Why Rile Russia?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Tuesday, April 10, 2001; Page A19
In 1861, with Union spirits low after Bull Run, Charles Wilkes, captain of the U.S. warship San Jacinto, intercepted the British steamer Trent, removed Confederate agents Mason and Slidell, who were sailing to Europe, and brought his prisoners to Fort Warren in Boston Harbor.
Unionists went wild. But Victoria was not amused. The queen regarded Wilkes's coup as piracy and kidnapping on a vessel flying the British flag. With all of England howling for war with the detested Yankees, the Royal Navy cleared the decks and 8,000 troops sailed for Canada. A stunned Abraham Lincoln beat a hasty retreat, let Mason and Slidell go, and told his secretary of state, "One war at a time."
Sound advice. As President Bush decides whether to arm Taiwan with advanced U.S. warships, and Beijing's belligerence mounts, why are we antagonizing Russia? Recently U.S. officials met an envoy of Chechen rebels who had just murdered 21 Russians and wounded 130 in car bomb attacks. A week earlier, we expelled 50 "spies." The White House has said Bush has no desire to meet President Putin any time soon.
Again, why are we driving Russia into the arms of China?
A decade ago, Moscow marched the Red Army out of Eastern Europe, allowed the captive nations to dump over their Communist regimes, and let the Soviet Union dissolve into 15 nations. Ronald Reagan, who had decried the "evil empire," was being cheered in Red Square.
Yet since Russia called off the Cold War, we have broken our word and moved NATO to its borders, smashed its old Serb ally and now collude with Azerbaijan and Georgia to cut Russia out of the Caspian oil trade. Bush aides talk of bringing Baltic states into NATO and forging new military bonds with ex-Soviet republics.
How would we react if a Russia, victorious in the Cold War, invited Cuba into the Warsaw Pact, handed a war guarantee to Panama and cut us out of the oil trade with Mexico?
But U.S. arrogance is matched by Muscovite folly. If Tony Blair is complaining of spies, Putin is overloading the circuits. Russia is also selling weapons to Iran and providing Beijing with destroyers, anti-ship missiles, submarines and fighter-bombers to contest the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
Putin must know that America, its superpower hubris aside, does not threaten Russia. But the Islamist regime in Iran is a threat in the Caucasus; and after Hong Kong and Taiwan have been digested, China will look to recover its lost lands in Russia.
In the treaties of Aikun and Peking in 1858 and 1860, China was swindled by agents of Alexander II out of 350,000 square miles along the Amur and Ussuri. On that territory today sits the trans-Siberian railroad and port of Vladivostok. In 1969 Soviet and Chinese troops clashed on both rivers. Chinese settlers are slowly moving in, just as Americans once moved south into the Mexican province of Texas.
Russia is a dying nation. Its population is down to 145 million, and Putin has said it may fall to 123 million by 2015 -- a 15-year loss as huge as all the dead in the Great Patriotic War. By 2025, Iran will have as many people. Russians are today outnumbered by Chinese 9 to 1. East of the Aral Sea, the ratio is closer to 50 to 1. In the 1990s the quarrels that exploded into wars within and between nations were ideological, territorial, religious and tribal. With Bolshevism dead, no such quarrel exists between America and Russia. If there is any vital U.S. interest, it is that Russia not be dismembered by the warriors of Islam or by a China which, by 2025, will have 1.5 billion people.
Bolshevik Russia was an enemy, but Orthodox Russia is part of the West, a natural ally. Why, then, treat it as a potential enemy? Would we really prefer the Chinese across the Bering Strait?
Moscow has behaved boorishly, but Beijing drowned in blood the Tienanmen Square heroes, has persecuted Christians and the Falun Gong, shipped nuclear technology to Pakistan and missiles to Iran, fired rockets over Taiwan, threatened us with war if we dare to intervene, upgraded Saddam's air defense against U.S. pilots -- and been rewarded with annual favored-nation trading status and $400 billion in trade surpluses with the United States in a single decade.
That was Clinton's legacy. Is it the Bush policy as well?
With Europe steaming, Moscow embittered, Arabs enraged, Iran and Iraq hostile, North Korea threatening and China forcing down U.S. planes, perhaps we should recall Mr. Lincoln's counsel to Mr. Seward, "One war at a time."
The writer was the Reform Party candidate for president in 2000.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
washingtonpost.com |
