Stephen Cohen still believes in détente and wants to avoid a war with Russia. He endorses Trump’s pro-Putin views and his efforts to defuse tension. Cohen claims that we are in a new Cold War and on the verge of World War III. He has also been called “Putin’s No 1 American apologist.” The eighty-year-old professor maintains that the world around him has changed but his views on Russia have remained consistent and he remains friendly with Gorbachev. Cohen has been a professor of Russian Studies at Princeton and NYU and for 20 years was a Russia/Soviet expert for CBS News.
The book is a series of short essays written between 2014 and 2019. Cohen mixes history and current affairs and explains what has gone wrong with our relationship with Russia. Cohen believes that Putin does not want a war, but continually expecting him to back down is probably a mistake. We risk pushing the Russians too far. Cohen doesn’t have much respect for the political-media establishment in Washington. He considers most of the media biased and clueless. Cohen explains how the Russians view the world and the reasons why they feel let down by the U.S. He regards Putin as a soft authoritarian and points out that Putin has had 80 percent approval ratings in his own country.
Cohen maintains that American foreign policy towards Russia changed after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. In the 1980s, détente had been the main strategy. He claims that President Reagan viewed the Soviet Union as an equal and wanted peaceful co-existence between the two countries. Gorbachev wanted Russia to become a normal European country and hoped that all Europeans would share a “common European home.” Things changed when George H.W. Bush became president. Russia’s isolation and alienation began after the Cold War when Russia was shut-out of NATO and the EU. Bush Senior saw Russia as a defeated nation that was required to accept American hegemony. Bush Senior wanted the U.S. to be the pre-eminent power in the world. The aim was to prevent any country from dominating any region of the world that might be a springboard to threaten unipolar and exclusive U.S. dominance. This became known as the 'Wolfowitz Doctrine’ named after Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the Iraq War. Instead of dismantling NATO, Clinton and Bush Junior expanded it right up to Russia's borders. Both major parties have pursued a similar foreign policy since the Soviet Union broke up.
Since Russia and China clearly reject American global hegemony, a war with both of them would appear to be inevitable given the Wolfowitz Doctrine. Professor John Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago believes that our main long-term global rival is China, not Russia. He views Russia as a declining power. Its economy is weak and its population is falling. He argues that we are returning to a world with two superpowers: America and China. America needs allies on its side. Mearsheimer argues that we have stupidly pushed Putin into China's camp.
Cohen is a life-long Democrat, however, he supported Reagan's Russian policy because it made sense and treated the Russians with respect. He is disappointed with both Clintons and Obama. Cohen observes that there is little or no mainstream political opposition in the U.S. to the hawkish policies directed at Russia. Cohen believes that pushing NATO up to the border of Russia has been a mistake and exerting further pressure could lead to war. Cohen believes that Putin and the Russian people are fed up with being pushed around. He suggests it was not Putin who caused the new cold war, but NATO expansion; U.S. and E.U. meddling in Ukraine; and the regime-change wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Cohen is not alone. Many people in Europe share his misgivings about America's end game. The German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, has described NATO military exercises on the Russian border as “saber-rattling and warmongering.”
Cohen is worried that America’s elites seem to have lost their fear of nuclear warfare as well as their sanity. During the first Cold War, the possibility of nuclear catastrophe was at the forefront of American political discourse. He believes that the Russians have a new generation of strategic nuclear weapons that can evade U.S. missile defenses. This makes war a much more dangerous option. The Russians have a large military, and they are a proud and patriotic people. The communist bloc used to act as a buffer between the two sides so that a land war would have been fought in Germany. A land war today would be fought along Russia’s borders. In a war to protect their homeland, Russia would be a formidable enemy, as the once invincible armies of Napoleon and Hitler found to their cost. Invading Russia would probably be a big mistake.
One of the consequences of Russophobia has been the demonization of Putin and the Russian people. The standard American view of Putin is that he is a sinister tyrant. Cohen has often defended Putin. "Putin is not a thug," he told CNN. "He’s not a neo-Soviet imperialist who’s trying to recreate the Soviet Union. He’s not even anti-American." Cohen characterizes Putin’s domestic polity as a “soft authoritarianism” and sees Russia as a society in transition to a better democracy. He fears that the western isolation of Russia will derail those efforts. Waiting in the wings to replace Putin are not pro-western liberal democrats – who have little support in Russia – but truly authoritarian ultra-nationalists. Hillary Clinton may have compared Putin to Hitler, but Cohen believes that Putin is moderate in Russian terms. Russia operated a police state under the Czars and communism. Cohen claims that Putin's Russia is relatively free in comparison.
Cohen doesn’t believe that Putin is attempting to subvert American democracy. The reverence with which some liberals have for today’s intelligence chiefs is in sharp contrast to previous generations who viewed the CIA and the FBI with suspicion. Cohen believes that U.S. intelligence agencies undertook an operation to damage, if not destroy, first the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump. He is scathing about Obama's CIA Director John Brennan who apparently accused Trump of treason. Cohen calls Brennan the godfather of Russiagate.
Trump has been criticized for trying to improve relations with Russia. However, he is not the first U.S. President to favor detente. It was the policy of Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, all Republicans. Cohen points out, that at the height of the old Cold War there were many people, advocating détente with the USSR. He does not understand where those people have gone. Cohen doesn't believe playing hardball with Russia works. If the past is any guide, further economic sanctions will achieve nothing, except bolstering support for Putin at home.
Cohen has often been right in the past. He was proved correct in his assessment in the late 1980s that Gorbachev was a genuine democrat. In the 1990s, Cohen was among the first to identify that Boris Yeltsin’s corruption was doing serious damage to Russia. Cohen was prescient in observing that post-Cold War NATO expansion would revive Russian nationalism. Before the Mueller report was published he consistently dismissed Russiagate as nonsense. He did not believe that Trump had colluded with Putin.
Cohen claims that although there are people in Washington pushing us towards war, he believes that ordinary people have much more common sense. In August 2018, Gallup asked Americans what kind of policy toward Russia they favored. “Even amid the torrent of vilifying Russiagate allegations and Russophobia, 58 percent wanted “to improve relations with Russia,” as opposed to 36 percent who preferred “strong diplomatic and economic steps against Russia.”
Cohen speculates on why the political-media establishment hates Putin: "Sinister forces, greedy forces, high in our political system and in our economy, need Russia as an enemy because it’s exceedingly profitable." He argues that U.S.-Russian relations "didn’t go wrong in Moscow." They "went wrong in Washington." Cohen used to advise both George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev, but his views are now unpopular in Washington. As Mearsheimer has explained, the Washington foreign policy establishment needs to create enemies in order to justify its existence.
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A Comforting, Thought Provoking, Contrarian Voice
In Ages of intellectual lemmings Stephen Cohen’s voice was one of rigorous, profound, thought provoking, contrarian comfort. For anyone who wishes to stake out an independent view on the issues he covered reading his words or hearing his now silenced voice will provide you a strong thoughtful way to do so.Thanks Steve
Top reviews from other countries
Thomas D.
Another author delves into the truth.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 9, 2024