O que é este blog?

Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida;

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sexta-feira, 30 de dezembro de 2022

Pelé: meu humilde muito obrigado - Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Confesso que nunca fui de torcer por algum time, nem de adotar qualquer paixão ou mesmo desejo de seguir futebol (nem religião ou movimento político).

Mas tendo seguido e participado do cenário, trabalhado e produzido nas áreas de relações internacionais e de diplomacia brasileira durante a maior parte de minha vida, não hesito em dizer que Pelé foi o maior, o melhor e mais distinguido passaporte que o Brasil jamais teve em toda a sua história. 

Provavelmente, nunca mais teremos um passe-partout como foi Pelé durante sua vida ativa e mais além, pois seu legado promete durar para sempre. 

Sem ser um torcedor, sequer um apreciador de futebol, gostaria de assistir às suas genialidades em campo, o que certamente virá agora.

Meu modesto muito obrigado, em nome da diplomacia, da nação, de uma raça!

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Brasília, 30 de dezembro de 2022.

quinta-feira, 29 de dezembro de 2022

Como chegamos à miséria geopolítica atual? No mundo e no Brasil - Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Como chegamos à miséria geopolítica atual?

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

George W. Bush (2000-2008), o pior presidente que os EUA já tiveram (com exceção de Trump, que é hors concours), carrega a suprema culpa pelas terríveis decisões que impactaram por décadas a atualidade (para trás e para a frente): a guerra do Iraque (o maior desastre da história militar dos EUA, comparável à insana guerra do Vietnã) e o antagonismo contra a Rússia (pela expansão da OTAN no glacis ucraniano) e a China (pela impossível decisão de contenção de sua irresistível ascensão), todas elas derivadas da arrogância e soberba daquele momento unipolar. 
Retrospectivamente, uma história diplomática dos EUA, se for honesta, terá de reconhecer esses tremendos erros de conduta estratégica.
Se ouso acrescentar algo para o Brasil e a sua política externa, seria isto: a decisão de se unir a duas autocracias (Rússia e China) e a uma democracia de baixa qualidade (a Índia, nisso semelhante ao Brasil) para formar o BRIC, a partir de uma simples sugestão de oportunidade de mercado por um economista de banco de investimentos, foi o maior ERRO ESTRATÉGICO da diplomacia brasileira em décadas, talvez historicamente. Venho alertando para esse erro desde 2006, quando o BRIC tomou forma em nível ministerial. 
O futuro confirmará meu julgamento, feito em diversos trabalhos reunidos neste livro,  cujo prefácio segue logo abaixo do índice: 


A grande ilusão do Brics : e o universo paralelo da diplomacia brasileira (2022): https://www.amazon.com.br/grande-ilus%C3%A3o-Brics-diplomacia-brasileira-ebook/dp/B0B3WC59F4

Índice

 

Prefácio: Brics: uma ideia em busca de algum conteúdo

1. O papel dos Brics na economia mundial

O Bric e os Brics 

A Rússia, um “animal menos igual que os outros” 

A China e a Índia  

E o Brasil nesse processo?

 

2. A fascinação exercida pelo Brics nos meios acadêmicos 

Esse obscuro objeto de curiosidade  

O Brasil, como fica no retrato?

Russia e China: do comunismo a um capitalismo especial 

O fascínio é justificado? 

O que os Brics podem oferecer ao mundo? 

 

3. Radiografia do Bric: indagações a partir do Brasil  

    Introdução: a caminho da Briclândia  

Radiografia dos Brics 

Ficha corrida dos personagens 

De onde vieram, para onde vão? 

New kids in the block  

Políticas domésticas 

Políticas econômicas externas 

Impacto dos Brics na economia mundial 

Impacto da economia mundial sobre os Brics  

Consequências geoestratégicas  

O Brasil e os Brics   

Alguma conclusão preventiva?

 

4. A democracia nos Brics  

A democracia é um critério universal?  

Como se situam os Brics do ponto de vista do critério democrático? 

Alguma chance de o critério democrático ser adotado no âmbito dos Brics? 

 

5. Sobre a morte do G8 e a ascensão do Brics   

Sobre um funeral anunciado  

Qualificando o debate   

O que define o G7, e deveria definir também o Brics e o G20

Quais as funções do G7, que deveriam, também, ser cumpridas pelo G20? 

 

6. O Bric e a substituição de hegemonias 

Introdução: por que o Bric e apenas o Bric?   

Bric: uma nova categoria conceitual ou apenas um acrônimo apelativo? 

O Bric na ordem global: um papel relevante, ou apenas uma instância formal?  

O Bric e a economia política da nova ordem mundial: contrastes e confrontos 

Grandezas e misérias da substituição hegemônica: lições da História 

Conclusão: um acrônimo talvez invertido 

 

7. Os Brics na crise econômica mundial de 2008-2009 

Existe um papel para os Brics na crise econômica?  

Os Brics podem sustentar uma recuperação financeira europeia? 

A ascensão dos Brics tornaria o mundo mais multipolar e democrático?

 

8. O futuro econômico do Brics e dos Brics  

Das distinções necessárias 

O Brics representa uma proposta alternativa à ordem mundial do G7? 

O que teriam os Brics a oferecer de melhor para uma nova ordem mundial? 

O futuro econômico do Brics (se existe um...)  

Existe algum legado a ser deixado pelo Brics? 

 

9. O Brasil no Brics: a dialética de uma ambição 

O Brasil e os principais componentes de sua geoeconomia elementar 

Potencial e limitações da economia brasileira no contexto internacional 

A emergência econômica e a presença política internacional do Brasil  

A política externa brasileira e sua atuação no âmbito do Brics 

O que busca o Brasil nos Brics? O que deveria, talvez, buscar?

 

10. O lugar dos Brics na agenda externa do Brasil 

Uma sigla inventada por um economista de finanças 

Um novo animal no cenário diplomático mundial 

Existe um papel para o Brics na atual configuração de poder? 

