Russia

Russia Should Learn to Take Yes for an Answer

Erin Drankoski — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 05:57:00 -0400

How should Russia respond to President Obama's indefinite suspension of US missile defences in Central Europe? Most obviously, by displaying flexibility concerning negotiations on nuclear weapons cuts. Here is an opportunity for both sides to create the impression of successful co-operation while in fact sacrificing very little, since both have far more weapons than they need for an effective deterrence against any conceivable threat.

Obama's Russia Trip | Reason Online

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:02:00 -0400

To realist pundits such as New America Foundation fellow and National Interest columnist Anatol Lieven, the democracy promoters are dangerously naïve, ...

Russia's Limousine Liberals

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:44:00 -0400

US ‘Reset Button’ with Russia Not So Easy | Khaleej Times

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 01:26:00 -0500

Anatol Lieven, an analyst with King’s College London, doubted whether the Obama administration could really press on with NATO expansion. ...

A Disintegrating U.S.? Critics Come Unglued

Cecille Isidro — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 13:10:00 -0500

For seriously predicting that the United States will break into six parts in June or July of 2010, Igor Panarin has suddenly become a Russian state-media celebrity. Hardly a day goes by without another interview or two for the KGB-trained, Kremlin-backed senior analyst. The clamor in Russia for his ideas is growing, he says.

Steve Clemons in Middle East Times | 'Outside View: Russia's New Start'

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:45:00 -0500

According to blogger and foreign policy expert Steve Clemons, he has regularly "opposed false trade-offs between embracing Eastern European nations (and even helping to create new ones) and Russia's serious national priorities." LINK

A Memo for President Obama

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:53:00 -0500

In domestic policy, president-elect Obama faces the need for urgent and radical action, above all of course concerning the economy, but also on health coverage and financing social security. In foreign policy, matters are rather different. There, what he does not do will be just as important as what he does. After the hyper-activism of the Bush presidency, there is an urgent need for a long period of caution and restraint.

Military overstretch, financial constraints and cooperation with other powers to deal with the world economic crisis all make this necessary. Obama’s own admirably calm and balanced character also make such an approach seem likely. But one can never be entirely sure. The president-elect is inexperienced in international affairs, and any U.S. administration finds itself under multiple pressures for international activism and ambition from a range of lobbies, interest groups and ideological advocates. Already, his probable appointments in the field of policy towards Russia and the other countries of the former-Soviet Union inspire little confidence that the next administration will follow a more cautious policy than the last.

What the next administration does need to do in foreign and security policy is the following: First and foremost to mobilize world capitalism behind economic recovery. That is, to seek the cooperation of China, the other East Asian states and Russia, with their huge sovereign funds and currency reserves, in stimulating international economic growth.

Linked to this should be a new program of international industrial renewal and regeneration based on a shift to renewable sources of energy. Recent Chinese suggestions for technology transfers in return for caps on emission are well worth examining in this regard. This will be a painful process for the U.S. economy--but a time when the United States is already undergoing severe crisis, and previous free market certainties have been shattered, may well be the right time, or even the only time, when such a strategy can succeed.

As the world economic crisis spreads to Latin America and the Caribbean, it is likely to become more and more necessary for Washington to concentrate on stabilizing its own backyard, and finding the very large sums in aid which may be necessary to do so. Frankly, the sight in recent years of the United States fooling around in the Caucasus while Haiti starves and Mexico sinks into drug-fuelled violence has been neither morally edifying nor strategically sensible. These are areas that pose direct threats to the wellbeing of U.S. citizens--in ways that the status of South Ossetia most assuredly does not.

Partly for this reason, the next administration will need to extricate itself from both Iraq and Afghanistan with at least the appearance of dignity and success. This is not only because of the cost of these operations and the strain that they are imposing on the American military, but because Afghanistan in particular is beginning seriously to destabilize neighboring Pakistan--a country which poses vastly greater dangers than Afghanistan to the United States and the world.

Above all, it is essential that the administration not be led by the pursuit of a chimerical “victory” in Afghanistan into direct ground attacks over the border into Pakistan, such as occurred in August–September. Such attacks are the one thing that could provoke mutiny in the Pakistani army and destroy the Pakistani state, with all the appalling horrors and dangers that would result.

