Reheating the Cold War: US, Russia, and the Revival of Rollback

Home , Bullshit

PERSPECTIVES Perspectives on Global Development ON GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT AND and Technology 16 (2017) 736-755 TECHNOLOGY brill.com/pgdt

Gerald Sussman Portland State University [email protected]

Abstract

A neoconservative coalition of oppositional forces, comprised of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party and their allies in the Republican Party, the liberal mainstream media, and the deep state have promoted a new Cold War against Russia. This is in- tended as a mobilizing strategy to overturn the Trump presidency, weaken the Russian state, and reconstruct state legitimacy following years of decline in the quality of life and democracy in America. The coalition reconstructed the Cold War as an ideological tool in the interest of continuing to pursue domestic and global neoliberal policies and dealing with a fractious public disenchanted with government, its elected officials, the mainstream media, and a failing democracy.

Keywords

Boris Yeltsin – CIA – Cold War – Crimea – Donald Trump – Hillary Clinton – NATO – neoconservatism – neoliberalism – NSA – Russia – Ukraine – Vladimir Putin

1 Introduction

Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy. Kennan 1997:118

The international conflicts inherited by the Trump administration and the Obama and Bush administrations before 2017 were embedded in a Cold War

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/15691497-12341459Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 05:43:40AM via free access Reheating the Cold War 737 that never actually ended. The Soviet Union collapsed, but the rollback initiatives, beyond containment, continue to be pursued to the present day. Not a lot has changed in terms of the ambitions of the surviving superpower that views itself, quite openly, as having the unique moral authority to rule the world system based on its hegemony over the international division of production and labor and its overwhelming global military power and presence. Between the end of the Second World War and the present, a decade-long interregnum, the 1990s, was a hiatus in Washington’s conflict with Moscow. During that decade, the US manipulated Russia through Boris Yeltsin, whom it actively supported, particularly during his 1996 presidential campaign. Yeltsin debilitated the country’s economy through the ruthless prescriptions of “shock therapy,” bringing severe destabilization, untold suffering, massive alcoholism, and early death to millions of Russians.1 Upon capturing the Russian presidency in 2000, Vladimir Putin began to turn things around economically and politically, while restoring the national pride that had been badly damaged with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the corrupt and stumbling, alcohol-spiked authoritarian rule of Yeltsin.2 Putin stood up to the US and NATO, the difference, however, between today and the early postwar period being that Russia no longer had a Warsaw Pact. Vice President Biden incited the Russian leadership by publicly declaring that the US opposed any effort on Russia’s part to recreate a sphere of influence even though there was no hard evidence offered of such a Russian agenda. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, pointing to the return of Crimea to Russia,3 described the Russian government in Cold War rhetoric. She even

1 The Yeltsin regime opened the door to the West, relying on Russia’s exports of oil and natural gas. “Shock therapy,” introduced to the country by Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Harvard Institute for International Development, proved disastrous, bringing about social conditions that were considerably worse and longer-lasting than the Great Depression. Similar results followed the introduction of a radical program of market-based policies in other former Soviet republics, including Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan. The US ran Yeltsin’s presidential campaign in 1996, securing a victory, but one that a Yeltsin associate, Russia’s current prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, says was rigged to block the Communist candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, who received the most votes, from winning. See Shuster 2012; Sussman 2010. 2 From 1992 until 1996, when Boris Yeltsin was re-elected as president, the United States made Russia its third largest recipient (at more than $2.1 billion) of bilateral foreign aid. The World Bank and IMF bailed out his government with a $22 billion rescue package, turning a blind eye to Yeltsin’s use of military force to dissolve the Russian parliament in 1993 and his other repressive measures. See Hook 2002; Ralph 2000; Rutland 2000. 3 Crimea historically was part of Russia, from 1783 to the year that the Russian government handed it over to Soviet Ukraine in 1954, where it remained after Ukraine’s independence in 1991. In 2014, it was re-absorbed by Russia, immediately following the coup that overthrew

Perspectives on Global Development and TechnologyDownloaded 16 from(2017) Brill.com09/26/2021 736-755 05:43:40AM via free access 738 Sussman compared Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler, the deepest possible insult consid- ering that the Russians and Soviets lost 27 million people (including Putin’s older brother and grandmother) in their successful efforts to defeat the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union and most of Europe (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty 2009; Rucker 2014). The callousness of such remarks harks back to the McCarthy era, when the American public was subject to a fear campaign that Communists were plot- ting within the major institutions of society—the unions, the universities and high schools, Hollywood, the State Department and other branches of government, even the military—to take over the country. The Soviet Union was seen as an imminent threat, and public schools were subject to regular air raid drills, requiring pupils to duck under their desks in anticipation of a nuclear attack. If children in the 1950s were told that Communists were hiding under their beds, in Cold War 2.0 it’s about Russians lurking inside every phone, computer, email, Twitter account, and website, linking Putin to everything, says Guardian contributor Trevor Timm (2016), “from Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn, Greece, and Spain.” It’s hard to reconcile the pervasive Russo-bogeymania in America with the missing mainstream media (MSM) attention to the massive NSA Big Brother spying on US citizens. Were it not for people like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, the work of WikiLeaks, and the investigative reporting of a few independent and intrepid journalists, the legal and moral transgressions of the state against the people’s right of security under the First and Fourth Amendments would be unknown to the public. This article seeks to provide a critical analysis of the present US-Russia relationship in terms of the larger geopolitical economy in which both countries are major players, the ideological and strategic conflicts, and the new Cold War tensions and war of words that stem from that competition. In comparing the 1950s Cold War era with the present, one thing that has not changed is the pervasive use of propaganda, which has become ever more technologically, though not more substantively, sophisticated. Harking back to West’s caricature of the Tsarist era, America’s MSM have recycled the meme of the aggressive Russian “Bear” approaching the steps of civilization, an evil personified by Putin. This has remained an ideological fixture for US and British ruling circles, helping to build public consensus in defense of privileged interests. The construction of a rogue, heartless Russia was earlier popularized through Hollywood’s adversaries, as in Rocky IV, Rambo, James Bond, Red Dawn, and, for youth, TV’s Rocky & Bullwinkle, which shaped an us-versus-them popular

the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, and a referendum organized by the Crimean parliament and the city council of Sevastopol for the purpose of joining the Russian Federation.