Vínculos e efeitos futuros: um exercício especulativo 

 

11. Contra as parcerias estratégicas: um relatório de minoria  

Introdução: o que é um relatório de minoria? 

O que é estratégico numa parceria? 

Quando o estratégico vira simplesmente tático 

Parcerias são sempre assimétricas, estrategicamente desiguais  

A experiência brasileira de parcerias: formuladas ex-ante 

A proliferação e o abuso de uma relação não assumida 

 

Posfácio: O Brics depois da guerra de agressão da Rússia contra a Ucrânia  


Indicações bibliográficas 

Nota sobre o autor 

 

Prefácio

Brics: uma ideia em busca de algum conteúdo

 

 

Agrupamentos econômicos ou políticos geralmente partem de algum projeto intrínseco à lógica instrumental de seus proponentes originais e tendem a seguir os objetivos precípuos de seus principais países membros. Eles geralmente são constituídos a partir de alguma ruptura de continuidade na ordem normal das coisas, ou seja, no plano diplomático, no seguimento de um evento ou processo transformador das relações de força. Por exemplo, a Grande Guerra de 1914-18, o mais devastador dos conflitos globais até então conhecidos, produziu a Liga das Nações, uma tentativa de conjurar enfrentamentos bélicos daquela magnitude nos anos à frente: o proponente original, contudo, a ela não aderiu, e a primeira entidade multilateral dedicada à manutenção da paz entre os Estados membros se debateu nos projetos militaristas expansionistas dos fascismos do entre guerras, até soçobrar por completo nos estertores da Segunda Guerra Mundial. Para Winston Churchill, os dois conflitos globais foram uma espécie de repetição daquilo que a Europa havia conhecido no século XVII, uma “segunda Guerra de Trinta Anos”. 

A tentativa seguinte começou com um exercício de conformação da ordem econômica do pós-guerra, realizado na reunião de Bretton Woods, em junho de 1944: ela partiu da constatação de que era preciso reconstruir as bases da interdependência econômica destruídas pela crise de 1929 e pela depressão da década seguinte, congregando quase todos os países que estavam então unidos pela ideia das “nações aliadas”, a maior parte em luta contra as potências do eixo nazifascista. A proposta foi relativamente bem-sucedida e resultou na criação do FMI e do Banco Internacional de Reconstrução e Desenvolvimento, ainda que a União Soviética, presente ao encontro, tenha preferido não se juntar às demais economias de mercado que puseram em funcionamento as duas instituições a partir de 1946. 

Imediatamente após a conferência de San Francisco e a abertura dos trabalhos da ONU, seu Comitê Econômico e Social (Ecosoc) aprovou a constituição de comissões econômicas regionais, encarregadas de mapear e informar a nova organização multilateral sobre a situação econômica em cada grande região do planeta, sendo que a mais famosa delas, a Cepal, sob a direção de Raúl Prebisch, não se contentou em apenas coletar dados econômicos sobre os países latino-americanos e do Caribe; com sede em Santiago do Chile, ela logo virou uma verdadeira escola de pensamento econômico, com cursos e programas de estudo sobre os problemas estruturais do continente.

Da mesma forma, a primeira organização de coordenação econômica europeia, a Oece, predecessora, em 1948, da Ocde (1960), foi constituída para administrar o funcionamento do Plano Marshall, e deveria, em princípio, estender-se igualmente aos países da Europa central e oriental ainda ocupados pelo Exército Vermelho. O Secretário de Estado americano proponente da ideia, o próprio George Marshall, respirou aliviado quando Stalin vetou a participação de sua esfera de influência no esquema, pois que não haveria, provavelmente, recursos a serem distribuídos entre todos eles; o programa, coordenado a partir de Paris, ficou então restrito à Europa ocidental.

Nos anos 1950 e no início da década seguinte, os países em desenvolvimento, em grande medida impulsionados pelo Brasil e demais latino-americanos, constataram que os arranjos econômicos feitos no âmbito de Bretton Woods e das reuniões preparatórias em Genebra à conferência da ONU sobre comércio e emprego de Havana, das quais resultaram, preliminarmente, o Acordo Geral sobre Comércio e Tarifas Aduaneiras (Gatt, 1947), não tinham resolvido o problema básico das diferenças estruturais entre as economias avançadas e as “subdesenvolvidas”, como então eram chamados os países pobres, logo em seguida batizados conjuntamente de “Terceiro Mundo”. Levantou-se, então, um imenso clamor em torno dessa distinção julgada indesejável entre o Norte e o Sul do planeta, do qual resultou a convocação, pelo Ecosoc, da primeira conferência das Nações Unidas sobre comércio e desenvolvimento (Unctad, 1964), da qual resultou não só a criação do G77, o grupo dos países em desenvolvimento, mas um secretariado em Genebra, que passou a organizar reuniões quadrienais, das quais alguns dos resultados foram acordos sobre produtos de base e a criação de um Sistema Geral de Preferências, abolindo, na prática, o princípio da reciprocidade inscrito nos primeiros acordos comerciais, uma das cláusulas básicas do sistema do Gatt.

Quando, no seguimento da denúncia americana da primeira versão de Bretton Woods, feita pelo presidente Nixon em agosto de 1971, se instalou um “não-sistema financeiro mundial”, as principais economias de mercado avançadas estabeleceram um esquema informal de consultas entre elas para tentar conter a volatilidade dos mercados cambiais, o que deu origem ao G5 e, mais adiante, ao G7. Esse agrupamento perdura até hoje, com uma fase de G8 – não exatamente econômica, mas bem mais política –, com a inclusão da Rússia pós-soviética no esquema, situação que perdurou até a invasão da península da Crimeia, amputando-a da Ucrânia, em 2014. 