Given growing financial constraints, and the need to strengthen U.S. ground forces, it is essential that cuts be made in other parts of the U.S. military budget. A situation in which America provides half of the world’s military spending on the basis of just over a fifth of the world’s GDP is only sustainable if the U.S. population is asked for higher taxes, and domestic programs are slashed.

Neither of these things is possible. Already the emphasis on military spending has led to the gross neglect of those tools of international economic assistance which during the cold war were regarded as crucial to defeating communism. And in any case, the United States simply does not need so many aircraft carriers, fighter jets, battle tanks and nuclear weapons to deter the Chinese and Russians from doing something which they have no intention of doing anyway--namely attacking U.S. allies or vital U.S. interests (I mean real U.S. allies like Poland or Japan, not a delinquent incubus like Georgia). This is especially true since when it comes to combating Islamist extremism and (at least in the case of China) guaranteeing energy security, their vital interests in any case match those of the United States.

In policy towards China, no major change to existing policy is necessary, since this is one place where the Bush administration in recent years has pursued a generally cautious and pragmatic approach. There are certain areas, however, where a Democratic administration might be tempted to take a new approach, with extremely dangerous results. The first is obviously protectionism, spurred on by the suffering of U.S. industry. This would risk wrecking not just the relationship with China but the whole world economy.

The second would be if increased unrest in China due to economic hardship leads the American administration to launch a much more active policy (if only in rhetoric) of support for “democracy” in China. The more endangered by mass unrest the communist state feels itself to be, the more ferocious will be its response. There seems little doubt that the new administration will emphasize “democracy” in its relations with Russia and that these will suffer as a result. Presumably, this will include U.S. support for “democratic” opposition leader Garry Kasparov and his neo-fascist allies.

Unless the present Russian administration comes under serious internal threat--which still appears unlikely, though not impossible--this U.S. approach will be only an irritant. A much more serious threat to relations will be a continuation of the existing American policy of pushing for Ukrainian and Georgian NATO membership.

This is something which the Obama administration most emphatically should not do. As the events of August demonstrated, ill-considered U.S. meddling in this region can lead to actual wars, further destabilizing the world economy and imposing new financial burdens on the United States. Since Russian policy at the moment is overwhelmingly a reaction to what the West is doing, simply to put the whole NATO issue on hold (without abandoning it formally at this stage) would lead to a significant improvement in relations.

Above all, President Obama should pay the closest attention to the fact that at present the U.S. does not even have an army that it could send to defend Georgia and Ukraine, even supposing that any American president would actually contemplate such a move. And it is hard to imagine that anyone as intelligent as Mr. Obama could believe that the Europeans will be much use in this regard.

This is another thing that the Obama administration should not do: Spend any serious effort in seeking additional European military assistance in Afghanistan. It ain’t worth a hill of beans. What would be useful is if the British could pull out of Iraq and use some of the additional troops in Afghanistan. Even additional European money for Afghanistan is not necessarily a good thing, because it involves even more complicated and divided decision making processes--and it is precisely these hopelessly snarled-up and endless international negotiations which have so far helped make a rational development or political strategy for Afghanistan impossible.

A real help for Afghanistan would be U.S. détente with Iran, and the return of Iran to the role it played in Afghanistan before and in the immediate aftermath of 9/11--until Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech wrecked everything: That is to say, as a force deeply opposed to the Taliban and anxious to contribute to Afghanistan’s stability and economic development. Obviously, there are many reasons why Obama should not rush into agreements with Iran, but he does need to move with deliberate speed to start improving relations. One fruitful approach might be to start talks on the issue of the Afghan heroin trade, which poses a major threat to Iran.

How much of this is likely? Eight years in Washington left me with considerable pessimism about the capability of the U.S. policy elites--Democrat as well as Republican--to carry out radical changes in policy if these required real civic courage and challenges to powerful domestic constituencies or dominant national myths. On the other hand, if the worst economic crisis for seventy years isn’t the right moment for radical new thought, then there never will be a right time.

United Moscow

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 08:31:00 -0400

In the course of the Valdai conference in Russia from September 7–14 we met with President Dmitri Medvedev, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov and Deputy Chief of the General Staff Anatoly Nogovitsyn. There was no significant difference between them in what they said about Russian policy and Russian views. Nor have such differences appeared outside the conference.