Perspectives on Global Development and TechnologyDownloaded from 16 Brill.com09/26/2021 (2017) 736-755 05:43:40AM via free access Reheating the Cold War 739 antagonism. Even during détentes and “resets,” the gut-level hostility has been close to the surface. Mainstream corporate media have a long tradition of sym- biosis with the imperialist state. Of interest here are the ways in which the Russian caricature is reproduced and the political utilities that it serves for the maintenance of state stability. The US government and the MSM not only have a compelling need to isolate or destroy their adversaries; their propaganda relies heavily on Manichean vilifications to isolate them on moral grounds, the current scale of which has not been seen since the Second World War, and particularly the domestic and overseas efforts of the Office of War Information. This recent defamation of enemies is not difficult to understand when one looks at the history of racial, na- tionalistic, and ethnic propaganda that has dominated official US worldviews since the beginning of the republic. NYU and Princeton emeritus professor and Russia scholar Stephen Cohen (2016c) warns that this current demonization of Russia and Putin “is propelling the new Cold War toward hot war, poisoning American politics, and degrading US media” (italics in original).4 The jingoism against Russia has become a mainstream media feeding frenzy, backed by key proctors in the military establishment. Obama’s chief military advisor and choice for chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, told the US Senate Armed Services committee in July 2015 that “Russia presents the greatest threat to our national security” (Crawford 2015). Defense secretary Ashton Carter declared in April 2016 that of the five greatest threats to America, Russia tops the list. Apart from political-cultural motivations, it is even more determinatively the globalizing and militarized American economic system that structurally and ideologically has a compulsive need for enemies. This is especially the case for those economic planners who argued after WWII the need for a postwar military-industrial complex, called for expansionist overseas policies, and saw the global growth model as warding off major domestic economic down- turns. Seymour Melman (1970, 1974) referred to this military Keynsianism as Pentagon Capitalism and The Permanent War Economy. One will recall the secret NSC-68 plan in 1950 as well as the covert Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in 1997, both of which sought the militarization of the state and new frontiers of conflict, while eschewing diplomatic alternatives. PNAC’s “statement of principles” called for military policies in order “to shape a new

4 The former Guardian journalist, Glenn Greenwald (2016) depicted the American political culture this way: “anyone who advocates better relations or less tension with Moscow is a likely sympathizer, stooge, or even agent of Putin; and any associations with the Kremlin render one’s loyalties suspect.”

Perspectives on Global Development and TechnologyDownloaded 16 from(2017) Brill.com09/26/2021 736-755 05:43:40AM via free access 740 Sussman century favorable to American principles and interests.” The two projects found their fulfillment in, respectively, the Korean War and the invasion of Iraq.

2 Post-Soviet International Relations

Even the demise of America’s only serious adversary did not alter the direction of its global militarism. The bloodless breakup of the Soviet Union, starting in 1989, and its massive withdrawal of military forces from central and eastern Europe and force reductions at home did not in turn precipitate a de-escalation of US global ambitions. Instead, the perceived opportunities of sole superpower status fed the West’s appetite for deeper projection of financial (IMF), economic (WTO, transnational enterprises), and military (NATO) power in that region. Despite a few gestures to the contrary (the Baker-Gorbachev meeting in February 1990, the withdrawal of Russia-controlled nuclear weapons from Ukraine, 1994-96), the US unilaterally expanded its military presence, with- drew from the 30-year-old Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty in 2002, and unofficially cancelled all agreements brokered at Yalta in 1945, without making any major concessions to Russia.5 Whatever cachet the US might have had as leader of the “free world” in the early postwar period, such high ground has been undermined by its aggressive international behavior in the post-Soviet era—a time when many Americans themselves expected the country’s leadership to refocus efforts toward renewing or strengthening the social programs of the New Deal and the Great Society. Instead, the New Democrats who emerged under Clinton in the 1990s, paralleled by New Labour under Blair, extended Reagan’s neoliberal turn in domestic politics and the neoconservative direction of foreign policy. From Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump, the US expanded NATO eastward, engaged in manifold regime change efforts, and developed new on- and off- field weapons systems, including drone warfare. The US also resorted to using primitive forms of political warfare, not actually new in its history, including the use of torture chambers in known and secreted hideouts around the world. Hundreds of political prisoners were dragnetted under a program the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) cynically called “extraordinary rendition.” Meanwhile, the US has fallen farther and farther behind other market econo- mies in delivering social services, including education, health care, and even

5 One of Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s advisers, Georgi Arbatov, told a group of American journalists at the time: “We are going to do something terrible to you. You will no longer have an enemy.” Cited in The Telegraph 2010.

Perspectives on Global Development and TechnologyDownloaded from 16 Brill.com09/26/2021 (2017) 736-755 05:43:40AM via free access Reheating the Cold War 741 a free press, which ranked number 46 worldwide according to the Reporters Without Borders’ 2014 report. Under President Clinton, the US and NATO aggressively pushed further east, contributing to the ethnic conflict and geo-political reshaping of the region. Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary were brought into NATO by 1997, followed during the Bush era by six additional former Soviet bloc countries or parts of countries (the former Yugoslavia) that had become independent states, and then under Obama the addition of Croatia and Albania and his backing of Kosovo’s secession from Serbia. Trump added Macedonia. As revealed by WikiLeaks, the Obama and Sarkozy governments in 2009 had secret conversations about moving Ukraine into NATO, against what was then internally understood as solid Ukrainian public opposition to the idea (WikiLeaks 2009). Following the 2014 coup in Ukraine that forced out the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, the new prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, asked the parliament (Verkhovna Rada) to cancel Ukraine’s non-aligned status and apply for membership in NATO, which the ousted president had opposed. Although the Soviet Union no longer exists, Russia retains, as any sovereign country does under international law, legitimate security rights, especially in light of the hawkish US-led NATO rapid deployment maneuvers inside its “near-abroad” and NATO’s near encirclement of Russia’s borders. Russia’s border security is certainly not a concern in Washington. As Stephen Cohen has consistently argued (Cohen 2006; Smith 2015), the political establishment and the MSM refuse to acknowledge Russia’s need for security, regardless of the sovereignty principles enshrined in the UN Charter.6 On the contrary, he says, the MSM have been nearly unanimous in condemning Russia’s actions in Ukraine and have attacked Putin as well for offering asylum to supposed evildoers, including Yanukovych and Snowden—and, more re- cently, for allegedly “hacking” the US election in 2016. To the issue of border security, were one to reverse the picture, with Russian bases along the Canadian and Mexican borders and in the Caribbean, Washington’s response would certainly be unequivocally aggressive. One has only to recall the “Cuban missile crisis” in this regard. Since Putin’s election as president in 2000, the compliant disposition of Russian politics under Yeltsin toward the US changed, though