Paralelamente às reuniões anuais do G7, foi criada uma entidade privada, o Fórum Econômico Mundial, com encontros em Davos, na Suíça, com esse mesmo objetivo primário, de oferecer um espaço de discussões sobre a economia global, mais reunindo líderes de países e empreendedores privados; daquelas tertúlias nos Alpes suíços resultaram algumas boas iniciativas depois incorporadas às agendas de trabalho das principais organizações do multilateralismo econômico, primeiro o Gatt, depois a OMC, mas também as entidades de Bretton Woods, assim como as de várias agências especializadas da ONU; delas também participavam muitas ONGs de todo o mundo, a passo que, num sentido manifestamente oposto aos objetivos de Davos, começou a reunir-se, por breve tempo, o Fórum Social Mundial, um convescote anual das tribos confusas de antiglobalizadores – ou altermundialistas, como proferiam os franceses –, já com clara orientação anticapitalista.

De forma algo similar, no contexto das crises financeiras das economias emergentes, no final dos anos 1990, foi criado, no âmbito do FMI, um Fórum de Estabilidade Global, que, impulsionado por nova crise financeira, desta vez dos países avançados, em 2008, resultou na institucionalização do G20, reunindo as maiores economias do planeta. As reuniões anuais do G20 ingressaram numa repetitiva rotina de trabalho dos dirigentes desses países (incluindo a União Europeia e organizações pertinentes), relativamente satisfatórias no plano das proposições, mas que eram bem menos exitosas no terreno das realizações concretas, dada a diversidade natural de orientações de política econômica (e de postura política) entre seus membros, o que parece natural, uma vez que o G20 carece da unidade de propósitos que caracteriza, por exemplo, a Ocde. Alguns grupos informais, para meio ambiente, por exemplo, ou para outros temas globais, foram sendo instituídos, ao sabor das urgências de cada momento, sem exibir, contudo, o formalismo institucional de grupos estruturados em torno de um tema específico, com objetivos bem determinados. Estes são, grosso modo, os exemplos mais conspícuos – descurando a multiplicidade e a diversidade dos acordos e arranjos regionais ou plurilaterais que congregam interesses setoriais ou regionais, geralmente sob a forma de arranjos de liberalização do comércio ou organizações de escopo político, ou militar, como a Otan, no caso –, de agrupamentos surgidos a partir de um entendimento comum sobre objetivos compartilhados, que podem, ou não, evoluir para formatos institucionais, ou mais refinados, de agregação de valores e dotados de metas claramente definidas. 

Este não parece ser o caso do Bric-Brics, entidade híbrida, no universo dos agrupamentos conhecidos, sem um formato preciso quanto à sua institucionalidade e desprovido de metas objetivamente fixadas de acordo a um entendimento comum sobre seus objetivos básicos, ou seja, os elementos capazes de definir esse agrupamento em sua essência fundamental. Ele parece ter sido mais formado em oposição ao suposto “hegemonismo” do G7 do que em torno de propostas próprias sobre a ordem econômica e política mundial, com base em uma agenda de trabalho formalizada. Mas atenção, e aqui reside uma diferença relevante com respeito a todas as entidades mencionadas acima, ele não resultou de uma necessidade detectada internamente aos integrantes de seu primeiro formato, o Bric, mas se constitui a partir de uma sugestão totalmente alheia ao trabalho diplomático, ou de coordenação econômica entre países postulando objetivos comuns, com uma “inspiração” externa e estranha ao grupo, apenas para “aproveitar” a aproximação feita por um funcionário de uma entidade dedicada a finanças e investimentos, o economista Jim O’Neill, do Goldman Sachs. Por essa razão precisa, sempre o considerei um personagem anômalo, no universo de nossas tradições diplomáticas, mas basicamente em função de uma composição heterogênea, sem um foco preciso no leque dos interesses nacionais do Brasil no plano externo.

 

 

Este livro foi composto a partir de uma seleção de uma dezena, tão somente, de trabalhos, dentre uma lista de mais de duas dúzias de ensaios e artigos que escrevi explicitamente sobre o Brics – à exclusão, portanto, de diversos outros textos que pudessem igualmente abordar secundariamente esse grupo de países reunidos por uma ambição diplomática –, a partir de uma simples proposta econômica, e que se manteve navegando, entre ventos e marés, desde meados da primeira década do século, e que segue existindo mais como ideia do que como realidade. Os primeiros trabalhos nessa categoria foram escritos antes mesmo da constituição formal do grupo e se estenderam por mais de uma década, sobretudo durante a vigência do lulopetismo diplomático. A despeito de algo defasados no tempo, o que se reflete em alguns dados conjunturais, eles revelam uma preocupação fundamental do autor com a coerência da diplomacia brasileira – nem sempre respeitada em todos os governos – e com uma noção muito bem refletida sobre os chamados interesses nacionais – nem sempre bem interpretados por todos os governos –, o que fiz invariavelmente desde minha formação superior, nos campos da sociologia histórica e da economia política. A partir do momento em que passei a exercer-me na carreira de diplomata, nunca deixei de aplicar minhas leituras, minhas pesquisas, as experiências adquiridas em prolongadas estadas no exterior, em todos os regimes políticos e sistemas econômicos imagináveis, com exceção talvez de uma pura tirania ao velho estilo do despotismo oriental, ou o stalinismo do seu período mais sombrio. Percorri muitos países, ao longo de uma vida de estudos e de missões diplomáticas, sempre recolhendo impressões sobre suas formas de organização política e suas modalidades de organização econômica, o que me permitiu escrever centenas de artigos, duas dúzias de livros e incontáveis notas em cadernos, que se transformavam em trabalhos uma vez definido um objeto preciso de análise.

