COUNTERING RUSSIA’S WIN-LOSE WITH WIN-WIN
[This is the text of a speech I am giving today, 11/05, at a NATO conference on Global Security in Paris, sponsored by the US Defense Dept. and French Ministry of Defense. In attendance are ministers of defense and ambassadors from several European countries, as well as those from Russia and China.]
I’d like to ask you to perform a thought experiment. The key is to make it as real as you can in your mind, as if it’s actually happening.
Suppose there’s an ornate marble mausoleum in the center Berlin, Germany right now. Inside, enclosed in a glass case, is the preserved embalmed body of Adolph Hitler lying in state, with long lines of Germans waiting to reverentially pass by and pay their solemn respects to the Nazi leader.
Hard to imagine but hardly unimaginable. We all know that Hitler was trying to build nuclear weapons. Let’s suppose his scientists led by Kurt Diebner and Erich Schumann were successful, so that WWII ended with Truman nuking Hiroshima and Hitler nuking Leningrad – the war thus concluding not with the defeat of Nazi Germany but in a Mexican Standoff.
In the ensuing Cold War between the West and the Third Reich, Hitler would rapidly colonize Eastern Europe from the Baltics to the Balkans, and the entire Soviet Union. In response, the West formed NATO to protect itself from Nazi imperialism.
When Hitler died in March 1953 from warfarin poisoning slipped into his wine by the chief of the Gestapo, his body was placed in the Berlin mausoleum as a shrine of worship, and statues of him erected throughout the Nazi Empire.
Hitler and his successors of course suppressed all knowledge of the Jewish Holocaust, which was researched only by little known scholars such as Robert Conquest of Stanford. The horrific atrocity everyone knew about instead was the Holomodor, Stalin’s genocide of 12 to 15 million Ukrainians.
At last when the Nazi Empire broke down and collapsed in 1991, Nazi colonies like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, the Baltics, Ukraine, Georgia, and Russia wasted no time in declaring their liberation, tearing down statues of Hitler, and asking to join NATO.
It was thought that Germany would now become part of the West at last, with a genuine peace that would include even its membership in NATO, but it was not to be. The successor government to the Nazis would remain antagonistic, its leader declaring that the collapse of the Nazi Empire was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.” Hitler would remain enshrined in his Berlin mausoleum, Germany’s leader said, as “removing him would imply that generations had observed false values” during 58 years of Nazi rule.”
Of course you all see the analogy and some may incensed at it. And that’s the crux of the problem, the refusal to recognize the deep equivalence between Nazism and Communism, also known as Marxism-Leninism.
Both of these two great totalitarian barbarisms of modern times are secular religions of envy, pathologies of envious rage. Nazism, preaching race-envy toward “rich exploitative Jews”; Communism preaching class-envy toward “rich exploitative bourgeois.”
Both base their ideology on “exploitation” – the only way Jews or Bourgeois get rich is to rip people off, to cheat, steal, exploit. In other words, both are metaphysically win-lose. The only way to prosper is to make someone else poor – just like the only way to be healthy is to make someone else sick. Both are equally ludicrous.
Wealth according to these religions of envy is not created, it doesn’t grow and expand, it’s a fixed pie, and if someone gets a bigger piece than others, he took more than his “fair share,” and made others take a smaller slice.
The reality of Germany today is that it is prosperous and peaceful because it rejected the Nazi ideology of hate, envious rage, and win-lose. The German people have rejoined the West and are part of its soul once again. I want to argue that it is in the interests of the Russian people and its leaders to do so as well.
It is easy to see why some of Russia’s leaders do not think so – because we have been here before. In the 1970s America had a series of disastrous failures and a resultant failure of will. Quagmire and defeat in Vietnam was followed by tearing itself apart with Watergate, then Americans electing a pathetic nebbish who was a reflection of their defeated self-image.
The Soviets saw their chance and went on an imperial march, colonizing 12 countries in ten years, from 1969 to 1979: Brazzaville-Congo, Sao Tomé, Guinea Bissau, Benin, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Yemen, Nicaragua, Grenada, and of course, Afghanistan.
This did not end well – for America regained its self-confidence with Ronald Reagan, who understood that if an opponent insisted on playing win-lose, then he had no choice but to abandon the Containment strategy, replacing it with “We win, they lose.” His Reagan Doctrine identified the key vulnerabilities of the Soviet system and implemented ways to exploit them to the max. The unthinkable happened within a few short years: the Berlin Wall fell, followed by the Soviet Union ceasing to exist.
Today, we are in a similar situation as the 1970s, with an aggressive Russia taking advantage of American self-imposed weakness. Mr. Putin has eagerly taken advantage of this. It is entirely possible that this weakness may continue, irresistibly enticing Mr. Putin to continue aggressing in Ukraine, Moldova, Estonia, Georgia, and elsewhere. This is an extremely risky bet.
For if America elects a president inspired by Ronald Reagan next November, the exploitable weaknesses and vulnerabilities of Russia today are far worse than those of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Russia’s GDP today is on a par with Mexico’s. It is in no position whatever to pick fights with anyone willing to stand up to it. It is thus in Russia’s and Mr. Putin’s self-interest to adapt a win-win course of action regarding the West.
That means being like Germany – facing up to and truly abandoning the evil of the past in one’s soul, a real and true embracing of partnership with and participation in Western Civilization. There is no one in NATO that wouldn’t welcome and celebrate this. NATO, in fact, is an excellent example of a win-win relationship – defined as despite whatever differences, mutual cooperation for mutual benefit.
Russia is right now in grave danger of ending up dissolving like the Soviet Union. The odds are exceedingly high, for example, that Russia will be unable to retain eastern Siberia. Just one region of Siberia, Yakutia or Sakha, is the size of Western Europe yet has less than a million people – and less than half of those are ethnic Russians.
Right nearby in the three northeast provinces of China are 110 million people, who are running out of water, resources, and women to marry. Already multitudes of Chinese are living in Trans-Baikal and Primorsky Krai, where Russian women are marrying them just like they’re marrying Moslem men in the Middle Volga. It’s very hard to see how a Chinese Siberia will be avoided in the next decade or two.
Mr. Putin is a very smart man, a very courageous man. Just last week he had the intelligence and courage to denounce “global warming” as a complete fraud, a hoax, which of course it is. He definitely has the capacity to see what is in his and his country’s best genuine self-interests.
Russia needs to be a part of the West. Russia needs to join hands with NATO. Russia needs to bury Lenin and all he stands for. There is so much potential, ability, genius within the Russian people, so much capacity to prosper. All it takes to unleash it is the decision to do so, to start playing win-win, not win-lose, for real, in the Russian heart and soul.
(LISTEN TO DR. JACK WHEELER’S SPEECH):
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