen our governmental secrets, it has a vast number of students here in the US who are not all but,most are considered spies. Recently it has turned more than 20 american professors at major universities to spying for it, and stealing valuable trade and business secrets. It has endeared itself to many poor African countries for a portion of their valuable mineral assets and placed military bases in their countries. It is a threat to our economy as it has the second largest GDP in the world. It is stroking disunion and disconnect within the United States, it has a marriage with Google, YouTube and other tech giants (which by the way are admitting that they only censor content that they consider dangerous but allow other dangerous comments to be published) and of course the NBA. It is the magician that is getting the audience to look at something else on the one hand while it prepares to destroy our country on the other hand. You can look to Russia, if you want but the threat is going to come from the east.

 

I don't expect someone like you to change your settled opinion on this, which you regard as wisdom and thinking outside the box, which makes it all the more unassailable. But you don't have to have a Ph.D., and I certainly don't have one, to grasp all the fallacies here in your statements.

 

One of the most interesting admissions I ever heard was from a Pentagon official, that they regretted not paying attention to Russia in the 1990s and thinking they could cross them off the list of threats because they now had a democratic government and their economy was in a shambles. Yeah, he got that right, because you don't need the GDP of a Germany or even a China to do enormous damage in the world. Threats are not decided by GDP amounts. If they were we would not have troops in Afghanistan. When the Department of Defense issues its annual report, they identify an array of enemies. They don't say, gosh, we have to pick just one because that's all we can focus on, we need to harbour our resources, and gosh, these other guys don't even have milk in the stores. No. They identify China, Russia, Iran and others, and for different reasons.

 

Russia influenced the US elections. That is not disputed. If you still have a problem with accepting that, go and talk to David who just posted what he posted and he may help you out. It did, and goes on doing so. That's insidious and undermines democracy and more of a problem than China, which doesn't get into politics in that way, but cares more about the economy. If you think no, it's not a problem because you hate Hillary even if you don't like Trump, so let the Russians have their way, you're not grasping how much bigger it is, everwhere, what they do, in many ways, which is about undermining faith in faith itself, about inciting cynicism and indifference and disbelief that truth can be found.

 

China pragmatically steals economic information and tries to harm rivals in business. But we're also heavily integrated with China, e.g. providing cheap shoes for our children going back to school (or at least before COVID), and backpacks and pencils and lunchboxes, just to site one big visible thing now for every family. So you don't lightly declare the supplier of your children's cheap shoes and lunchboxes an enemy until you have more of a game plan. Obama seemed to swing wildly on this with his pivot; Trump does as well. Perhaps he thinks keeping China off balance is a strategy. My own entirely uninformed opinion on China, merely based on meeting them at the UN for years, is that they are an ancient civilization, they can wait anything out they need to, they can appear to be "flexible" even as they do not budge at all; they are big, we are small, we should deter and contain and stay out of their way and encourage them to be better. But then the consequences are that we have to defend Japan and other smaller countries in their way. China didn't use to project force outside its borders; now it does occasionally, and has far more reach economically with oil projects in Africa and Asia. Are economic enemies or political and military enemies worse? Well, why even debate that? Both are worse, as they say in Odessa and we can make policies about all of them. More visa denials to China will help stop some of the mayhem -- not like it's a Texas 7-lane highway going out from our side, it's a cow-path.

 

You could worry about African countries that first the West, then the Russians exploited, but then, their dictators and terrorists are no fun, either. You could leave them to China, like we left Central Asia to China, with mixed results (the only way Turkmen labour standards were ever raised in history was not by Russia, and not by American NGO do-gooders, but by China who wanted to get the gas out. But China now owns half of Kazakhstan). Life is filled with unpleasant realities like that which governments have to sort through and pick their moments to fight.

 

There isn't any magician doing anything, other than the magician of the US media that has Twitter as an assignment editor and now managing editor. What American doesn't get it about China, at some level? But real people doing real things in the world don't listen to that noise more than they need to, and try to deal with these situations.

 

Meanwhile, Russia is indeed a danger. If you think you can sacrifice Georgia, South Abakhazia, Ukraine and now Belarus to them, and it doesn't matter, look at the map and think again. There is a reason they speak of "Londongrad". The way the State Department blocks Russian mayhem is by having the Treasury Department designate individuals who cannot go on buying Virginia ranches here. Because they have bought a lot. So that is important to keep doing.

 

The idea that Google only deals with China and has sold out to China is some partial understanding that I don't know where to begin to dispel. Its founder, Sergei Brin, may not have endeared himself to Putin by calling Russia "Nigeria with snow," which is true to a certain extent, but then Sergei has hired a legion of literally hundreds of thousands of Russian computer programmers who did not give up their Russian citizenship, and who as members of the VPK (military-industrial complex) are loyal to Putin while sunning in California.

 

This "fourth wave" of emigres are the worst I've ever seen come out of Russia. They are cynical, rapacious and they hate America, even if they have a job from its riches and even live here. It's from this milieu and from international "business" that you get all the Russian-American or Russian-European emigre thugs around Trump. So again, you don't have the luxury to pick one enemy. You have different tactics and different priorities. The tactic with Russia remains the same as 1947: containment and deterrence. There isn't anything better. The idea that you make our own society better and more resilient and fix its problems with racism or health care -- and then that better positions you to deal with Russia -- is nice as a fantasy, but in fact we did that for eight years under Obama and it didn't work -- Putin invaded first Georgia, then Ukraine -- both our military allies in the war in Iraq, like it or not (it's a war I opposed); it has gone on to cause enormous havoc. Poisoning the top opposition figure and having Germany confirm it is an enormously big event. That Germany will likely go on buying oil and gas from Russia means that nothing can change. Maybe, but not likely.

 

Finally, I'm not aware of any international body that looks at nuclear threats by lining up random lists of countries, and deciding that taken together, those countries are worse or better by the numbers than Russia or the USA. I mean, that's just silly. Israel is an ally and does not aim nuclear weapons at us. France's force de frappe is a legacy of the horror of World War I and is not aimed at us. India is ostensibly our ally and supplies Google with engineers, too, and is not aimed at us. Out of that list, Pakistan is a threat, and North Korea -- allied with Russia BTW -- is of course a potential threat. But Russia's tanks and planes; it's nuclear weapons; they are aimed at the West, and that's how you calibrate threats, not by adding up random lemons and oranges.

 

More people died from car accidents and heart attacks than from terrorism, goes one of the particularly vapid forms of anti-militarism, but you know, car accidents are...accidents. You can control smoking and cholesterol and reduce heart attacks. Terrorism is random and effective for that reason. So you do get to spend more time and resources preventing terrorism in the world, you don't go by your low numbers this year in New Jersey, you look at the whole map of the world and see where it has increased in Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, etc. and work it out accordingly.

 

I'm done here. I find it unproductive to argue with friends of friends on Facebook that falls below the fold in 45 minutes. I actually bothered with this because I'm going to put it on my blog and hopefully make more time for it now because of the left's announcement today that they are dropping Russia as a "thing" -- just like you, and you aren't anywhere near as left as they are. David was right to try to rustle up some reality checks from his social circles, but it's hopeless. I, too, find it hard to take seriously when Google and Twitter send me sober messages that my account has been hacked by "a government". I don't think that government is Canada.