6 The UN Charter specifies that the rights of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and self- determination are sacrosanct. The General Assembly adopted on February 27, 1996 a resolution (50/172): “Recognizing that the principles of national sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of any State should be respected in the holding of elections.” The US Congress, however, has not cited this resolution in claiming Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Perspectives on Global Development and TechnologyDownloaded 16 from(2017) Brill.com09/26/2021 736-755 05:43:40AM via free access 742 Sussman

Russia had initially yielded to the status quo of US and NATO bases stationed in CIS countries and other former Soviet republics. The official line in Washington, particularly among Democrats and echoed in the MSM, runs counter to most of the available evidence. While some Russian politicians may hope to restore the reach and power of the former Soviet Union, and indeed there is a great deal of nostalgia among Russians for that era, there is little basis for the US state and media contention that post-Soviet Russia has been an aggressor in eastern European or other regions’ affairs.7 Quite the contrary. Cohen (2016a) argues that NATO is recklessly provoking a country with 10,000 battlefield artillery-ready nuclear weapons, and the US presence in Ukraine could easily hit the trip wire to set off the nuclear exchange. For conservative British journalist Peter Hitchens (2014), NATO and the EU had undertaken in 2013-2014 “a bureaucratic, economic and legal invasion of Ukraine,” an effort to bring that country into its orbit, which he calls “a postmodern form of territorial aggression.” He sees the EU’s motives, however, as more political than economic, as it had no real intention of bailing out a country in such derelict condition. On the question of which country, Russia or the US, should more appro- priately be considered an aggressor state and more persuasively represents a threat to peaceful international relations, one needs to examine the hard evidence. A 2013 Gallup poll of 68 countries found that the US is seen as the biggest threat to world peace. Moreover, if one were to count the number of invasions and “collateral damage” imposed on other countries in the past 50 years, or to compare the number and reach of overseas military bases, or the production, sale, and use of weapons, and therefore the reproduction of vio- lence, the answer would be obvious. As of 2015, Russia had some 25 military bases and installations beyond its borders (all but two, a tiny naval installation in Syria and a joint submarine repair facility in Cam Ranh Bay, located in a neighboring, former Soviet, republic); the US has an estimated 800-1,000 bases and military installations in some 120 far-off countries, and in many that sur- round Russia and China. Both political parties in the US have pursued for many years an essentially bi-partisan imperialistic agenda. Barack Obama, who was given ex-ante the Nobel Peace Prize, finished his two terms with airstrikes or military assaults in at least seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. In response to the Russian actions in Ukraine following the 2014 coup in Kiev, he expanded the US and NATO military presence in eastern Europe.

7 The Public Broadcasting System (PBS) has been a strong supporter of the Russian “aggression” thesis. See PBS 2017.

Perspectives on Global Development and TechnologyDownloaded from 16 Brill.com09/26/2021 (2017) 736-755 05:43:40AM via free access Reheating the Cold War 743

And although Obama reduced the number of troops in war zones, “he vastly expanded the role of elite commando units and the use of new technology, including armed drones and cyber weapons” (Parsons and Hennigan 2017). Regardless of his “anti-establishment” representations, Donald Trump has not strayed from this path of global hegemony.

3 The Russian (Putin) Aggression Narrative

What is the basis on which establishment Democrats and the MSM insist on depicting the Russians in dark conspiratorial terms? As of 2017, there were three major arguments. First, they assert that Russia is an interventionist state attempting to restore the Soviet Union, citing its alleged “invasion” of South Ossetia in 2008. Dan Lamothe, a Washington Post national security reporter, told viewers on C-Span’s Washington Journal on December 26, 2016 that Russia “invaded” Georgia in 2008. But even The New York Times, a usually reliable echo chamber of the State Department, retracted its earlier report that Russia ini- tiated the conflict in that autonomous region (Schwirtz 2008; Schwirtz et al. 2008). There has since been a broad understanding among informed reporters that it was the president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, who attacked South Ossetia and the Russian peacekeepers who were stationed there. Russia forced out the invaders and left South Ossetia with its autonomous status intact. The leading German weekly, Der Spiegel, reported at the time that, according to the EU investigative mission head Heidi Tagliavini, “It was Georgia which triggered off the war when it attacked [the South Ossetian capital] Tskhinvali” (Bidder 2009). Following the Georgian invasion, the pro-US Saakashvili increasingly came under internal criticism for corruption and authoritarianism and fled Georgia in 2013 while under criminal investigation. With the backing of Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, Saakashvili briefly served as a failed governor of Odessa. Meanwhile, Georgia stripped him of his citizenship. Second, Putin is accused of having “invaded” eastern Ukraine and annexing Crimea in 2014. A map purporting to show Russian troops along the Ukrainian border that appeared in The Washington Post on May 3, 2014 failed to indicate the US and NATO troops then present in Poland, Estonia, and Bulgaria and what this might signify about Russian intentions. The Crimean “annexation” followed a March referendum to rejoin Russia with an 83 percent turnout and 97 percent approval. The New York Times, as former Associated Press and Newsweek journalist Robert Parry (2016) noted, continually referred to the Crimean referendum as a Russian “invasion,” as if the preceding US-backed coup in Kiev that year