Of course, it is possible that they exist in private and have so far been kept under wraps by strict discipline; but it is very important to note that there is no actual evidence for this. From the point of view of shaping Western policy towards Russia, it would therefore be wise to proceed from the assumption that what we are facing is a very united and determined Russian approach which is strongly supported by the entire top leadership. Indeed, to judge from the ordinary Russians I talked with during our stay, the government line on the need to fight in South Ossetia also appears to be supported by the overwhelming majority of the population.

As is his wont, Vladimir Putin used somewhat harsher tones about Western policy than President Medvedev, but Medvedev was also absolutely categorical that the decision to fight against “Georgian aggression” was unavoidable. He emphasised that he would have taken exactly the same decision even if Georgia had previously received a NATO Membership Action Plan, “and then we would have had a much more serious crisis.”

Medvedev also said, like Putin, that while he took the steep decline in the Russian stock market and reduction of foreign investment seriously, and while he himself had had “more important things to do” in August than fight a war,

when it comes to choosing between protecting people's lives and protecting the economy, you can understand why we made the choice we did. Almost every state would have reacted in this way if a situation of the kind that presented itself in August had occurred. That is how we reacted. I have specifically said and I reiterate it for my audience here: protecting the lives and the dignity of Russian citizens, wherever they are, is the raison d’etre of the Russian state.

Medvedev’s ostensibly calm public response to the stock market crisis echoes Putin’s:

I believe that the resources available to our companies to restore the values of Russian stock indicators is huge. There are two reasons for this: the first is that until now Russian blue chip stocks, the most attractive Russian companies, have still not reached their peak: their worth has not yet been fully appreciated. They are still undervalued. And the second reason is that, given that our market is still growing, still evolving, in this sense it is more risky than traditional markets, and this makes for all the variability in the markets, or as economists say, all the market volatility. There is nothing to be frightened of. We simply need to take a deep breath and calmly continue to pursue developing the economy, as a matter of fact to go on doing what we have been doing.

This may of course be purely for public consumption; the word from Russian businessmen is very much grimmer. It does however once again indicate what is for the moment at least a united administration line.

On relations with the West, all the Russian leaders said that they have no desire for a new cold war, since as Putin stressed, “we have many common problems that we can only solve together: terrorism, global warming, infectious disease, regional crises.” Lavrov emphasized Russia’s desire to help the NATO operation in Afghanistan, and that it was the United States. which had rejected Russian offers of assistance.

In response to a question from an Israeli participant, Medvedev went out of his way to say that Russia would not follow the Soviet Union’s strategy in the Middle East, that it was committed to the Arab-Israeli peace process, and that a conference provisionally scheduled to be held in Moscow is a continuation of the one held under U.S. auspices at Annapolis.

All, however, attacked the West over its support for Georgia, and stressed the breakdown of the U.S-led unipolar world order. In Medvedev’s words,

Did the unipolar system work [over the Georgian crisis]? No, on the contrary, everyone froze in a loss as to what to do next. I think therefore that military analysts, politicians, and you too, as specialists in this area, will be analysing the lessons of the Caucasus crisis for some time to come. As I said, for me personally and for a large part of the Russian public, this crisis has meant an end to the last illusions about the current security system’s ability to function reliably. We simply have to create a new security system, otherwise there will be no guarantees that some other Saakashvili could blow his top and do something like what happened in August, and we would again have to pay a high price.

One possible area of new agreement was suggested by Sergei Lavrov in answer to a question, when he acknowledged a legal and political parallel between Abkhazia and South Ossetia on the one hand and Kosovo on the other--thereby opening the possibility of a future deal on mutual recognition, if the West ever takes this up.

All of the leaders took a hard line against NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia, describing it as a threat to vital Russian interests; but all also said that in the absence of such a threat, they had no intention of undermining Ukraine or challenging Ukrainian territorial integrity. Putin declared that “all this talk about Crimea is a provocation. Is there really anything in common between Crimea and South Ossetia? In Georgia, there were civil wars and international peacekeepers. There is none of that in Ukraine, thank God.” All emphasized Russia’s interest in a stable and prosperous Ukraine, given Russia’s deep economic, cultural and human stake in that country. Putin spoke at length of the fact that a large majority of the Ukrainian population opposes NATO membership, and that a move in this direction will therefore itself cause damaging internal divisions.