O Bric-Brics foi um desses animais estranhos na paisagem diplomática, ao qual apliquei o meu bisturi analítico, de forma bastante crítica como se poderá constatar pela leitura dos trabalhos selecionados e aqui compilados, o que obviamente se situava contrariamente à postura do Brasil em política externa nos anos do lulopetismo diplomático. Nunca fui de aderir a modismos de ocasião, nem me intimidei com os olhares estranhos que me eram dirigidos cada vez que eu me pronunciava com o meu olhar crítico sobre esse novo animal na paisagem de nossas relações exteriores. Sempre considerei que a atividade diplomática não pode ser dominada por esses princípios que só podem vigorar nas casernas, ou melhor, em situações de combate: a hierarquia e a disciplina. Acredito que um soldado não pode interromper as operações no terreno para ir discutir os fundamentos da paz kantiana com o seu comandante de pelotão, mas um diplomata tem, sim, o dever, de questionar, e de argumentar, sobre cada “novidade” que se apresenta na agenda das relações exteriores do Brasil. 

Como nunca me dobrei ao argumento da autoridade, sempre busquei invocar a autoridade do argumento ao discutir a rationale desse animal bizarro no cenário de nossas atividades, o que não foi bem recebido pelo grupo no poder. Não obstante estar privado de cargos na Secretaria de Estado, durante mais de uma década, continuei analisando criticamente as principais opções de nossas relações exteriores, aliás em todos os governos, desde a era militar até o arremedo de autoritarismo castrense a partir de 2019, o que se refletiu, precisamente, em todos os livros que publiquei desde 1993 (sendo os dois primeiros sobre o Mercosul) e em dezenas de artigos de corte acadêmico redigidos desde o período da ditadura militar. O último artigo desta coletânea, não tem a ver diretamente com a questão do Brics, mas se refere precisamente a essa postura de “minoria” contra certas posições dominantes, que nunca hesitei em proclamar, com base num estudo aprofundado de nossas relações internacionais. 

Esta compilação de artigos e ensaios tem por objetivo, assim, demonstrar na prática como se pode fazer diplomacia – ou, no caso, história diplomática – sem necessariamente rezar a missa pelo credo oficial. Ela demonstra, pelo menos para mim, que o dever do diplomata não é o de se curvar disciplinadamente às inovações que vêm de cima, mas o de questionar, com base num exame detido de cada questão, sua adequação a uma certa concepção do interesse nacional. A radiografia que aqui se faz do Brics tem por objetivo apresentar os dados da questão, examinar o interesse da ideia para o interesse nacional – com o objetivo do desenvolvimento econômico e social sempre em pauta – e de questionar o que deve ser questionado a partir de certos equívocos de posicionamento externo que podem discrepar daquele objetivo. Manterei minha opção de oferecer relatórios de minoria cada vez que a ocasião se apresentar. No momento, a intenção foi a de coletar trabalhos resultando uma década e meia de reflexões sobre o que eu chamei de “grande ilusão” de uma diplomacia paralela, que ainda exerce influência sobre nossas opções externas. 

 

 

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Brasília, 6 de maio de 2022

 

 

A responsabilidade dos EUA (de Bush Jr) pela guerra da Ucrânia- Doug Bandow (19FortyFive)

  

19FortyFive, Baltimore - – 28.12.2022

Blame Putin, Yes, But the West Isn't Blameless

Doug Bandow

 

 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky enjoyed a reception akin to that of a Roman conqueror during his brief but packed visit to Washington. He made a pitch for more aid with a carefully crafted speech that touched multiple American emotions. Congress responded by approving another $45 billion in aid—more than most NATO countries spend on their militaries in a year or, in some cases, in a decade.

The Wall Street Journal, which has never covered a war that it did not favor, lauded Capitol Hill’s response, arguing: “The U.S. would be far worse off today if Putin had conquered Ukraine.” That’s true, but incomplete. It would have been much better had the U.S. not helped set the stage for the terrible war now raging between Ukraine and Russia. And it would be so much better if the U.S. and Russia don’t end up lobbing nuclear weapons at each other before the current conflict ends.

Where to start with the “what ifs?”

The U.S. would be far better off today had successive administrations lived up to the promises made to both Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin that NATO would not expand forever eastward.Although much obviously went into Putin’s decision to attack Ukraine, there is no evidence that he is a Hitler wannabe bent on world conquest, or even on reassembling the Soviet Union. Adolf Hitler hit the zenith of his conquests within a decade; Putin’s territorial acquisitions after two decades in power were Crimea and influence over a handful of statelets: Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and separatist states in the Donbas. He is no friend of liberty or democracy, but compare Putin’s conciliatory 2001 speech to Germany’s Bundestag with his accusatory tone at the Munich Security Dialogue in 2007. Much changed in his attitude toward the West, without which February’s action is highly unlikely, if not inconceivable.

The U.S. would be far better off today had Washington used the collapse of the Soviet Union as an opportunity to transfer responsibility to Europe for its own defense.With the Russian military retreating eastward even as it rapidly deteriorated, the allies could have safely adjusted to defense adulthood. Moscow’s nationalists would have had difficulty claiming a threat from the West, while the allies would have had a strong incentive to construct a new security order that included Russia. America’s remaining role would have been much smaller, allowing more serious military retrenchment. 

The U.S. could have begun the complex process of becoming a “normal” country again, shifting military responsibilities in Asia and the Middle East as well. There would have been no arrogant and reckless unipolar moment – with the invasion of Iraq, intervention in Libya, and decades of conflict in Afghanistan – during which thousands of American and allied troops died and tens of thousands were wounded, while hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed and millions were displaced. More money would have been invested in the U.S. economy and gone to meet Americans’ needs. They would have been most proud of what they were doing at home, rather than about their government’s dubious activities abroad.

The U.S. would be far better off today had it not promised NATO membership to Georgia and Ukraine. President George W. Bush – the leader responsible for the disastrous Iraq War, perhaps America’s worst foreign policy mistake of the last 60 years – heedlessly challenged Moscow’s red lines. His officials were aware of the risks of antagonizing Russia. Fiona Hill, made famous by her recent stint with the Trump administration, warned the Bush administration that bringing Kyiv toward NATO “would likely provoke pre-emptive Russian military action.” Having foolishly turned Russia hostile, Washington still had a chance to back away. Had Georgia’s Mikheil Saakashvili not appeared to be a U.S. lackey in 2008, and had NATO not spent six more years promising membership to Kyiv and Tbilisi, Moscow might have exhibited more military forbearance in 2014.