Perspectives on Global Development and TechnologyDownloaded 16 from(2017) Brill.com09/26/2021 736-755 05:43:40AM via free access 744 Sussman against a constitutionally elected president had greater legitimacy.8 From the Kremlin’s standpoint, had Russia not retaken Crimea, there likely would have been a US-backed Ukrainian cancellation of the treaty that permitted a Russian naval station in Sevastopol, leading to its subsequent takeover by US forces, bringing NATO right to the doorstep of Moscow. Former US ambassador to Russia (1987-1991), Jack Matlock, who had been an advisor to Bush Sr. warned in the 1990s: “Do not expand NATO eastward…. Otherwise, eventually there’s going to be a confrontation [with Russia]” (Washington’s Blog 2014). The Obama administration and the MSM, which condemned the “annexation,” failed to explain how it was significantly different from the Kosovo secession that the US supported following the massive US and NATO bombardment of Serbia, and which eventually ended Serbia’s control over the province. In Kosovo’s case, there was no referendum. Prior to the Kosovo secession, the US had played a vital role in the breakup of Yugoslavia. Although the US hasn’t annexed additional territory, apart from small boundary adjustments, since Philippine independence in 1946, it certainly has been involved in determining the territorial composition and independence of many other countries. Ukraine is but one of multiple countries in which the US has been involved in regime change, an action the State Department prefers to call “democracy promotion.” Others targeted for regime change have included Georgia, Serbia, and Belarus within eastern Europe. Worldwide the list includes Cuba, Chile, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Guatemala, Grenada, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, South Vietnam, Philippines, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, the Congo, Egypt, Brazil, and still more. By the time the US overthrew Slobodan Milošević in 2000,9 the State Department had perfected a “revolution template”—what Mark Beissinger (2006) called a democracy “module.” Enamored by the success in extending NATO eastward, Washington neocons’ ultimate crown jewel is Russia.

8 The referendum led to a series of reprisals by the coup regime against the ethnic Russian population, pushed by neo-Nazi sections of the new government that were followers of the Stepan Bandera fascist movement in Ukraine during the Second World War. Bandera and other pro-Nazi leaders assisted the German military in the murder of millions of Ukraine’s Russians, Jews, Gypsies, and Poles. 9 According to Carnegie-Mellon professor Dov Levin, in Serbia’s 2000 election, the US didn’t want Milošević to stay in power, “So we intervened in various ways for the opposition candidate, Vojislav Kostunica. And we gave funding to the opposition, and we gave them training and campaigning aid. And according to my estimate, that assistance was crucial in enabling the opposition to win.” Levin also asserted that: “If it wouldn’t have been for overt intervention … Milošević would have been very likely to have won another term” (italics added). See Agrawal 2016; National Public Radio 2016.

Perspectives on Global Development and TechnologyDownloaded from 16 Brill.com09/26/2021 (2017) 736-755 05:43:40AM via free access Reheating the Cold War 745

The third major argument is the “evil empire” initiative. Allegedly ordered by Putin was the “hacking” of email files of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign manager, John Podesta. Despite the way in which the story permeated the MSM for the better part of a year (as of mid- 2017), there was no hard evidence revealed to back up the claim. It is alarming that mainstream journalists would accept such a report at face value without more scrupulous investigation of its authenticity. The principal sources of the story were the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA), which every profes- sional journalist should know have regularly deceived the public about their secret operations. The FBI also signed on to the claim, but admits that because of the DNC’s recalcitrance, it never was permitted to see the computers that allegedly were broken into. The CIA lied about Saddam’s involvement in 9/11, his alleged involvement in the 2001 anthrax attacks in the US, his support for terrorist groups, and his import of aluminum tubes for making nuclear centrifuges and purchase of yel- lowcake uranium powder from Niger. The agency likewise lied about black site detention and torture chambers they set up around the world for kidnapped Arabs and other alleged “terrorists” as part of their program of “extraordinary rendition.” One of them, the infamous Abu Ghraib, located outside Baghdad, was kept secret until widely exposed by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, first lied about and then admitted to spying on a Senate intelligence committee charged with CIA oversight, and then attempted to suppress the committee’s report on the CIA torture program and the agency’s cover-up of the program. Unnamed agents from these agencies became the MSM’s trusted sources on the Russian “hacking” story, which had headline coverage through 2017 as it morphed into a narrative about the Trump campaign’s alleged multiple collaborations with the Russian state. James Clapper weighed in by accusing the Russians of having tried since the Soviet era to influence US elections— offering as much evidence as his claims about Saddam’s WMD. The truth about foreign intervention is that between 1946 and 2000, according to a study of Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University, the US interfered in 81 separate elections, the large majority of them undertaken covertly, the Russians were involved in 36. Other than leaving out most of the last two de- cades, which would widen the gap even further, the study did not count invasions of countries, support for military coups, and other forms of political and economic intervention and destabilization (Agrawal 2016). Had Clapper made an honest assessment of state interference in other countries, he might have mentioned the US manipulation of the uprising in Kiev in 2014 to arrange the removal in Ukraine of Viktor Yanukovych in favor of the State Department’s