Putin, Medvedev and Shuvalov all spoke of the need to push ahead with economic reforms, with Putin talking of Russia being “on the threshold of a new breakthrough” in this regard. In keeping with his past statements, however, Medvedev spoke at much greater length about property rights and the rule of law. Indeed, in this regard his remarks echo those of Russia’s Western critics:

I have already been obliged to hold forth on the value of property rights. I believe that due to a number of factors in Russia for almost the entire twentieth century there was no real idea of property in the ordinary sense. And our task is to create it, to give it our full-fledged guidance and protection. This is perhaps the cornerstone of a normal investment and business climate. Nothing else means much in this regard, not even military developments, as paradoxical as that might sound, because problems of a military kind can be resolved, whereas economic development and social development never stop. . . . My deep conviction is that in Russia unfortunately there is no real understanding of the value of law. I have engaged with these issues for a long time, both in theory and in practice. Unfortunately this manifests itself everywhere, including in everyday matters, everyday issues: at the domestic level, the level of business, the level of civil servants and even the state as a whole. And so for us it's obvious, at least for me as head of state at any rate, that if we don't change in this regard we will never be accepted as equal partners.

This and Medvedev’s youth (he is thirteen years younger than Putin) made me think that if we are lucky, and either personality clashes or economic crises do not drive them apart, the following may be a possible scenario for Russia: a natural and positive historical progression from a Putin generation dedicated to the restoration of order and state authority as the basis for economic progress to a Medvedev generation anxious to use the new order as the basis for the development of a law-based state and economy: a Rechtstaat, in the German phrase, even though probably not a fully-fledged democracy, whatever that is. You could say, the transition from Caesar the conqueror to Augustus the consolidator and administrator.

This was very much the dream of the great Russian reformers of the nineteenth century. But as with them, it would be the gravest mistake to think that Medvedev and other Russian state liberals of today are not at the same time passionately dedicated to the defense of Russian interests and Russian honor. A Western strategy that departs from the belief that the only legitimate Russian government is one that bows to Western commands will destroy every hope of international cooperation with Russia, and perhaps every hope of Russian domestic progress as well.

Gracious Grozny

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 08:53:00 -0400

In a way, Chechnya, which we visited in the course of the Valdai Club discussions in Russia last week, can stand as a more savage version of the Putin era in Russia as a whole: namely the successful restoration of order and progress, by methods which were often extremely ugly, but which may have been the only ones available under the circumstances.

Grozny, which I last saw as an immense heap of rubble, is now a truly impressive sight, with fine modern apartment blocks and a beautiful Turkish-built mosque, modeled on the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, towering over the main square. Opposite, on the site of the old Soviet-era republican council which General Dudayev used as his headquarters before the war of 1994, there is now a garden with a statue of the previous pro-Russian President of Chechnya, Ahmed Kadyrov, assassinated by a bomb in 1994. Walls in the centre were festooned with huge pictures of his son Ramzan, the present president (often accompanied by ones of Vladimir Putin), and slogans like “Ramzan, you were president for only one year and our city rose from the ashes.”

So totally has the center changed that it was difficult for a while to remember where things used to be. In fact, Grozny as it now stands is a vast improvement on the city as it stood before the war of 1994, when it was a dirty, run-down Soviet industrial city with grim, shabby architecture, very few amenities--and no visible mosques at all. As a British journalist friend who has visited both places muttered, “We could learn something from this about how to rebuild Kabul and Baghdad.”

It may, however, have been a help in the reconstruction that the current population of 228,000 is less than half of that recorded in the last Soviet census. Most of the losses come from the fact that Grozny was historically a mainly Russian-inhabited city, and the great bulk of the Russian population had fled even before 1994, driven out by the collapse of law and order and the special vulnerability of Russians to Chechen criminal attack. On the other hand, looking at the gleaming new buildings, I could not help also reflecting that no-one will ever know how many former inhabitants of the city now lie buried beneath their foundations. This left me with an eerie impression, as if the ghosts of the old buildings and the old people were staring out from between the ribs of the new.