The U.S. would have been far better off today had it exhibited strategic empathy then, and considered how its support for the forcible overthrow of an elected government friendly to Russia in Ukraine would be received by Moscow. Imagine China establishing the South Pacific Treaty Organization in Latin America, promoting a street putsch against the elected, pro-American government in Mexico, sending officials to Mexico City to express their preferences for the new president and Cabinet, and inviting the new administration to join the alliance, with Chinese troop deployments expected to follow. The response of U.S. policymakers would have been pure hysteria. They would have made no pretense of accepting the democratic decision of the Mexican people to exercise their right to join the international organizations of their choice.  

Had the U.S. informally treated Russia’s sphere of influence like America’s Monroe Doctrine, Ukraine might have come through what was the latest of many political crises with its territory intact. Had the allies also not previously put NATO membership forward for Kyiv, it almost certainly would have avoided Moscow’s wrath. That would have meant no seizure of Crimea, no intervention in the Donbas, and no full-scale invasion eight years later.

The U.S. would have been far better off today had it taken seriously Putin’s demands. There was still time for Washington to negotiate, admitting what it claimed to be obvious – that Ukraine would not enter NATO any time soon, and probably never – since in reality neither Washington nor its European allies wanted to fight for Kyiv. 

Alas, Moscow had no confidence in any informal quasi-assurances. As noted earlier, the allies had shamelessly broken a gaggle of earlier promises to successive governments. Moreover, the reassurances for Ukraine (and Georgia) never stopped coming. When Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin went to both countries in late 2021, the Pentagon ostentatiously publicized its plan to reassure them that NATO was, of course, continuing to enthusiastically await their entrance. 

Putin was not the sucker the allies seemed to assume. Although in February 2022 his demands went much further than NATO expansion, granting his most serious, longstanding condition would have demonstrated the value of diplomacy and encouraged continued negotiation. This would have tipped the balance in the Kremlin against a decision for war – a decision that intelligence reports indicate remained in doubt until the end.

In short, there were many crucial points at which different U.S. and allied decisions likely would have left Europe at peace. That would have been better for America, Europe, and especially Ukraine. The latter is bearing the brunt of the cost of the war. The price of the West’s many mistakes is terrible, as described in Foreign Affairs: 

“[A] grinding war of attrition has already been hugely damaging for Ukraine and the West, as well as for Russia. Over six million Ukrainians have been forced to flee, the Ukrainian economy is in freefall, and the widespread destruction of the country’s energy infrastructure threatens a humanitarian catastrophe this winter. Even now, Kyiv is on financial life support, maintaining its operations only through billions of dollars of aid from the United States and Europe. The costs of energy in Europe have risen dramatically because of the disruption of usual oil and gas flows. Meanwhile, despite significant setbacks, Russian forces have regrouped and have not collapsed.”

Vladimir Putin bears responsibility for initiating hostilities and the horrors that have resulted. However, blame for this conflict is widely shared. Western officials cannot escape their role in making war likely, and perhaps even inevitable. Allied governments, especially Washington, should learn from their mistakes.

We should not have to suffer such catastrophic consequences from such an avoidable conflict again.

 

A 19FortyFive Contributing Editor, Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is the author of Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire.

Zeitenwende para a Alemanha e para o mundo: a guerra de Putin - Tony Barber (FT)

 Financial Times, Londres –25.12.2022

Language and grammar

Year in a word: Zeitenwende

Tony Barber

 

Just days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, German chancellor Olaf Scholz proclaimed the moment to be a Zeitenwende. The post-cold war era was over. Germany and its allies must stand together in resolute defence of freedom and democracy. Germany would have to rethink its foreign, energy and economic policies, spend more on defence and not be shy of providing leadership for Europe. No chancellor since the Federal Republic’s birth in 1949 had made a speech quite like it. 

Like other German concepts such as Ostpolitik (policy towards communist eastern Europe during the cold war), or Spitzenkandidat (leading candidate to be European Commission president), Zeitenwende quickly entered English usage, despite being tricky for native English-speakers to spell, pronounce or define.

Zeitenwende is one of those compound nouns that adorn the German language like baubles on a Christmas tree — also known as Weihnachtsbaum, which is itself a three-part compound noun. Other examples include Schadenfreude (malicious pleasure in others’ misfortune) and Zahnfleischbluten (bleeding gums). 

A compound noun fuses two or more separate words to make a new, longer one: Weihe means consecration, Nacht means night, Weihnachten means Christmas and Baum means tree. Sometimes a compound noun can become a bit indigestible, as with Nahrungsmittelunverträglichkeit (food intolerance). 

Zeitenwende combines Zeit, the word for time, era or period, with Wende, a word meaning change. Wende has a special resonance for Germans, as it is the word used to describe the peaceful, democratic revolution of 1989 in the former communist East Germany that led the next year to German reunification. 

How far will the Zeitenwende change German policies over the next few years? Perhaps only Scholz, the Bundeskanzler (federal chancellor), knows the answer.

George Kennan e as duas guerras frias - Fredrik Logevall (Foreign Affairs)

 Foreign Affairs, Nova York – Jan.-Fev.2023

The Ghosts of Kennan

Lessons From the Start of a Cold War

Fredrik Logevall

 

 

We all read him, those of us who did graduate work in U.S. diplomatic history in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For although there were other important figures in modern U.S. foreign relations, only one was George Kennan, the “father of containment,” who later became an astute critic of U.S. policy as well as a prize-winning historian. We dissected Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram” of February 1946, his “X” article in these pages from the following year, and his lengthy and unvarnished report on Latin America from March 1950. We devoured his slim but influential 1951 book, American Diplomacy, based on lectures he gave at the University of Chicago; his memoirs, which appeared in two installments in 1967 and 1972 and the first of which received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; and any other publication he wrote that we could get our hands on. (I figured there was no skipping Russia Leaves the War, from 1956, as it won not only the same awards garnered by the first volume of his memoirs but also the George Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize.) And we dove into the quartet of important studies of Kennan then coming out in rapid succession by our seniors in the guild—by David Mayers, Walter Hixson, Anders Stephanson, and Wilson Miscamble.