Perspectives on Global Development and TechnologyDownloaded 16 from(2017) Brill.com09/26/2021 736-755 05:43:40AM via free access 746 Sussman hand-picked successors, Petro Poroshenko as president (US-Ukraine Business Council 2014). Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, bragged to the International Business Conference that Washington had “invested” more than $5 billion in support of opposition forces (Parsons 2014). The official Russian intervention story was not, however, universally ac- cepted within the ranks of the digerati or the more independent journalists. Discussing the official US intelligence assessment issued in January 2017 on alleged Russian interference in the US presidential election, George Beebe, a former CIA Russia analyst, commented that The New York Times read the study as detailed and damning of Russia, whereas “people that work in the information technology industry, cyber experts on the other hand, had quite a different reaction…. [They] generally found it sloppy and weak in the use of evidence…. The report says this is an operation that is explicitly ordered by President Putin with specific goals in mind. The forensic evidence we have in the public domain is not particularly impressive in this regard….” Beebe compared the “hacking” story to the fake WMD report on Iraq, which led to the US invasion of that country (C-Span 2017; Office of Director of National Intelligence 2017). In December 2016, the Department of Homeland Security and FBI issued a joint report, “Grizzly Steppe,” on the alleged Russian cyber attacks, “but security experts,” seeing insubstantial evidence of connections between the Russian state and the invasion of the DNC computers, “have expressed broad disap- pointment with the report” (Morris 2016). Joining the skeptics is cyber security specialist John McAfee. Speaking on a Larry King talk show he publicly disput- ed the Russian “hacking” claims against the DNC and John Podesta. He called it a “fallacy,” arguing that anyone who leaves fingerprints on a hack that tracks him/her as “Russian” isn’t Russian. “If it looks like the Russians did it, then I can guarantee you it was not the Russians.” It’s just a political ploy to “manipulate our opinions,” he contends (Nair 2016).10 “The amount of information and the conclusions that can be drawn from strictly technical forensics are limited,” according to Steve Grobman, chief

10 In July 2017, a group of 16 former and military, NSA, CIA, and private sector cyber security analysts and other ranking defense specialists, under the name of “Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity,” issued a public memo to the US president. In it, they asserted, later joined by Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, that with regard to the “intrusion into the DNC server [during the 2016 presidential campaign], independent cyber investigators have concluded that an insider copied DNC data onto an external stor- age device, and that ‘telltale signs’ implicating Russia were then inserted” (italics added). They insisted that the DNC information was internally leaked somewhere on the US east coast and was not a Russian “hacking” incident (italics added). See VIPS 2017.

Perspectives on Global Development and TechnologyDownloaded from 16 Brill.com09/26/2021 (2017) 736-755 05:43:40AM via free access Reheating the Cold War 747 technology officer at the Intel Security Group. Hackers can “make it seem as if they were coming from Russia,” by putting “strings of Russian in their code and then compromise a machine somewhere in Russia and use it to launch the attack from,” he suggested, making “a convincing story that it is being per- petrated by someone in Russia.” Mark McArdle, chief technology officer with Canadian computer security company eSentire, points out, “While intrusions tend to leave traces—digital DNA—these can sometimes be spoofed.” He reduced the number of potential state actors to China, North Korea, Russia, and Israel, in addition to “a few extremely sophisticated criminal groups such as those behind recent multimillion dollar bank transfer thefts” (Weise 2016). The point is that to date (mid-2017), neither the intelligence community nor the Democrats and their allies have shown unimpeachable evidence of Russian state involvement in the election. But that hasn’t stopped the MSM from droning on without anything close to a smoking gun, or even the quali- fier “alleged.” The mainstream media’s lapse in not demanding hard evidential confirmation and complicity in spreading what amounts to an unsubstanti- ated news story raises serious questions about the moral authority of the MSM and the state.

4 The Decline of State Legitimacy

The crisis of state legitimacy is closely related to America’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy, especially its posture toward Russia in recent years. In turn, it is argued, deteriorating state legitimacy in the US is rooted in the degrading of social protections and thus democracy itself. Once the state is seen as rep- resenting only the privileged and not the society as a whole, it must attempt to restore its legitimacy by deceiving the public about its centrally capitalist and class-repressive character (Carnoy 1984). This contradiction (accumula- tion versus legitimation) came to a head during the 2016 presidential election.11 The election of Donald Trump, a man not trusted within the chambers and boardrooms of power, especially as he advocated during his campaign a nor- malization of relations with Russia, was the immediate trigger. It was the anger of the working class that ultimately brought him to the White House, as voters in the “rust belt” states understood that the Democrats were no longer on their side. That eight multi-billionaires have more wealth than the least wealthy

11 One international measure of the crisis is the reduction of the status of the US from a “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy” by the Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2016 Democracy Index, based on the decline in the trust of government and elected officials. See Shen 2017.

Perspectives on Global Development and TechnologyDownloaded 16 from(2017) Brill.com09/26/2021 736-755 05:43:40AM via free access 748 Sussman

3.6 billion people in the world (Oxfam 2017) is a stark indicator of such con- centration of wealth and power. Trump promised to rectify such inequality, at least in the US, and thereby restore confidence in government. The dissolution of working-class identity with the Democratic party has been spectacular, radically transforming American politics. It was not only the White House that the self-assured Democrats had lost since 2009, but also all three federal governing institutions, most governorships, and 919 state legis- lative seats. Rather than concede their severe loss of credibility, the Clinton campaign chose to blame the Russian government for its defeat at the polls. In many, if not most democracies, such a devastating turn of party political fortunes would automatically lead to the expulsion or voluntary withdrawal of the defeated leadership. In Britain, for example, the failure of the ruling Conservative leadership under David Cameron to defeat the Brexit initiative induced him to step down as prime minister. The year before, Ed Miliband relinquished his post as Labour leader following his party’s defeat at the polls; resignations also followed for the leaders of other defeated parties, the Liberal Democrats and UKIP. Britain presently (mid-2017) awaits the resignation of Theresa May, following the Tories major losses in the 2017 “snap” election. Yet, in the US, after the massive 2016 defeat, the dominant right-wing section of the Democrats (the Clintonites) retained power and indeed doubled down, putting their loyalists back in control of the House and Senate minority leadership positions, plus Tom Perez as the head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the party’s governing body. Beyond the Democrats, trust in the basic organs of democracy in the US is extremely low. According to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey (2015), just 19 percent believe that government is doing the right thing always or most of the time; and a Gallup poll (Swift 2016) in 2016 found that only 32 percent have much or some trust in media. Ironically, according to Gallup, these data con- trasted considerably with the same measures tested in Russia, a country the US disparages as the antithesis of a democracy. Gallup found that trust in the Russian government was 64 percent (2014), trust in Vladimir Putin’s leadership (2017) was 81 percent (88 percent immediately after Crimea rejoined Russia in 2014), and trust that media in their country has adequate freedom reached a record high of 55 percent in 2014. Confidence among Russians in the reliability of state media coverage of Ukraine and Crimea (2014) was 76 percent (Ray and Esipova 2014, 2017).12

12 Another measure of state legitimacy is election turnout. Comparing US congressio- nal elections with that of the Russian Duma (parliament), during a non-presidential (“off-year”) race, the US turnout in 2014 was 36 percent, while the Russian turnout in 2016 was 48 percent, indeed a record low (65 percent in the 2012 presidential election).