We drove out of Grozny to visit Chechnya’s president, Ramzan Kadyrov, in his compound in the hills to the east. Security, though visible, was not heavy, suggesting that things really have become much more peaceful in Chechnya. Certainly the presidential houses, with their expanses of glass windows, would not be a good place to be in during a bombardment.

The architecture of the compound varies from Italianate to nineteenth century Russian to modern to generic “Islamic,” with the conference centre apparently modeled on the Soviet-era Great Hall of the People in the Kremlin. In the middle is an artificial lake with an artificial hill seemingly made out of greenish playdough, perched on which are four enormous eagle statues. Peacocks strolled in the gardens. The whole effect might be called Houphouet-Bongiesque, after the French-backed former dictator of the Ivory Coast. There is also a small zoo with tigers and other animals, which we did not see. President Kadyrov said that he goes to talk to them and stroke them when he wants to relax.

Kadyrov himself is a strikingly young man, having inherited the position when his father was killed. With his jutting reddish beard, engaging grin and rolling walk, he looks like a child’s idea of a genial pirate, though much of his record is hardly fit for children’s ears. His staff are dressed in what I have come to think of as Caucasus-official mafia style: dark suits with unbuttoned shirt collars and loosened dark ties; and scattered among the gunmen are a number of young educated looking types. Not exactly what I’d have chosen myself to run a country, but better than the mixture of brigands and fanatics I met around previous leaders of Chechnya.

The meeting with Kadyrov took place in a partitioned section of the conference centre--only about a third of the total space, but still so large that we looked at people on the other side of the round table across an immense expanse of floor.

At first, I was astonished that no food or tea was served, since this is the Caucasus and such hospitality is just as much de rigeur as in Pakistan. Then I remembered that of course this was during Ramadan, and Kadyrov’s father was after all the Grand Mufti of Chechnya, who fought against Russia in the war of 1994–96. He broke with President Maskhadov and went over to the Russian side in the late 1990s after he and his followers came under attack from the international radical Islamist group headed by Khattab and their local Chechen allies. These groups had moved to adopt the Wahabi theology of international radical Islamism, and were trying to destroy Chechnya’s own Sufi Muslim traditions, represented by Kadyrov. The President mentioned that the present Mufti of Chechnya had recently visited the Middle East to visit religious leaders, seek support and exchange views and information on extremism.

It is said that Kadyrov, having been brought up in Chechnya in the 1990s, did not even speak Russian till his father went over to Moscow in 1998, but he now speaks it well, though with a marked Chechen accent. His remarks were well-prepared for effect, with much emphasis on how Chechnya, like Afghanistan, had previously become a magnet for “terrorists from all over the world,” and how Russian help was necessary to defeat this.

Kadyrov also stressed his desire for Chechens to return from abroad, and remarked that several supporters of President Maskhadov had done so. He invited Ahmed Zakayev, the former Chechen foreign minister now in London, to join them, although the Russian government has accused him of being a terrorist and sought his extradition (admittedly, Kadyrov did this in ironic tones, with several references to Zakayev’s former profession as an actor who continued to play-act--“I have rebuilt the Grozny drama theatre specially for him”). The president also said that former separatist fighters--“misguided people”-- had been pardoned and were now serving in his forces.

His remarks, though urbane, contained the occasional flash of the old Chechen spirit. One was when he said that the death of terrorist leader Shamil Basayev had been “the happiest day of my life”, but that “I was also sorry, because I wanted to kill him myself.” Another was when he said that Chechens had gone to fight against Georgia in the latest war--“of course, because we are the best fighters.”

Apart from terrorism and extremism, Kadyrov’s chief accusation against the separatist Chechen governments was that “they wanted Chechen independence, but they had no idea what to do with it.” Instead of a successful modern state, “they created a mafia racket.” By contrast, Kadyrov stressed his own government’s achievements in reconstruction of every kind, including not only buildings, but schools, hospitals and industry.

Kadyrov naturally declared Chechnya’s absolute adherence to the Russian Federation, and conviction that its future depended wholly on union with Russia. Having met him though, I would not be surprised if, should Moscow’s rule ever collapse again, Kadyrov himself would be the next leader to try to take his people to independence. On the other hand, he seems intelligent enough to see that this is not at all likely to happen for a long while to come.

