Roger Cohen is lucid again. Cohen is still hiding under the bed in Lithuania but this is more than lucid, it is excellent writing. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/14/opinion/cohen-the-agent-in-his-labyrinth.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0
The dream flickered briefly after the end of the Cold War: a shared space from Lisbon to Vladivostok, Russia gathered into a close association with NATO, or even becoming an alliance member, and the European Union working in cooperation with Moscow on the modernization of the country.
It was a nice idea, like the end of history, and as with many nice ideas, it did not come to pass.
...
Vladimir Putin, a former K.G.B. agent obsessed with the loss of the Soviet imperium, had a different idea...[the] vision of a revived imperium...
...
The culmination of this process sees Putin...pitted against America’s languid leg-crossing law professor and the pastor’s methodical daughter in Berlin. Neither of these leaders of the West (whose feelings for each other are cool) will utter of Crimea those four resonant words: “This will not stand.”
Putin notices this unuttered sentence. He notes the flaccid body language in the White House, the post-modern man’s teleprompter, the bloodlessness of the liberal realism emanating from the Oval Office. He hears the Kremlin phone ring and mutters, no, not Angela again, with her reasonable pleas. Germany, unified by America but nullified by it too, was far better when there were two of them.
He has heard the lectures, the veiled and not-so-veiled threats, the expressions of outrage. Let them squeal!
...
Putin laughs at the theory that the West lost the Lisbon-to-Vladivostok dream and turned him into the conspiracy-spouting strongman he is through ...its decision to expand NATO eastward into the Baltic states, its enlargement of the European Union, and its general lack of solicitous regard toward Moscow.
No, he was always this way...
...
But America had grown weaker since then. Its wars did not get won. Its red lines did not count for much. Its doctrine was indistinct, an endless series of improvisations whose bottom line was no more shooting wars. All it threatened was visa bans! Weakness was an attitude against which Russia had roused itself.
...
Putin knows Germany and the United States need him for Iran, need him for Syria, need him for Russia’s energy. He has them where he wants them.
Or Putin thinks so most of the time. But what was it Angela Merkel was saying in her fifth phone call about Russia’s self-isolation? How dare she suggest he had reached a point where black was white, day was night, and two plus two was five!
What was she parroting about Russia’s dependence on European trade? What was that talk of testing the resilience of the Russian economy if he did not step back from the illegal seizure of Crimea and unacceptable threats to east Ukraine? Were the Chinese really unhappy that Crimea could give Taiwan ideas? Did some people honestly think Simferopol was the desperate gambit of a Russian president who had lost Kiev and Ukraine?
Every now and again, in the gilded mirrors of the Kremlin, Putin glimpses his reflection and struggles to avert his eyes: a small man with six-pack abs, eyes cold and pale as a glacier, and a maniacal grin. The agent in his labyrinth.
The dream flickered briefly after the end of the Cold War: a shared space from Lisbon to Vladivostok, Russia gathered into a close association with NATO, or even becoming an alliance member, and the European Union working in cooperation with Moscow on the modernization of the country.
It was a nice idea, like the end of history, and as with many nice ideas, it did not come to pass.
...
Vladimir Putin, a former K.G.B. agent obsessed with the loss of the Soviet imperium, had a different idea...[the] vision of a revived imperium...
...
The culmination of this process sees Putin...pitted against America’s languid leg-crossing law professor and the pastor’s methodical daughter in Berlin. Neither of these leaders of the West (whose feelings for each other are cool) will utter of Crimea those four resonant words: “This will not stand.”
Putin notices this unuttered sentence. He notes the flaccid body language in the White House, the post-modern man’s teleprompter, the bloodlessness of the liberal realism emanating from the Oval Office. He hears the Kremlin phone ring and mutters, no, not Angela again, with her reasonable pleas. Germany, unified by America but nullified by it too, was far better when there were two of them.
He has heard the lectures, the veiled and not-so-veiled threats, the expressions of outrage. Let them squeal!
...
Putin laughs at the theory that the West lost the Lisbon-to-Vladivostok dream and turned him into the conspiracy-spouting strongman he is through ...its decision to expand NATO eastward into the Baltic states, its enlargement of the European Union, and its general lack of solicitous regard toward Moscow.
No, he was always this way...
...
But America had grown weaker since then. Its wars did not get won. Its red lines did not count for much. Its doctrine was indistinct, an endless series of improvisations whose bottom line was no more shooting wars. All it threatened was visa bans! Weakness was an attitude against which Russia had roused itself.
...
Putin knows Germany and the United States need him for Iran, need him for Syria, need him for Russia’s energy. He has them where he wants them.
Or Putin thinks so most of the time. But what was it Angela Merkel was saying in her fifth phone call about Russia’s self-isolation? How dare she suggest he had reached a point where black was white, day was night, and two plus two was five!
What was she parroting about Russia’s dependence on European trade? What was that talk of testing the resilience of the Russian economy if he did not step back from the illegal seizure of Crimea and unacceptable threats to east Ukraine? Were the Chinese really unhappy that Crimea could give Taiwan ideas? Did some people honestly think Simferopol was the desperate gambit of a Russian president who had lost Kiev and Ukraine?
Every now and again, in the gilded mirrors of the Kremlin, Putin glimpses his reflection and struggles to avert his eyes: a small man with six-pack abs, eyes cold and pale as a glacier, and a maniacal grin. The agent in his labyrinth.
Boy oh boy, that is good writing. Cohen is not struggling here!
"America’s languid leg-crossing law professor," "flaccid body language;" "pastor’s methodical daughter in Berlin." Very interesting observations. Wonder if they're true. Putin sees himself as a steely He-man and Obama as a limp-dicked "languid leg-crossing law professor." Obama does that! Obama is that! Wait...I see a man: young, handsome, the epitome of cool, legs crossed too, sitting in a rocking chair: JFK. Sized up by Khrushchev in much the same way: a lazy, privileged, pretty boy. Mistake, Khrushchev.
Merkel "the pastor's methodical daughter." I don't see "weakness" in that image. Because she is a child of a pastor? Because she's female? I don't get that one.
"This will not stand." Got that one: Bush 41. On Iraq. After, a grocer's daughter scolded him "not to go wooly in the knees." Bush invaded and kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. So, why is Cohen using "This will not stand?" Does he want the U.S. to invade Crimea to kick Putin out?