Perspectives on Global Development and TechnologyDownloaded from 16 Brill.com09/26/2021 (2017) 736-755 05:43:40AM via free access Reheating the Cold War 749

Beneath the decline of institutional and state legitimacy of the Democrats and the weakening of their governing power across the country, lies the failure of both parties to defend middle class and working class interests in the areas of health care, education, housing policies, employment, and privacy protections. Even with the reduction of the uninsured from 14.6 percent in the first quarter of 2008 to 11 percent in the first quarter of 2016, there remained 28.6 million people without health coverage, and those with insurance faced sky- rocketing premiums, drug prices, co-pays, and deductibles. Of the average one million personal bankruptcies of Americans filed over each of the past five years, 62 percent according to a Harvard Medical School study, have resulted from medical expenses (Himmelstein et al. 2009). As of February 2016, Big Pharma had contributed $1 million spread over ten candidates in that year’s presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton receiving more than a third, well over twice as much as the second largest beneficiary, Jeb Bush (Kounang 2016). Education costs have also exploded. In-state tuitions at public universities rose on average 28 percent (many much higher) from 2008 to 2015, resulting in an imposed debt-bondage on millions of university graduates (Groden 2016). Total student loan debt in the US as of early 2017 was $1.3 trillion, spread among 44 million Americans, larger than total credit card debt. A university degree no longer provides most students with long-term work security, half taking jobs that require no college education. Most jobs created since the 2008 economic crisis have been in this category (Adams 2013; Friedman 2017; Groden 2016). Housing is another crisis that has only been exacerbated in recent years, with declining rates of ownership since its peak in 2004. Although the Obama administration achieved some cuts in homelessness, particularly among military veterans, one conservative estimate was that in 2013-2014, 1.49 million people lived in homeless shelters, with another 578,424 sleeping without shelter—on the streets, in cars, tents, and other exposed places—and this only counts those reporting their situation. The US Department of Education identified 1.3 million homeless students enrolled in US preschools and K-12 schools, a 100 percent increase over the 2006-2007 school year. This counts only enrolled youth and not young adults (EW 2016; US Department of Education 2016). Neither Clinton nor Trump addressed this as a campaign issue in 2016. On the issue of employment, recovery from the 2008 recession, the worst since the Great Depression, was slow. Republican leaders in control of Congress as of 2011 blocked policies to foster full employment, wage gains, and other conditions favorable to labor markets, including pro-union initiatives, while fiscal austerity at the federal and state levels radically reduced welfare spend- ing for the working poor. The Obama administration helped to reduce the official unemployment rate by half from the 10 percent stated level in 2010, when

Perspectives on Global Development and TechnologyDownloaded 16 from(2017) Brill.com09/26/2021 736-755 05:43:40AM via free access 750 Sussman the recession hit rock bottom, but real wages were no higher in 2016 than they were 20 years earlier. Wealth and productivity gains continued to be taken by the top 1 percent, particularly the rentier class. Lower-wage industries absorbed 22 percent of the recession’s job losses, but accounted for 44 percent of employment growth over 2010-2014, employing 1.85 million more workers than at the start of the recession. Higher-wage industries, on the other hand, absorbed 41 percent of job losses, and only 30 percent of new employment growth. As of 2014, there were 976,000 fewer jobs in higher-wage industries compared to the start of the recession. Medium-wage industries took 37 percent of job losses, adding only 26 percent of new employment growth, resulting in 958,000 fewer jobs in this range than at the start of the recession (National Employment Law Project 2014). Americans continued to experience erosions of democratic life during the Obama years in the area of personal privacy (Fourth Amendment) and First Amendment rights. Before Obama, Bush’s Patriot Act was attacked by the American Civil Liberties Union for its widespread abuses of privacy protections. Bush routinely used color-coded “terrorist” alerts to instill public fear, as his administration led an assault on Iraq’s political and economic structures and got the US bogged down in an unwinnable invasion of Afghanistan while at home reworking the regulatory and tax structures to favor the wealthiest sections of the country. Obama didn’t resort so much to fear tactics, but his NSA secretly undertook programs to spy without warrants on millions of citizens’ phones, computers, and even cars and TV sets. Of the 13 people prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act during the past century for leaking state secrets, eight of them were arrested under the Obama administration (Wootson 2017).

5 Conclusion

The fall of the Democrats in recent years has led their leadership to engage in political projection, finding others to pin the blame for their own shortcom- ings. As a party that shares with Republicans a neoliberal economic agenda as well as a neoconservative foreign policy, the Democrats, unlike in the past, failed to distinguish themselves as the defenders of workers’ interests. Instead, they relentlessly pursued the “Russiagate” controversy with the unending re- frain that the outcome of the 2016 presidential contest was the result of foreign intervention. Did Americans take this seriously? According to a Gallup poll in February 2017 (Jones 2017), it appears they did not. The biggest problem facing America, according to the poll, is “dissatisfaction with government.” Russian “interference” in US politics, even with the constant droning of the