Lunch with Putin

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 10:13:00 -0400

There were moments during the week I spent in Russia for the Valdai Discussion Club when I felt as if the world had begun to rotate backward. Chiefly, this was the result of having spent the previous six weeks in Pakistan, half of them based in Peshawar near the frontier with Afghanistan.

During my stay the bloody mayhem in Afghanistan continued unabated, with a French unit cut to pieces near Kabul. President Musharraf of Pakistan was forced to resign and was replaced by Asif Zardari, a man widely accused of corruption on a kleptocratic scale and hated by much of the country’s population. The Pakistani military began extensive campaigns against pro-Taliban insurgents to the north and west of Peshawar. Several bombs exploded in Peshawar itself, killing dozens of police, soldiers and ordinary people. And the United States began for the first time not only to launch missile attacks on Taliban and al-Qaeda targets in Pakistani territory, but to conduct raids on the ground, leading to a terrifying risk of direct clashes with the Pakistani military, and of Pakistani units mutinying in order to fight on the side of the Taliban. Senior officers and officials in Washington are talking of the possibility of a full-scale U.S. invasion of the Pakistani tribal areas--something which could well lead to Islamist revolt throughout much of Pakistan.

And with this in mind, I had to listen to discussions on the questions of whether there is an existential clash of systems between Russia and the West. Whether NATO should provoke a crisis, and quite possibly a major war with Russia by extending membership to Georgia and Ukraine, and rearm Georgia so that it can make another attempt at the re-conquest of its lost territories--in the process cutting NATO communications to Afghanistan from the north just as they are endangered in the south. And whether (and in what ways) the West should punish Russia for its “aggression” against Georgia. With the West’s own financial structures under frightening pressure, some Western analysts have actually welcomed the drastic fall in Moscow’s stock market as a way of weakening Russia. Not that these views were supported by the vast majority of the Western participants of the Valdai Club, but they provided the context for our meeting; and it was a context which could have been drawn up by Mullah Omar himself, or possibly Ayman al-Zawahiri, since he is much more of a thinker.

But there was another way in which the world seemed to revolve backward during the Valdai, which was if anything even more disturbing. During two lunches over the course of the conference, the president and prime minister of Russia spoke with us for a total of almost seven hours, answering unscripted questions without the help of aides. The foreign minister, deputy prime minister and deputy chief of the general staff spoke with us for several more hours. The chances of this happening in George Bush’s Washington, or indeed most other Western capitals, are zero.

On the other hand, I was told, several U.S. experts who had been invited refused to come because they were afraid that to be seen to talk with Russian leaders would hurt their chances of being selected for jobs in the next U.S. administration, or even their candidate’s chances of being elected president. In particular, they were afraid of attending a conference including meetings with the presidents of Abkhazia and South Ossetia--even though they had the option of not attending them. The idea that it was their duty as analysts to find out what these people are thinking evidently did not occur to them.

In the course of the discussions, we heard a great deal from Russian participants about Russian national interests, and about international peace, stability and cooperation against global threats; but not one word of ideology. The tone was sometimes harsh, but entirely pragmatic. On the other hand, from the U.S. administration and presidential candidates we’ve heard a flood of ideological clichés from the cold war about defending democracy and spreading freedom--platitudes with absolutely no relevance to the reasons for or the circumstances surrounding the war over South Ossetia.

Of course, taken as a whole, U.S. society is much more open and democratic than Russian society; but this is no longer necessarily true of American politicians or Washington elites when it comes to key issues of foreign policy. As for most of the U.S. media, its response to the war over South Ossetia demonstrated that it can on occasion be every bit as hysterically one-sided and willfully inaccurate as the Russian one. Indeed, in this case it was parts of the U.S. media which told by far the biggest single lie--namely the outrageous suggestion, in the face of all the known facts, that it was Russia and not Georgia that started this latest war.

Over the course of our lunch in Sochi, Vladimir Putin congratulated the U.S. media ironically on this performance--they acted “as if they had been given an order.” This raises the interesting question of what is in fact better: authoritarian control from above or mass hysteria from below. The way things are going, we will get plenty of opportunities to study this question in the years to come.