Even then, some of us wondered whether Kennan was quite as important to U.S. policy during the early Cold War as numerous analysts made him out to be.Perhaps, we thought, he should be considered an architect of American strategy, not the architect. Perhaps the most that could be said was that he gave a name—containment—and a certain conceptual focus to a foreign policy approach that was already emerging, if not indeed in place. Even at the Potsdam Conference in mid-1945, after all, well before either the Long Telegram or the “X” article, U.S. diplomats understood that Joseph Stalin and his lieutenants were intent on dominating those areas of Eastern and Central Europe that the Red Army had seized. Little could be done to thwart these designs, officials determined, but they vowed to resist any effort by Kremlin leaders to move farther west. Likewise, the Soviets would not be permitted to interfere in Japan or be allowed to take control of Iran or Turkey. This was containment in all but name. By early 1946, when Kennan penned the Long Telegram from the embassy in Moscow, the wartime Grand Alliance was but a fading memory; by then, anti-Soviet sentiment was a stock feature of internal U.S. policy deliberations.

Still, the 1946 telegram and the 1947 article were remarkable pieces of analytical writing that explained much about how U.S. officials saw the postwar world and their country’s place in it. That Kennan soon began to distance himself from containment, and to claim that he had been grievously misunderstood, that the policy in action was turning out to be more bellicose than he had envisioned or wanted, only added to the intrigue. Was he more hawkish regarding Moscow in this early period than he later claimed? Or had he merely been uncharacteristically loose in his phrasing in these writings, implying a hawkishness he did not feel? The available evidence suggested the former, but one held off final judgment, pending the full opening of Kennan’s personal papers and especially his gargantuan diaries, which spanned 88 years and ran to more than 8,000 pages.

These materials were indeed rich, as the world learned with the publication of John Lewis Gaddis’s authorized biography, three decades in the making, which appeared to wide acclaim in 2011 and won the Pulitzer Prize. Gaddis had full access to the papers and made extensive and incisive use of them. Then, in 2014, came the publication of The Kennan Diaries, a 768-page compendium of entries ably selected and annotated by the historian Frank Costigliola. Scholars had long known about Kennan’s prickly, complex personality and his tendency toward curmudgeonly brooding, but the diaries laid bare these qualities. What emerged was a man of formidable intellectual gifts, sensitive and proud, expressive and emotional, ill at ease in the modern world, prone to self-pity, disdainful of what he saw as America’s moral decadence and rampant materialism, and given to derogatory claims about women, immigrants, and foreigners. 

Yet in one key respect, Kennan’s diaries proved unrevealing. Like many people, Kennan journaled less when he was busy, and there is virtually nothing of consequence from 1946 or 1947, when he wrote the two documents on which his influence rested and when he began to reconsider fundamental assumptions about the nature of the Soviet challenge and the preferred American response. For the entirety of 1947, arguably the pivotal year of both the early Cold War and Kennan’s career, there is but a single entry: a one-page rhyme. Any serious assessment of Kennan’s historical importance—How deeply did he shape U.S. policy at the dawn of the superpower struggle? When and why did he sour on containment as practiced? Is it proper to speak of “two Kennans” with respect to the Cold War?—must center on this period of the late 1940s. 

Now Costigliola has come out with a full-scale biography of the man, from his birth into a prosperous middle-class family in Milwaukee, in 1904, to his death in Princeton, New Jersey, in 2005. (What a century to live through!) It is an absorbing, skillfully wrought, at times frustrating book, more than half of which is focused on the diplomat’s youth and early career. Costigliola’s unmatched familiarity with the diaries is on full display, and although he does not shy away from quoting from some of their more unsavory parts, his overall assessment is sympathetic, especially vis-à-vis the “second” Kennan, the one who decried the militarization of containment and pushed for U.S.-Soviet negotiations. Kennan, he writes, was a “largely unsung hero” for his diligent efforts to ease the Cold War.

Intriguingly, as Costigliola shows but could have developed more fully, these efforts were already underway in the late 1940s, while the superpower conflict was still in its infancy. This transformation in Kennan’s thinking is especially resonant today, in an era that many analysts are calling the early stages of yet another cold war, with U.S.-Russian relations in a deep freeze and China playing the role of an assertive Soviet Union. If the analogy is correct, then it bears asking: How did Kennan’s thinking change? And does his evolution hold lessons for his successors as they forge policy for a new era of conflict?

 

OUR MAN IN MOSCOW

 

Kennan’s love of Russia came early, and partly because of family ties: his grandfather’s cousin, also named George Kennan, was an explorer who achieved considerable fame in the late nineteenth century for his writings on tsarist Russia and for casting light on the harsh penal system in Siberia. Soon after graduating from Princeton, in 1925, the younger Kennan joined the Foreign Service and developed an interest in the country; in time, it became much more. Costigliola writes, “Kennan’s love for Russia, his quest for some mystical connection—impulses that stemmed in part from the hurt and loneliness in his psyche going back to the loss of his mother—had enormous consequences for policy.” That is a pregnant sentence indeed, with claims that would seem hard to verify, but there can be no doubt that Kennan’s passion for pre-revolutionary Russia and its culture was real and abiding, staying with him to the end of his days.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, as an ambitious young State Department officer, Kennan toggled between Germany, Estonia, and Latvia, working hard to develop facility in the Russian language and serving from 1931 to 1933 at the Soviet listening post in Riga. There followed an intense, exhilarating, draining period in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, under the mercurial ambassador William Bullitt. Costigliola finds the middle of the decade to be a formative period for Kennan—he devotes an entire 48-page chapter to “The ‘Madness of ’34,’” and another of equal length to the years 1935–37, writing, in effect, a small book within a book and adding much to our understanding of Kennan’s worldview—as the diplomat worked to the point of exhaustion to establish himself as the premier Soviet expert in the Foreign Service.