Perspectives on Global Development and TechnologyDownloaded from 16 Brill.com09/26/2021 (2017) 736-755 05:43:40AM via free access Reheating the Cold War 751 liberal mainstream media on this issue, does not show up as a concern of most Americans (a mere 1 percent cited the “situation with Russia” as worrisome). What is to be made, therefore, of the Democrats’ and MSM obsession with Russia? One essential rule is follow the money. John Bonifield, a producer for CNN, admitted that CNN kept promoting Russia hysteria simply for ratings while ignoring more important stories, such as climate change (Evangelista 2017). This, he conceded, is based on the station’s overarching concern for maximizing audience share, which is quite low compared to network news. Describing the Russian coverage as “mostly bullshit right now,” Bonifield also admitted that “we [CNN] don’t have any big giant proof” of Russian interference in US politics and that most of his colleagues share his cynicism about the station’s news reporting. This suggests that station management, not the reporters or pundits, call the shots on what’s considered newsworthy and that the amount of coverage bears no relationship to truth-seeking or importance to the country. Another explanation for Russophobia has to do with the broader national and global policy objectives of a superpower, which can brook no challenges— especially the proposition put forward by countries such as China and Russia of a global balance of power. An academic author, Dominic Tierney (2016), has found that:

[D]uring eras of safety, the United States loses its preoccupying focus and people turn their attention to domestic affairs. The in-group versus out- group boundaries start to blur. Americans are less sure of their national identity. Social cohesion may be replaced by a mood of fractiousness. People become more distrustful of national institutions, including the presidency. During these eras, military interventions are targeted against amorphous threats or humanitarian emergencies, often involve nation- building or peacekeeping operations, and tend to be unpopular (Pg. 54).

Perhaps the best explanation is the decline of state legitimacy which, building on what Tierney suggests about the tendency toward the breakdown of social cohesion in an inward-looking society, leads to a search for enemies. The US certainly has had an insular outlook on the rest of the world for most of its history, from its foundational beliefs in and commitments to “manifest destiny,” isolationism toward Europe, Nativism, “America First” nationalism, limiting immigration (especially of Asians and Latin Americans), religiosity, hostility to socialism, global exceptionalism, etc. The unobstructed playing field that came with the fall of the Soviet Union left America’s global corporatists and militarists without a serious challenge, which, aided by the advent of digital

Perspectives on Global Development and TechnologyDownloaded 16 from(2017) Brill.com09/26/2021 736-755 05:43:40AM via free access 752 Sussman technology, led to policy shifts in favor of deregulation, cuts in social protec- tion programs (austerity), and global economic, industrial, and financial ex- pansionism. For most Americans, it is the decline in the quality of life that has led to a crisis in state legitimacy. With the ongoing breakdown of social cohesion, as widely observed and reported, the state found a way to continue to serve the strategic interests of ruling elites and at the same time distract the public from the palpable realities of growing inequality. The “war on terror” was useful to that purpose to some extent but wore thin with a war-weary public. Russia’s resistance to America’s regime change efforts that were directed against governments once friendly to Russia (Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, Syria, and others) required a new ideological mobilization, a new Cold War. The Trump election inspired an oppositional coalition of Clinton Democrats, several Republicans, the mainstream media, and the deep state, and served as a mobilization weapon to weaken the Russian state and the US president. At best, it is a very unstable coalition, which offers middle and working class Americans little to look forward to, and even less to believe in. At worst, it is a pathway to inconceivable destruction.

References

Adams, Susan. 2013. “Half Of College Grads Are Working Jobs that Don’t Require a Degree.” Forbes Magazine. May 28. Agrawal, Nina. 2016. “The U.S. Is No Stranger to Interfering in the Elections of Other Countries.” Los Angeles Times. December 21. Associated Press. 2016. “Bad News: Just 6 Percent Of People Say They Trust The Media.” April 18. (https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/bad-news-just-6-percent- people-say-they-trust-media-n557591). Beissinger, Mark R. 2006. “Promoting Democracy: Is Exporting Revolution a Constructive Strategy?” Dissent Magazine Winter:18-24. Bidder, Benjamin. 2009. “EU Investigators Debunk Saakashvili’s Lies.” Der Spiegel. October 1. Carnoy, Martin. 1984. The State and Political Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University. Cohen, Stephen F. 2006. “The New American Cold War.” The Nation, 10 July. Cohen, Stephen F. 2016a. “The Obama Administration Recklessly Escalates Confrontation with Russia.” The Nation. February 9. Cohen, Stephen F. 2016c. “The Imperative of De-Demonizing Vladimir Putin.” The Nation, November 2. (https://www.thenation.com/article/the-imperative-of-de- demonizing-vladimir-putin/).

Perspectives on Global Development and TechnologyDownloaded from 16 Brill.com09/26/2021 (2017) 736-755 05:43:40AM via free access Reheating the Cold War 753

Crawford, Jamie. 2015. “Joint Chiefs Nominee: Russia Greatest Threat to U.S.” CNN. July 10. C-Span. 2017. “Russia and the US Elections.” January 26. Editorial Board. 2016. “The Pentagon’s Top Threat? Russia.” The New York Times. February 3. Evangelista, Nicholas. 2017. “American Pravda: CNN Part 1, Russia Narrative is all about “Ratings.” Project Veritas. June 17. E.W. 2016. “How Many Homeless People are there in America?” The Economist. February 22. Friedman, Zack. 2017. “Student Loan Debt in 2017: A $1.3 Trillion Crisis.” Forbes Magazine. February 21. Greenwald, Glenn. 2016. “What’s Behind Barack Obama’s Ongoing Accommodation of Vladimir Putin?” The Intercept, September 9. Groden, Claire. 2016. “Public University Tuition Has Jumped 28% Since Recession.” Fortune Magazine. (http://fortune.com/2016/01/08/tuition-hike-recession/). Himmelstein, David, Deborah Thorne, Elizabeth Warren, and Steffie Woolhandler. 2009. “Medical Bankruptcy in the United States, 2007: Results of a National Study.” The American Journal of Medicine 122(8):741-746. Hitchens, Peter. 2014. “Who is the Aggressor? Some Thoughts on the Continuing Crisis.” Daily Mail, March 22. (http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/03/who-is- the-aggressor-some-thoughts-on-the-continuing-crisis.html). Hook, Steven W. 2002. “Inconsistent U.S. Efforts to Promote Democracy Abroad.” Pp. 109-128 in Exporting Democracy: Rhetoric vs. Reality. Edited by Peter J. Schraeder. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Jones, Jeffrey. 2017. “Government Dissatisfaction Returns as Most Important Problem.” Gallup News, February 9. Kennan, George F. 1997. At a Century’s Ending: Reflections, 1982-1995. New York: Norton. Kounang, Nadia. 2016. “Big Pharma’s Big Donations to 2016 Presidential Candidates.” CNN. February 11. Melman, Seymour. 1970. Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War. New York: McGraw-Hill. Melman, Seymour. 1974. Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline. New York: Simon & Schuster. Morris, David Z. 2016. “Grizzly Misstep: Security Experts Call Russia Hacking Report ‘Poorly Done,’ ‘Fatally Flawed.’” Fortune Magazine, December 31. Nair, Ajay. 2016. “‘It’s A FALLACY’: John McAfee Shuts Down ‘Manipulative’ FBI Claims of Russian Hacking.” Sunday Express (London), December 30. National Employment Law Project. 2014. “The Low-Wage Recovery: Industry Employment and Wages Four Years into the Recovery.” Data Brief, April.

