"The Russians are a tough bunch of bastards"

That, at least, was Richard Nixon's verdict on November 1971.  His successors in office since 1989 would have done well to remember that.  The oafish, drunk, incompetent Boris Yeltsin was an exception and a national embarrassment to most Russians.  He is widely reviled for precipitating the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and facilitating the theft of the state's wealth by a small number of oligarchs.  The Clinton era is remembered in the US as the good times.  In Russia they were, for most people, a time frightening change and economic hardship, with a dose of national humiliation layered on top.

The years of the Bush administration saw better economic times in Russia, as Vladimir Putin brought a degree of stability to the country, but in foreign policy, the former KGB man Putin saw his country suffer (what were in his eyes) repeated indignities.  The US embarked on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  NATO and the EU's borders raced eastwards, pushing up against the Russian frontier itself.  The fruits of Clinton's air war against Serbia (Russia's long-standing friend and ally) were reaped by Kosovar independence.  George W barely missed an opportunity to kick the Russian bear in Poland, the Czech Republic and Georgia.  In the dying days of the crippled Bush presidency the bear gnarled, briefly, over the latter.

And while Obama and Secretary of State Clinon famously (embarrassingly now, looking back) tried to "reset" relations with Russia, preoccupied with Libya, Syria and a "pivot to Asia", when the Obama administration did pay attention to Europe, its focus was on the crisis in eurozone.

Jon Stewart on why the GOP love Putin (it to Obama)

This is all you will ever know about the ridiculous Republic hypocrisy that criticizes Obama for being simultaneously weak and an unconstitutional tyrant, and then praises Putin, for being a strong unconstitutional tyrant.

Hmm... fascinating.  Let me see if I have this straight.  Barack Obama is a weak, mom jeans-wearing DICTATOR-KING!!!  Weak mom jean tyrants are the worst tyrants of all!

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Kissinger is mostly correct on Ukraine

Who did Henry work for, goddamn it? RT @wagssid @dick_nixon Do we need to send Henry to settle the Russians?
— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) March 4, 2014

Henry is mostly correct on Ukraine. http://t.co/rWXabxxncy
— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) March 6, 2014

Some of you may not realize that I have a personal relationship with Henry Kissinger.

Now, in the interests of fairness, I should admit that it is more akin to the sort of relationship that some people have with Jesus, than the one you have with your BFF: which is to say that only one party to the relationship knows it exists.

Nonetheless, over the course of the best part of four years of my life, poring over HAK's memos and conversations and briefing notes and doodles in the margins of the aforementioned, having read all volumes of his autobiography and just about every biography written about him, I feel that I have a connection with Henry Alfred Kissinger.  I feel I know a little bit about how his mind works.

Henry Kissinger (l) and me, when I used to be Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus.

And having written previously about the parallels, as I see them, between HAK's boss and Putin (and even having had a twitter interaction with @dick_nixon about it),  I was surprised that Kissinger had not yet weighed in on the Ukrainian crisis.  Thankfully, that wait was ended yesterday evening when an opinion piece by him was published in the Washington Post online, and which is presumably in today's print edition.

Although it was still a number of years before my birth, my relationship with Kissinger ended, more or less, in the summer of 1973, just before he was sworn in as Secretary of State, so I was delighted to see that, unlike when he was just National Security Adviser in the first Nixon White House (as opposed to both NSA and Secretary of State from September 1973 to November 1975), the good folks down in Foggy Bottom appear to have taught Henry a thing or two about the power of ideas and ideologies, about which he was somewhat scornful and dismissive when he worked in the White House.

On the whole, if you rolled up my own thoughts on what has been happening in Ukraine, and combined them with decades of experience as, for better or worse, one of the world's most prominent statesmen and thinkers on international affairs, you could say that Henry and I have arrived at almost the same conclusions.

I also think it is fair to say that Henry's analysis of the current crisis has gained him some respect from those who would not normally be inclined towards him:

For the undead corpse of a soulless, Satan-spawned golem, Henry Kissinger is making a surprising amount of sense. http://t.co/Ed9PouSFyr
— billmon (@billmon1) March 5, 2014

Is Russia really America's greatest geopolitical foe?

In the past few days it has become very fashionable to rehabilitate Mitt Romney's foreign affairs credentials, and to assert that he was "right" about Russia in the presidential foreign policy debates, and President Obama was wrong.

Dave Weigel at Slate was one of the first out of the blocks.

There followed a piece in The New Republic by Isaac Chotiner, for which Julia Ioffe tweeted her support,

and then yesterday evening The Daily Beast published a piece by Stuart Stevens, making essentially the same argument.

 It is, superficially at least, an attractive argument.

Is Putin putting the mad back into madman?

As if on cue from my blog post yesterday that compared Russian president Vladimir Putin and former U.S. president Richard Nixon, Putin today obliged with two perfect illustrations of the 'madman theory' I was referring to.

Holding what New Republic journalist Julia Ioffe described as a "dada press conference", the Russian president rambled and roamed.  I'll let Julia fill in the gaps from her article (the whole thing is worth a read):

 

"And much of that, by the way, is direct quotes."

Putin and Nixon: birds of a feather

If you have been confused about what has been happening in Ukraine over the past week and went online or picked up a paper to try and find out, chances are you would come away not much the wiser.

Depending on what you read, Russian President Vladimir Putin is either a strategic genius, playing a long game of chess while the West plays marbles, or a short-sighted opportunist, constantly reacting to events but never able to control them.

Putin is either taking advantage of American weakness to throw Russian weight around, or is threatened by American and Western power pushing further against his borders.

Putin is either a hard-nosed realist, who will only respond to force and understands the importance of a balance-of-power, or an ideological Russian nationalist, prepared to risk Russia's material wellbeing and international standing in order to poke his perceived enemies in the eye.

In reading the multiple accounts and analyses of what is going on in Russia and Ukraine, I couldn't help but think of a comment by Henry Kissinger to TV presenter Dick Cavett, when discussing his former boss, Richard Nixon:

There are so many strands to his personality that almost everything you would say about Richard Nixon is true.