Kennan treasured Russians as a warm and generous people but looked askance at Marxist-Leninist ideology, speculating even then that Russian communism was headed toward ultimate disintegration, on account of its disregard for individual expression, spirituality, and human diversity. About Western capitalism he had scarcely better things to say: it was characterized by systemic overproduction, crass materialism, and destructive individualism. He disliked and distrusted the “rough and tumble” of his own country’s democracy and longed for rule by an “intelligent, determined ruling minority.”

During World War II, Kennan served first as the chief administrative officer of the Berlin embassy and then, after a brief assignment in Washington in 1942, as second-in-command at the U.S. diplomatic mission in Lisbon. The top U.S. representative at the post, Bert Fish, seldom set foot in the building, which left Kennan to negotiate base rights in the Azores with Portugal’s premier, António de Oliveira Salazar, whose dictatorial but anti-Nazi rule Kennan admired. He grew disenchanted, by contrast, with U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime diplomacy. He opposed the president’s demand that Germany and Japan unconditionally surrender, as it foreclosed the possibility of a negotiated settlement. And after returning to the Moscow embassy in mid-1944, he faulted as naive Roosevelt’s belief that the United States could secure long-term cooperation with Stalin. Both then and later, Costigliola maintains, Kennan failed to detect Roosevelt’s underlying realism and shrewd grasp of power politics, as he continually mistook the president’s public statements for his private views. He missed the degree to which, despite their differences, he and Roosevelt “agreed on the fundamental issue of working out with the Soviets separate spheres of influence in Europe.”

About the subsequent Cold War, Costigliola is unequivocal: it need not have happened and, having broken out, need not have lasted nearly as long as it did. This argument is less novel than the book implies, but the author is certainly correct that “the story of Kennan’s life demands that we rethink the Cold War as an era of possibilities for dialogue and diplomacy, not the inevitable series of confrontations and crises we came to see.”

All the more puzzling, then, that Costigliola gives scant attention to the sharp downturn in U.S.-Soviet relations that began in the fall of 1945, as the two powers clashed over plans for Europe and the Middle East. He notes in passing that Kennan was “unaware how rapidly U.S. opinion and policy were souring on Russia” in this period, but he does little to contextualize this important point. The schism over the Soviet occupation of Iran goes unmentioned, and readers learn nothing of Washington’s decision in early 1946 to abandon atomic cooperation with Moscow. And if indeed Kennan was incognizant of how swiftly American views and policy were changing as the year turned, how is this ignorance to be explained?

 

“X” MARKS THE SPOT

 

Costigliola is surely correct to note Kennan’s transformation from a position of opposing negotiations with the Kremlin in 1946 to one of advocating them in 1948. But one wants to know more about this metamorphosis. Costigliola is authoritative (if, especially compared to Gaddis, terse) on the Long Telegram and the “X” article, but one wishes for more context—even in a biography—especially concerning 1947, when the latter piece appeared. There is no discussion, or even mention, of the crises in Greece and Turkey that raged during that year; of President Harry Truman’s speech to a joint session of Congress, in which he asked for $400 million in aid for the two countries and articulated what became known as the Truman Doctrine, by which the United States pledged to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures”; or of the 1947 National Security Act, which was closely tied to the perceived Soviet threat and which gave the president vastly enhanced power over foreign affairs.

Kennan, as other sources reveal, objected to the expansive nature of Truman’s speech and what it implied for policy. But he chose not to alter the “X” article—then still in production—by emphasizing his desire for a limited form of containment. Appearing in these pages in July under the pseudonym “X” and the title “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” the essay was widely seen as a systematic articulation of the administration’s latest thinking about relations with Moscow, as its author laid out policy of “firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.” For the foreseeable future, Kennan seemed to be saying, diplomacy was a waste of time. Stalin’s hostility to the West was irrational, unjustified by any U.S. actions, and thus the Kremlin could not be reasoned with; negotiations could not be expected to ease or eliminate the hostility and end the U.S.-Soviet clash. The Soviet Union, he wrote, was “committed fanatically to the belief that with the United States there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional ways of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.”

The assertion likely raised few eyebrows among Foreign Affairs readers that tense summer of 1947. But not everyone in the establishment was convinced. The influential columnist Walter Lippmann railed against Kennan’s essay in a stunning series of 14 articles in The New York Herald Tribune in September and October that were parsed in government offices around the world. The columns were then grouped in a slim book whose title, The Cold War, gave a name to the superpower competition. Lippmann did not dispute Kennan’s contention that the Soviet Union would expand its reach unless confronted by American power. But to his mind, the threat was primarily political, not military.

Moreover, Lippmann insisted that officials in Moscow had genuine security fears and were motivated mostly by a defensive determination to forestall the resurgence of German power. Hence their determination to seize control of Eastern Europe. It distressed Lippmann that Kennan, as well as the Truman White House, seemed blind to this reality and to the possibility of negotiating with the Kremlin over issues of mutual concern. As he wrote,

The history of diplomacy is the history of relations among rival powers, which did not enjoy political intimacy and did not respond to appeals to common purposes. Nevertheless, there have been settlements. Some of them did not last very long. Some of them did. For a diplomat to think that rival and unfriendly powers cannot be brought to a settlement is to forget what diplomacy is all about. There would be little for diplomats to do if the world consisted of partners, enjoying political intimacy, and responding to common appeals.

Containment as outlined by Kennan, Lippmann added, risked drawing Washington into defending any number of distant and nonvital parts of the world. Military commitments in such peripheral areas might bankrupt the Treasury and would in any event do little to enhance U.S. security. American society would become militarized to fight a “Cold War.”

