Kerry agonistes - Well, maybe not yet.

"Russian officials say they are not insisting on the survival of Assad, but they note that the Geneva accord says the fate of his government is to be decided by Syrians in negotiations. The secretary of State's comments in Rome come as reports surfaced that Israel had warned the United States that Russia was about to complete the sale of advanced, S-300 ground-to-air missile batteries to Syria. Kerry called the missile sales "potentially destabilizing," but his criticism of Moscow was muted at a time when the two nations were cooperating in the effort to jump-start peace talks. "I think we've made it crystal clear that we would prefer that Russia was not supplying assistance" to Syria, Kerry said. "That is on record; that hasn't changed." Israeli officials declined to comment Thursday on the report of new Russian missile shipments, but Israel has long been concerned about Russia's weapons sales to Syria. Analysts said Syria wants the missiles in part to defend against Israeli airstrikes. Since January, Israel has launched three air attacks against Syrian weapons stockpiles that it said were earmarked for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah."  LA Times

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Wow!  I have come to think that diplomacy is too important to be left to the State Department.  Both this fellow and HC thought it their role to wander the earth directing future history while "the Department" concentrates on important things like keeping the WH happy at all cost.

Why does this man think that the Syrian Government and/or the various rebel factions care what he thinks about anything?  We have "made it clear to Russia that we wish they were not supplying the Syrian armed forces?"  Why would Russia care about our wishes.  What leverage do we have? Actually, they are doing us a great kindness by letting us use their railroads for re-supply and to evacuate our equipment from Afghanistan.

Does Kerry imagine that if he looks sad and unhappy Putin will give him what he wants?

I think itis time for a true special envoy to be appointed.  I nominate Zbig.  pl 

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/middleeast/la-fg-kerry-syria-20130510,0,2669751.story

Comments

[William R. Cumming]

Kerry i s fluent in French! Any other languages or special expertise in other cultures?

[The beaver]

Colonel

Read somewhere that Putin made him wait for nearly 3 hours before they met for a few minutes .

[Rob Prince]

so arming wackosalafist wahhabist islamist rebels - trained by U.S. allies - is NOT destabilizing but arming the syrian government is?

need to end the cycle of violence. the syrian mess will not be resolved militarily...need more serious attention to a diplomatic solution. the Obama Administration talks diplomacy but fans the flames of war in syria

[jonst]

Zbig? The small minds, the politically correct warriors, the R2P people would eat him alive. That is what they are good at. The only thing they are good at.

[confusedponderer]

Zbig? God, no. He is bright, and far brighter than Kerry for sure, but he totally hates Russians, and being the Promethean that he is, he greatly enjoyed his time kicking them while they were down.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheism

On the other hand, Zbig would at least spare America the embarrassment of a diplomatic approach based on trying to make Putin weep. With Kerry, I'm not so sure. To me, Kerry is first of all vain, a lightweight. But there you go as far as continuity is concerned. A pity.

[Matthew]

CP: Does of any of this really matter? Look what is waiting in the wings: http://www.lobelog.com/new-congressional-sanctions-push-aimed-at-killing-iran-diplomacy/

[Stephanie]

I don't think he would take the job if offered:

http://swampland.time.com/2013/05/08/syria-intervention-will-only-make-it-worse/

"That risk has been compounded by the recent Israeli bombing of weapons sites inside Syria. Whatever their justification, the attacks convey to some Arabs the sense that there is an external plot against them. That impression would be solidified if the U.S. were now to enter the fight, suggesting a de facto American-Israeli-Saudi alliance, which would play into the hands of the extremists."

[David Habakkuk]

CP,

Back in 1989, I was working on a BBC programme whose editor had been an aide to the former Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan. He was active in the group of erstwhile leaders called the Trilateral Commission, of whom a prominent member was the former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.

I remember her recounting how Schmidt used to say, of Brzezinski, that he could never work out which of Poland's traditional enemies he hated most -- Germany or Russia.

[Brian]

Why do you think we have don't have any leverage?

We have enormous leverage over them. We can economically sanction Russia and bring their economy to a stand still.

If Russia were to go rouge and start arming our enemies, like they used to back int he cold war, they will face a massive retaliation and I bet that's what Kerry was there to remind them of. Kerry probably told Putin that this aint 1950's and that he better think before doing anything foolish.

[turcopolier]

Brian

"We can economically sanction Russia and bring their economy to a stand still." Really? Seems to me that is what we did to Japan in the late 30s. pl

[turcopolier]

David Habakkuk

In 1989 that was an appropriate attitude. pl

[JMH]

Brian, the problem with massive retaliation is massive counter retaliation. Ask yourself, are you ready to start lobbing H-bombs into Russia over Syria? I am not.

[Bill H]

Seems to me Brian is of the crowd that praised HRC for saying that "China will find itself isolated" if it continues doing whatever it was that she didn't like it doing.

