Clinton Legacy Watch # 5: Welcome To The New Inter-War Era

(Washington, D.C.): Required reading
for those seeking to comprehend the
“Clinton legacy” should be
William Manchester’s The Last Lion,
Alone, an account of Winston
Churchill’s “Wilderness Years”
between World Wars I and II. This
magnificent biography chronicles what
were among the Great Man’s finest hours,
as he braved vitriolic ridicule in the
press, disfavor among the public and
political isolation by his colleagues in
Parliament to bear unflinching witness to
international developments that
ultimately produced renewed global
conflict.

Be forewarned, however, the record of
those developments — and the policies
associated with them — can produce a
chilling insight: We may well be
in the midst of an inter-war period.
While history does not make forecasting
easy by simply repeating itself,
repetitive patterns of human behavior and
long-term cycles certainly are
discernible — if only one has the wit
and the will to see them. Today’s
patterns and cycles suggest that the
bookend to the present era could be yet
another, terrible war.

Appeasement by Any Other
Name

Unfortunately, like those responsible
for policy-making in Great Britain in the
Twenties and Thirties, President Clinton
and his senior advisors appear to have
persuaded themselves that conflict on a
massive scale is no longer a possibility
— and that all other power centers
subscribe to this view. Confident in the
supremacy of its own military strength
and misconstruing the ambitions of past
rivals and those who see themselves as
future ones, the leading democracy of the
day is once again blithely weakening
itself, while contributing to the
emerging power of prospective
adversaries.

One need look no further for evidence
of this syndrome than an op.ed. article
published in the London Financial
Times on 1 September by Strobe
Talbott, the Russophile Friend
of Bill who has been a key architect of
Clinton foreign policy during his years
as the Deputy Secretary of State. In the
essay entitled “The Great Game is
Over,” Talbott contended that we
have entered a new age in which the
tradition of great powers jockeying for
advantage at each others’ expense in the
oil-rich Caucasus and Central Asia need
no longer apply. In a manner all
too reminiscent of Britain’s appeasing
premiers of the inter-war periods,
Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain,
Talbott accentuates the positive, while
downplaying — if not ignoring — the
negative.

For example, Talbott places great
importance on the “solidarity”
and “high degree of harmony”
Moscow is now exhibiting in trying to
forge with the United States and France a
settlement of the festering conflict
between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the
Azerbaijani region of Nargorno-Karabakh. This
ignores the direct role the Kremlin has
played in fostering and enabling that
conflict, including an estimated $1
billion worth of Russian weapons
supplied to the Armenians.
Talbott also forecasts that such a
settlement will “require compromises
on all sides.”

In other words, the people of
Azerbaijan who have been victimized by
Russian-backed Armenian aggression must
agree to reward the perpetrators. Such an
outcome would be all-too-reminiscent of
the pressure brought to bear by
Chamberlain, in turn, upon the Austrian,
Czech and Polish governments to
accommodate themselves to Hitler’s
covetousness.

‘Selling the Rope…’

No less reminiscent of the bad old
days is the Clinton Administration’s
casualness about the dangers associated
with Russian rearmament. Those like
Talbott — who proved to be
absolutely wrong about Soviet
militarism during the Cold War — dismiss
as hopelessly passé warnings that a
nation endowed with immense human and
other resources, a long-standing view of
itself as a great power and a powerful
resentment of others on its border and
beyond is unlikely to remain destitute
and/or benign. After the earlier
inter-war period, Churchill was
vindicated in his appreciation that such
conditions in Germany would produce,
under someone of Hitler’s stripe, a
renewed threat. Even if such an
individual has yet to emerge in
post-Soviet Russia, it is
imprudent to ignore the distinct
possibility that one will do so by and
by, transforming its past and potential
greatness once again into a menace to
American interests and world peace.

Such imprudence is particularly
evident in the Clinton
Administration’s determination to share
advanced military and dual-use technology
like supercomputers with Russia.
Draft guidance now being circulated in
preparation for the ninth meeting later
this month of the Gore-Chernomyrdin
Commission aims to push the
Russian president to negotiate an
“umbrella agreement” governing
long-term cooperation on such
technologies. This would apparently clear
the way for collaboration on such
sensitive areas as ballistic
missile defense, the Joint Strike Fighter
program, “high-speed penetrators for
use against deeply buried targets,”
“a low-cost, ground-launched
hypersonic interceptor” and
“surveillance, detection and
non-lethal technologies in support of
counter-terrorism, landmine detection and
peacekeeping operations.”

To be sure, in some of these areas,
the Russians have technology and
expertise that we could benefit from
obtaining. This is the case, for example,
with respect to ballistic missile
defense, where they have been developing,
testing and operating anti-missile
systems for decades — including
territorial defenses explicitly
prohibited by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty (as documented in an
important book recently published by one
of most accurate observers of the former
Soviet Union, former Defense Intelligence
Agency analyst William Lee).
Our refusal to acknowledge this reality,
coupled with Russia’s selective
willingness to part with its military
seed-corn, tend to facilitate technology
flows, but in the wrong direction.

The Bottom Line

From today’s vantage point, World War
II appears clearly avoidable but for the
appalling wishful thinking, cognitive
dissonance and risk-averse tendencies
exhibited by the Western democracies —
and the appeasement policies inspired by
such attitudes. If a counterpart to Adolf
Hitler is not yet apparent in Russia, it
is equally true that no statesman of
Churchill’s stature is providing his
prescient warnings about the risks
entailed in today’s policies. We can only
hope that the latter emerges first, and
that his counsel is heeded in time to
avoid a renewed conflagration of
unprecedented proportions.