Perspectives on Global Development and TechnologyDownloaded 16 from(2017) Brill.com09/26/2021 736-755 05:43:40AM via free access 754 Sussman

National Public Radio. 2016. “Database Tracks History of U.S. Meddling In Foreign Elections.” NPR News, December 22. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 2017. “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections.” January 6. Oxfam. 2017. “Just 8 Men Own Same Wealth as Half the World.” January 16. Parry, Robert 2016. “The Dumbed-Down New York Times.” Consortiumnews.com, 27 August. (https://consortiumnews.com/2016/08/27/the-dumbed-down-new- york-times/). Parsons, Christi and W.J. Hennigan. 2017. “President Obama, Who Hoped to Sow Peace, Instead Led the Nation in War.” Los Angeles Times. January 13. Parsons, Renee. 2014. “Chronology of the Ukrainian Coup.” CounterPunch, March 5. PBS. 2017. “U.S. NATO Troops Surge in Europe after Russian Aggression.” NewsHour. January 22. Pew Research Center. 2015. “Beyond Distrust: How Americans View Their Government.” November 23. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. 2009. “Biden to RFE/RL: US Won’t Tolerate Russian Spheres of Influence.” October 26. Ralph, Jason G. 2000. “‘High Stakes’ and ‘Low-Intensity Democracy’: Understanding America’s Policy of Promoting Democracy.” Pp. 200-218 in American Democracy Promotion: Impulses, Strategies, and Impacts. Edited by Michael Cox, John Ikenberry, and Takashi Inoguchi. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ray, Julie and Neli Esipova. 2014. “Russians Rely on State Media for News of Ukraine, Crimea.” Gallup. July 25. Ray, Julie and Neli Esipova. 2017. “Economic Problems, Corruption Fail to Dent Putin’s Image.” Gallup. March 28. Rucker, Philip. 2014. “Hillary Clinton Says Putin’s Actions are Like ‘What Hitler Did Back in the ’30s.’” The Washington Post. March 5. Rutland, Peter. 2000. “Russia: Limping Along Towards American Democracy?” Pp. 243- 266 in American Democracy Promotion: Impulses, Strategies, and Impacts. Edited by Michael Cox, John Ikenberry, and Takashi Inoguchi. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schwirtz, Michael. 2008. “Georgia Fired More Cluster Bombs than Thought, Killing Civilians, Report Finds.” The New York Times. November 6. Schwirtz, Michael, Anne Barnard, and C.J. Chivers. 2008. “Russia and Georgia Clash over Separatist Region.” The New York Times. August 9. Shen, Lucinda. 2017. “The U.S. Was Just Downgraded from a ‘Full’ to ‘Flawed Democracy.’” Fortune Magazine. January 25. Shuster, Simon. 2012. “Rewriting Russian History: Did Boris Yeltsin Steal the 1996 Presidential Election?” Time Magazine. February 24.

Perspectives on Global Development and TechnologyDownloaded from 16 Brill.com09/26/2021 (2017) 736-755 05:43:40AM via free access Reheating the Cold War 755

Smith, Patrick 2015. “‘Architects of American Policy towards Russia and Ukraine are Destroying American National Security’: Stephen F. Cohen on the Truths U.S. Media and Politicians Hide.” Salon.com. April 23. Sussman, Gerald. 2010. Branding Democracy: US Regime Change in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe. New York: Peter Lang. Swift, Art. 2016. “Americans’ Trust in Mass Media Sinks to New Low.” Gallup. September 14. The Telegraph (UK). 2010. “Georgi Arbatov.” Obituary. November 14. Tierney. Dominic 2016. “Does America Need an Enemy?” National Interest, November/ December, pp. 53-60. Timm, Trevor. 2016. “The Rush to Blame Russia for the DNC Email Hack is Premature.” The Guardian. July 25. US Department Of Education. 2016. “Education Department Releases Guidance on Homeless Children and Youth.” July 27. US-Ukraine Business Council. 2014. “Obama Strongly Supports Poroshenko in Warsaw; U.S. Security Assistance to Ukraine Fact Sheet.” June 4. VIPS. 2014. “U.S. Intelligence Veterans Believe the ‘Russian Hack’ of DNC Computers May Have Been an Inside Job.” Truthdig. July 24. Washington’s Blog. 2014. “Former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union: The U.S. and NATO Are Provoking the Ukrainian Crisis.” Global Research. September 5. Weise, Elizabeth. 2016. “Experts: Hard to Prove Russians behind DNC hack.” USA Today. July 25. WikiLeaks Public Library of US Diplomacy. 2009. “A/S Gordon’s Meetings with Policy- Makers in Paris: A Tour D’horizon of Europe and Afghanistan.” Public Library of US Diplomacy. September 16. Wootson, Jr., Cleve. 2017. “Trump Rages about Leakers. Obama Quietly Prosecuted Them.” The Washington Post. June 8.

Perspectives on Global Development and TechnologyDownloaded 16 from(2017) Brill.com09/26/2021 736-755 05:43:40AM via free access