I'm sure we can force Europe not to buy energy from Russia, just as we forced India et al not to buy oil from Iran. And it has worked so well with Iran, hasn't it? They dropped their nuclear program... Oh, wait.

[jurisV]

Brian

I think you may be forgetting that a huge part of Europe's energy supply comes from, or through, Russia in the form of natural gas. A quick google search fetched this report among a host of others:

http://www.centrex.at/en/files/study_stern_e.pdf

How long do you really expect Europe to support even entertain any discussion of sanctions against Russia? Sanctions are a complete fantasy in our current universe.

[mac]

Zbig is an excellent choice, he gets it...but he seems far too smart to get entangled in the mess....

[confusedponderer]

Well, what 'USA, USA, USA' as a strategy lacks in subtlety and utility, it easily outweighs with simplicity and consistency.

The Euros for instance would probably object to bringing Russia's economy to a standstill, as a result of our interdependence.

I find it pretty hilarious to equal Putin's stance on Syria with the policies of 1950's USSR. Apparently, for some the cold war never ended, and it ain't the Russians.

[Rd.]

"Wow! I have come to think that diplomacy is too important to be left to the State Department. Both this fellow and HC thought it their role to wander the earth directing future history while "the Department" concentrates on important things like keeping the WH happy at all cost." pl

it seems FP is run by those very few short sighted individuals camping in the house. so HC, Kerry, et al are just cheer (leaders) followers, as well as DoD.

[The beaver]

He may be getting familiar in Persian culture - his SIL is from Iran (or his parents are from there).

[walrus]

Brians attitude reminds me of the apochryphal British newspaper headline: ‘Thick fog in English Channel – continent cut off’.

What if Russia, China and the Europeans simply ignore America?

Furthermore, it is axiomatic that the Russians can mmake just as much trouble and expense for America as we can for them.

[Eliot]

Did Syria sign a contract for the S-300s? That would make life much more difficult for the intervention crowd, not to mention the Israelis.

[Tyler]

Its interesting to see Putin run circles around Kerry. Does Kerry not know that Putin was in the 1st KGB Directorate, and probably watched the light fade from more than one person's eyes?

We truly are a nation run by children.

[confusedponderer]

And don't forget how isolated old Europe was back in 2002, when the coalition of the willing went over to the Americans, leaving us isolated with usselves.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Coalition_of_the_willing.svg

Gee, we're really eating crow right now for having at the wrong side of history. The Iraqis now hate us too, for not having saved them from Saddam! We were being punished not only by history, but also by not getting those lucrative contracts in the thriving Iraqi economy (and we didn't get fair share of laurels and rose petals either, which is the worst part).

[David Habakkuk]

Some remarks on Brzezinski’s credentials appear appropriate. Back in the 1980s he was – like almost everyone in the United States and Britain – caught completely unprepared by the changes in the Soviet system introduced by Gorbachev.

An extract from summary of central arguments of his 1986 study ‘Game Plan’ in a – sympathetic – review by a British journalist:

“This reasoning springs from his view that America and Russia are quite unequal as competitors. The Soviet regime, he thinks, cannot outperform America economically or technologically. In these respects the gap between the two is widening, and if they formed the only arena of contest, America could simply sit back and wait for Russia to lose the game. Unfortunately Russia can and does outperform America in the production and deployment of military power. He thinks Russia is ahead in strategic forces and that the gap could widen to the point where Russia would be in a position to deliver a successful first strike or (more likely) to force America to back down on a matter vital to its interests. That would be the beginning of the end, and America would lose the game without a war. Even if this did not happen, continued growth in Soviet military preponderance might lead to American loss of control in geographical areas, such as the Far East or Central America, and this would come to the same thing in the long run.”

(http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/09/03/specials/johnson-brzezinski.html )

As an assessment of Soviet capabilities and intentions at the time Gorbachev came to power, this account had no contact with reality whatsoever. As ‘Game Plan’ was published, the new General Secretary of the CPSU was already embracing the agenda for the total abolition of nuclear weapons – quite sincerely, as rapidly became apparent – while at the same time moving to liquidate the ‘capabilities threat’ to Western Europe. Meanwhile, anyone who did a little basic research could have realised that technological change was shifting the balance of conventional power decisively towards the United States, and that there was absolutely zilch possibility that a command economy and a political system dependent on the control of information could keep up.

Two veteran Western analysts of Soviet security policy, Ambassador Raymond Garthoff and – to give him his service title – Commander Michael MccGwire, RN (King’s Dirk, Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, class of 1942) had already demonstrated conclusively that Brzezinski was wrong about Soviet military strategy. It was precisely because in the late Sixties and early Seventies Soviet contingency planning had moved decisively away from the notion of a pre-emptive nuclear strike that the build-up of conventional and naval capabilities in the Seventies and early Eighties had taken place. Conventional capabilities were a substitute for nuclear, not a complement.