Kennan was stung by this multipronged, multiweek takedown, which Costigliola oddly does not discuss. The diplomat admired Lippmann’s stature as perhaps the most formidable foreign policy analyst in Washington, and he felt flattered that the great man would devote so much space to something he had written. More than that, he found himself agreeing with much of Lippmann’s interpretation, including with respect to Moscow’s defensive orientation and the need for U.S. strategists to distinguish between core and peripheral areas. “The Soviets don’t want to invade anyone,” he wrote in an unsent letter to Lippmann in April 1948, adding that his intention in the “X” article had been to make his compatriots aware that they faced a long period of complex diplomacy when political skills would dominate. Once Western Europe had been shored up, he assured Lippmann, negotiations under qualitatively new conditions could follow. 

In the months thereafter, Kennan, now director of the newly formed Policy Planning Staff in the State Department, began to decry the militarization of containment and the apparent abandonment of diplomacy in Truman’s Soviet policy. He pushed for negotiations with the Kremlin, just as Lippmann had earlier. His influence waning, Kennan left the government in 1950, returning for a brief stint as ambassador to Moscow in 1952 and later, under President John F. Kennedy, a longer spell as ambassador to Yugoslavia.

 

OUT OF THE ARENA

 

So began George Kennan’s second career, as a historian and public intellectual, from a perch at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. It would last half a century. Costigliola is consistently fascinating here, even if he is less interested in Kennan’s writings and policy analysis than in his deep and deepening alienation from modern society and his strenuous efforts to curate his legacy. Readers get almost nothing on American Diplomacy, Kennan’s important, realist critique of what he called the “legalistic-moralistic” approach to U.S. foreign policy, or on the two volumes of memoirs, the first of which must be considered a modern classic. Costigliola says little about Kennan’s analysis of the U.S. military intervention in Vietnam (he was less dovish in 1965–66 than Costigliola implies) but a great deal about his loathing of the student protesters—with their “defiant rags and hairdos,” in Kennan’s words—against the war. As elsewhere in A Life Between Worlds, more would have been better. Readers deserve more, for example, on what the diplomat-historian made of the crises over Berlin and Cuba under Kennedy in the early 1960s or on how he interpreted the severe worsening of superpower tensions under Jimmy Carter in 1979–80.

More and more as the years passed, Kennan felt underappreciated. Never mind the literary prizes and other accolades, never mind the Presidential Medal of Freedom presented to him by President George H. W. Bush in 1989. On more days than not, he was a Cassandra, despairing at the state of the world and his place in it, worried about how he would be remembered. Thrilled to secure in Gaddis a brilliant young historian as his biographer, he grew apprehensive, especially as it became clear that Gaddis did not share his low opinion of U.S. Cold War policy in general and nuclear strategy under President Ronald Reagan in particular. (Another worry: that Gaddis would be too distracted by other commitments to complete the work in a timely fashion, thus allowing supposedly less able biographers—“inadequate pens,” Kennan called them—to come to the fore.)

Even the Soviet Union’s collapse, in 1991, brought Kennan little cheer. For half a century, he had predicted that this day would come, but one finds scant evidence of public or private gloating, only frustration that the Cold War had lasted so long and concern that Washington risked inciting Russian nationalism and militarism with its support for NATO expansion into former Soviet domains. The result, he feared, could be another cold war. In the fall of 2002, at the age of 98, he railed against what he saw as the George W. Bush administration’s heedless rush into war in Iraq. The history of U.S. foreign relations, he told the press, showed that although “you might start a war with certain things on your mind . . . in the end you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before.” It dismayed him that the administration seemed to have no plan for Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and he doubted the evidence about the country’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. For that matter, he argued, if it turned out Saddam in fact had the weapons or would soon acquire them, the problem was in essence a regional one, not America’s concern.

All the while, Kennan condemned what he saw as the abuses of industrialization and urbanization and called for a restoration of “the proper relationship between Man and Nature.” In the process, Costigliola convincingly argues, he became an early and prescient advocate of environmental protection. And all the while, his antimodernism showed a retrograde side, as he looked askance at feminism, gay rights, and his country’s increasing ethnic and racial diversity. Maybe only the Jews, Chinese, and “Negroes” would keep their ethnic distinctiveness, he suggested at one point, and thus use their strength to “subjugate and dominate” the rest of the nation. Costigliola comments acidly: “Kennan was aware enough to confine such racist drivel to his diary and the dinner table, where his adult children squirmed.”

Kennan’s long-held skepticism about democracy, meanwhile, showed no signs of abating. “‘The people’ haven’t the faintest idea what’s good for them,” he groused in 1984. Left to themselves, “they would (and will) simply stampede into a final, utterly disastrous, and totally unnecessary nuclear war.” Even if they somehow managed to avoid that outcome, they would complete their wrecking of the environment, “as they are now enthusiastically doing.” In his 1993 book, Around the Cragged Hill, a melancholy rumination on all that plagued modern American life, Kennan called for the creation of a nine-member “Council of State,” an unelected body to be chosen by the president and charged with advising him on pressing medium- and long-term policy issues, with no interference by the hoi polloi. The idea was half-baked at best. That American democracy was in its essence a messy, fractious, pluralistic enterprise, with hard bargaining based on mutual concessions and with noisy interest groups jockeying for influence, he never fully grasped.

What he did understand was diplomacy and statecraft. Here, his body of writing, published as well as unpublished, historical as well as contemporaneous, stands out for its cogency, intricacy, and fluency. He was not always consistent; he got some things wrong. But as a critic of the militarization of U.S. foreign policy, in the Cold War and beyond, Kennan had few if any peers. For he grasped realities that have lost none of their potency in the almost two decades since his death—about the limits of power, about the certainty of unintended consequences in war-making, about the prime importance of using good-faith diplomacy with adversaries to advance U.S. strategic interests. Understanding the growth and projection of American power over the past century and its proper use in this one, it may truly be said, means understanding this “life between worlds.”

 

FREDRIK LOGEVALL is the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs and Professor of History at Harvard University. He is the author of JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917–1956.