Confronting Barbarians

Vladimir Putin is in danger of becoming nekulturny. It’s the Russian word which is translated as “uncultured”, but which is a far worse insult in Russian than it sounds to an American ear.  You might get a bit closer by translating it as “barbarian.”  That’s what George Will correctly (surprise!) calls Putin for telling the Russian parliament that Crimea is all Russia “needs.”  Will points out that when something is what you need or desire, thinking that creates an unfettered right to it constitutes the mark of a barbarian.  That understanding actually goes back to Freud, who in Civilization and Its Discontents defined deferred gratification as the enabler of civilization itself.  To that list we have since added taming the horse, brewing beer, roast beef, Dionysian revels (substitute Mardi Gras or October Fest) and a variety of other things, but recognizing that just feeling you need something does not entitle you to grab it out of someone else’s hands is in fact what separates us from barbarians and toddlers.

Any parent has probably at some point had an instant urge to smack their toddler for that grabbing, but instantly knows better than to do so.  It’s a learning process for both toddler and parent.  The problem gets harder when you’re dealing with a barbarian holding a spear.  You may have multiple bigger spears and feel perfectly justified in using them.  But is there a better way?  Being civilized imposes a need for deferring gratification on you even if the barbarian does not share that need.  You probably impose some intermediate response like making the size of your spears really clear while trying to slightly improve the barbarian’s understanding of what being civilized really means – you know, it’s like dealing with a teenager.  That’s graduated response and essentially what foreign policy in these situations is all about.

The problem is that part of you feels ashamed from backing away from a fight in a good cause you know you could win.  That’s the situation Robert Kagan describes this morning in the Washington Post.  Polls show that Americans clearly prefer a foreign policy embodying a graduated response to Putin with a minimum of spear shaking and a maximum of non-violent alternatives like economic sanctions.  The polls also show a dip in Obama’s popularity for following that approach.  On a broader horizon, Americans clearly elected Obama to get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, reduce our military commitments and pursue a more nuanced foreign policy, and they now show disapproval for his doing just that.  Kagan ascribes these paradoxes to that sense of shame for having done something sensible rather than something more gallant.

That’s of course the feeling any parent of a teenager knows – it accompanies “staying cool and conserving your ammunition.”  It’s also one of the discontents of being civilized.  It has its limits of course.  Exceeding those limits was what got Europe into trouble with Hitler at Munich.  Failing to preserve limits leads to disaster.  You’ve got to know when and how to say “That’s it!”  But mainly you need to know how what you do sends the proper message.  It’s best when that message is, “Welcome to civilization; you can put away that spear now. And no, you can’t have what you just grabbed.  That’s not the way we do it here.”

Translating that message into foreign policy moves can be very messy.  It’s hardest when hotheads maintain positions carved in stone.  The lesson for grabbing should hurt but not hurt to the fighting mad” point, and when people are already fighting mad, that gets very delicate.  The Obama Administration seems on the right course for now.  It’s not getting much credit for that now, but credit in complex situations generally comes as hindsight. 

The results will be measured by outcomes, and that’s what remains, perhaps deliberately, fuzzy.  Is the takeover of Crimea to be considered a fait accompli? If so, what happens with the Tatars?  The wrong answer to that question could lead to protracted bloodshed.  What about Russia’s possible future “need” for a guaranteed land path to their naval base at Sevastopol?  Or their opposition to being surrounded by states like Poland with ties to the EU and NATO?  We want neither surrender to barbarians or a return to Cold War days. This is a time when our foreign policy people need support, not disparagement.