Garry Kasparov: "The USSR Fell and the World Fell Asleep"

Garry Kasparov wrote a great article yesterday in the WSJ, " The U.S.S.R. Fell--and the World Fell Asleep" (Twenty-five years after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, plenty of repressive regimes live on. Today, the free world no longer cares.).

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The U.S.S.R. ceased to exist in 1991, but there are plenty of repressive, authoritarian regimes thriving in 2016. The difference, and I am sad to say it, is that the citizens of the free world don’t much care about dictatorships anymore, or about the 2.7 billion people who still live in them.

The words of John F. Kennedy in 1963 Berlin sound naive to most Americans today: “Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free,” he said. That for decades the U.S. government based effective foreign policy on such lofty ideals seems as distant as a world without iPhones.

Ronald Reagan’s warning that “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction” was never meant to be put to the test, but it is being tested now. If anything, Reagan’s time frame of a generation was far too generous. The dramatic expansion of freedom that occurred 25 years ago may be coming undone in 25 months.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the U.S.S.R. was the end of watch for the anti-Communist coalition formed by Harry Truman after World War II. A year later, baby boomer Bill Clinton was making jokes with Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin and it was time to party, not press the advantage. The U.S. had unrivaled global power and influence, more than at any other time in history. Yet instead of using it to shape a new global framework to protect and project the values of democracy and human rights—as Truman had done immediately to put Stalin in check—the free world acted as though the fight had been won once and for all.

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The internet was going to connect every living soul and shine a light into the dark corners of the world. Instead, the light has reflected back to illuminate the hypocrisy and apathy of the most powerful nations in the world. Crimea is annexed, Ukraine is invaded, ISIS is rallying, Aleppo is laid waste, and not a one of us can say that we did not know. We can say only that we did not care.

Globalization has made it easy for the enemies of the free world to spread their influence in ways the Soviet leadership couldn’t have imagined, while the West has lost the will to defend itself and its values.

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People have been obsessing over the legal technicalities of whether Russia tried to "hack" the election, and it doesn't really matter, because it misses the larger point: Russia has largely already succeeded in the propaganda war to get American citizens to believe in anti-Western conspiracy theories and distrust their own system of government. This picked up steam with the financial crisis and Ron Paul around 2007-08, and it has gotten progressively worse every year since.

As several commentators have noted, with his Syria policy, President Obama has now managed to allow what 10 prior U.S. Presidents (Truman through Bush) had all worked to prevent: a Russian military presence in the Middle East. Russia is, of course, not our main enemy. It has a per capital GDP of $9,458 ( LINK), below that of Eastern Europe and Kazakhstan, and not even close to Saudi Arabia's $20,583. (The U.S. per capita GDP of $56,084 is still tops in the world for countries with populations greater than 10 million people.) That being said, Russia's propaganda capabilities is a huge concern, and so is it's diplomatic, technological, and military support for Assad and Khamenei.

Iran is the lynchpin to escalating terrorism in the region, and there will be no way to drain the swamp there until they are defeated. Hate Saudi Arabia all you want, but the Saudi monarchy didn't want 9/11 to happen, and they weren't the ones who strengthened al Qaeda during the Iraq War, and they weren't the ones who purposefully facilitated the rise of ISIS. The opposite is true for Syria and Iran.

Don't blame George W. Bush either. There was no easy solution or road to take in 2003. The region had been spiraling out of control badly in the 1990s under Clinton, and it was going to continue to escalate without intervention. There was no easy solution to this mess back in 1998 either, by the way, when we effectively did nothing.

As I mentioned in another thread, Henry Kissinger realized the central premise of our interests in the region ( LINK):

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As competing regional powers strive for comparable threshold capacity, the nonproliferation regime in the Middle East may crumble. If nuclear weapons become established, a catastrophic outcome is nearly inevitable. A strategy of pre-emption is inherent in the nuclear technology. The U.S. must be determined to prevent such an outcome and apply the principle of nonproliferation to all nuclear aspirants in the region.

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Like Latin America or Southeast Asia, the Middle East was a Cold War hot spot. Almost everywhere was. This explains the historical origins of the instability. But why did those other places tend to stabilize, whereas the Middle East has continued to spin out of control? I would argue that it's mainly because of the legacy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Reagan’s weak and accommodating response to it. He was poorly counseled by the realists in his administration, such as Eagleburger, Baker, and Scowcroft.

Pursuing a realist foreign policy makes some sense against the USSR. Pursuing a realist policy against Iran, and the menace of a radical Islamic anti-American terrorism, is plain idiotic. If you narrowly define your own national interests, then the cancer in foreign lands will necessarily metastasize and blow back upon you even stronger than before. JFK understood this. One way or the other, we will come to understand it again.

Which brings us to Tom Rogan's latest article in The National Review: " After Aleppo Falls: Five Predictions."

#1. "First off, Syria’s Sunni-dominated rebellion will no longer be a national campaign — it will become a collection of geographically limited ones."

#2. "Second, al-Qaeda-linked organizations, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS), and other Salafi-Jihadist groups such as Ahrar al-Sham will grow stronger. The axis claim that capturing Aleppo will weaken extremist groups, but the opposite is true."

#3. "Third, and as an extension, when Aleppo falls, we’ll see expanded external support for the extremists, notably from the Sunni monarchies."

#4. "Fourth, the Assad axis will escalate operations in Syria’s western, rebel-held Idlib governate."

#5. "Finally, Putin will use Aleppo’s capture to damage U.S. foreign policy."


I have my doubts about Rogan's 2nd & 3rd predictions, but his other ones seem undeniable. The problem for us is not that the human catastrophe will escalate inside the borders of Syria, although it will, and that's horrible. The problem is that an Axis victory in Syria will necessarily escalate into new campaigns in different countries, and that these will be designed to weaken alliances to the West. The broader regional war continues, and one side wants a strong U.S., and the other side will do anything in its power to weaken the U.S., incite more anti-American revolutions, and bring us closer to a nuclear Iran. Both Obama and Trump seem to prefer the wrong side.