Gorilla's Blog

As an obsolescently trained former expert on the USSR, Gorilla has little time for the Russians.

They seem to occupy a mindset frozen in time, much like the Serbians. Memories there are of great and powerful days, but these, like much of our own Global War on Terror, are built on fantasy. Nukes still roam the world, but Russian tanks can’t get much beyond their old Caucasian graveyards. The only sabres they rattle are the ones no one cares much to hear.

President Obama visits with no clear idea of what the Russians want to be. He must keep moving forward, in this case to wherever the reset button may be, even as he repeats in Afghanistan the very mistakes that helped topple the Soviet empire. He thinks Medvedev and Putin can be jawboned like so many Chicago pols. He’d like some help with North Korea, Iran, and proliferation, but has very little to offer a middling petro thug state ruled by what’s left of the secret police.

Missile defense? Hard to know who benefits more from scrapping this delusion. A few less weapons of mass destruction? We seem more afraid of one rogue bomb hidden in a madrassah than a few thousand SS-20s gathering dust in a Moscow exurb. Less regional adventurism? Not likely to see progress on this unless we can convince the Swedish banks to expand southwards. Trade and other forms of cooperation? The casinos have been closed, and the ruble doesn’t look like riding the next wave of financial engineering.

On the other hand, willful historical ignorance makes any inferiority complex dangerous, so we have to keep talking. It’s the sort of thing Stalin would have understood as he gazed longingly across the Bering Strait to Wasilla.