The notion that Soviet strategy was geared to establishing ‘escalation dominance’ to be used for political ends was, to be blunt, rubbish. Rather, Soviet military planning had been conspicuous for the way that political and economic considerations were sidelined in an obsessive desire to have the capabilities to avoid defeat in a global war. This was an obsession which reflected the deep trauma left by the events of 22 June 1941 and subsequent months, and proved suicidally self-defeating in a number of respects.

In mid-1987, when it became clear that the arms control proposals the Warsaw Pact was putting forward would make it impossible for it to carry out existing war plans, Garthoff and MccGwire concluded that the Soviet leadership might well have decided that a radical restructuring of the Soviet strategic posture was imperative. I picked up the story at the end of that year. As Thatcher was in the process of destroying critical television current affairs in the U.K. at the time, the only place I could find any interest – after many months of trying – was in a niche of BBC Radio.

In the course of making two documentaries for them on the so-called ‘new thinking’ at the start of 1989, a colleague and I interviewed General-Mayor Valentin Larionov, the military figure most closely associated with the so-called ‘new thinking’. Unfortunately, at that time I had yet to come across the Soviet Army Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, among whose staff was a very fine scholar called Dr Jacob W. Kipp – later the director of its successor, the Foreign Military Studies Office. Had I done so, I might have grasped that Larionov had earlier been one of the foremost theorists of the strategy of pre-emptive nuclear attack – and also realised the significance of what he had to say about a Soviet strategist of the Twenties called Aleksandr Svechin, who, Larionov told us, had been ‘repressed’ under Stalin.

Ironically, Larionov also discussed the ‘Game Plan’ study, describing Brzezinski as – ‘our friend – a Pole.’ He confirmed what Garthoff and MccGwire had argued – that the roots of the changes introduced by Gorbachev went back quite precisely to the realisation, back in the Seventies, that it was impossible to win a nuclear war.

[David Habakkuk]

As to Svechin, as I learned later from the work of Kipp, in 1917 the ‘genstabisty’ – General Staff officers – of the Imperial Russian Army split. Among those who sided with the Bolsheviks was one of the ablest of them – Svechin. His choice of the Bolsheviks was certainly not the product of ideological conviction. At the time in the Twenties when the Bolshevik leadership curbed its revolutionary enthusiasm in favour of the ‘New Economic Policy’, involving a mixed economy and overriding emphasis on the maintenance of the alliance with the peasantry, Kipp demonstrated, Svechin had provided the corresponding military strategy.

His conceptions were based on a deep scepticism about aspirations to the rapid and decisive defeat of the enemy by what became known as ‘blitzkrieg’ strategies, and the belief that the Soviet Union should plan for the long war of attrition in the – protracted – initial phase of which it would be on the defensive (as in 1812). Also critical to Svechin’s strategic conceptions was a Clausewitzian insistence on the overriding importance of making military strategy subordinate to political (and economic) objectives. The defeat of Svechin by Tukhachevski, an enthusiast for ‘blitzkrieg’, Kipp’s analysis suggests, helped pave the way for the adoption of forced industrialisation and collectivisation and the resulting apocalypse of terror in which both men died.

Whether any American ‘experts’ on the Soviet Union, apart from Kipp and a few others like him, had heard of Svechin I rather doubt. What Brzezinski also appears to have missed is the collapse, among very significant sections of the Soviet elite, of faith in their system and its ideological underpinnings. A question this collapse inevitably raised was that of what the Cold War – and the whole history of the confrontations between the Soviet Union and other powers going back to 1917 – had been about.

If essentially they were about ideology, then it was natural enough to conclude that the West was unequivocally in the right, and the security problems of the Soviet Union were of its own making. However, there were alternative possibilities. It could be that the Cold War was ultimately less about ideology than the kind of Halford Mackinder-style geopolitics in which Brzezinski deals. And it could also be that the real driving force behind the Cold War was less antagonism towards communism than antagonism towards Russia.

Looking back, I think the conflict between these alternative perceptions lurked in the background of what General-Mayor Larionov said to us in that interview. And I also think that, like very significant elements in the Soviet elite, he came to believe that the security problems of the Soviet Union were indeed largely self-inflicted. Subsequently, largely because of policies championed by Brzezinski, the balance of opinion shifted dramatically the other way.

Whether from the point of view of American security interests this matters one iota I leave for others to judge. As to Brzezinski, I note that he has abandoned his earlier enthusiasm for seeing Russian divided into three parts in favour of embracing ‘a truly democratizing Russia’ in a ‘larger and more vital West’ – one more academic’s pipedream concept following another.

If however Americans think that substantive cooperation on such issues as there are on which American and Russian interests coincide or overlap is of any value a pragmatic diplomat, in the mode of the late Llewellyn Thompson, or E. Wayne Merry, would I think be of a more appropriate choice of envoy. Likewise, if Americans think there is anything to be said for trying to avoid the kind of close alliance between Russia and China which is the natural result of the policies advocated by Brzezinski, such a pragmatic diplomat would be an appropriate choice.