Moscow Meh
For all the hype around the Biden-Putin summit, Russia is basically a second-rate power with nukes. Also, Republicans hate critical race theory a lot more than than they understand it
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Earlier today, President Joe Biden sat down with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva. It was the first summit meeting between the two men, and it’s one that had journalists buzzing. “Showdown between Biden and Putin” blared news headlines throughout the day on Tuesday. "Biden Preparing Intensely for Meeting With Putin,” the chyrons read at CNN.
After four years of Donald Trump’s strange relationship with the Russian strongman and the elevation of Putin into, perhaps, America’s number one foreign bogeyman, the media coverage was to be expected. But that doesn’t mean it made much sense or that the lack of real news from the meeting is surprising.
However, left out of the breathless coverage of the Biden-Putin summit is that Russia is no longer a great power or even a serious challenger to the United States. Its economy is sputtering; its population restive; life expectancy remains far below other developed countries (it’s even four years behind China), and Moscow has few friends in the international arena outside Belarus and Syria. And with friends like that, who needs enemies.
Military, Russia is in a stronger position than it was a few years ago. But that doesn’t mean it can meaningfully project power outside its borders. Moscow continues to play a destabilizing role in Ukraine, but when it comes to NATO countries like the Baltic states or those in Eastern Europe, Russia is a minor threat. Of course, Russia still has a large nuclear arsenal, but just as deterrence worked to avoid nuclear conflict during the Cold War it is playing a similarly pacifying role today. Indeed, the two leaders focused more in their talk today on Russia’s use of cyberweapons rather than nukes.
One of the reasons why Russia has invested so heavily in cyber is that it lacks the conventional military capabilities to seriously threaten its adversaries. Russia’s use of cyberweapons is emblematic of Russia’s weakness, not its strength.
The Russian economy is the 11th largest in the world, squeezed between Canada, which has a quarter of the population of Russia, and South Korea. It’s a tenth the size of the American economy. US trade relations with Moscow are trifling. Russia is America’s 26th largest trading partner, behind other “major powers” like Singapore, Malaysia, Switzerland, and Colombia. The $34 billion in trade between the two countries is $600 billion less than the US trade relationship with China.
In short, Russia is a declining, second-rate power with nukes. A meeting between Biden and Putin is not a meeting of equals.
That’s not to say that a sit down between the two men is not important and valuable. "Restor(ing) predictability and stability to the US-Russia relationship, as Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary said when previewing the summit, is a worthwhile goal. Russia certainly can cause trouble in its near abroad, and its Solar Winds hack of US federal agencies last year demonstrates its sophistication in launching cyberattacks. A drama-free relationship between the US and Russia is better than the alternative. And there are areas of shared interest between Moscow and Washington: the Iran nuclear agreement and the political situation in Syria and Afghanistan. But aside from its cyberattacks, Russia is more of a nuisance to the United States than a serious rival.
Few countries are looking to Moscow for guidance or support or seeking to imitate its political and economic model (except perhaps for other authoritarian leaders). While Moscow is working to tighten its ties with China, it’s because Beijing sees Russia as a potential counterweight to the United States, not a peer country. The US bilateral relationship with China will go a long way toward charting the future of international relations over the next several decades. The US and Russia: meh.
Biden was likely doing Putin a considerable favor by even agreeing to the summit. The event gave the Russian leader a chance to preen on the international stage and pretend that he stands on an equal footing with the US president. But Biden was wise to dismiss a joint press conference with Putin and avoid giving him the extra PR boost he wanted.
It’s understandable that after Trump’s bromance with Putin that the news media would expend so much energy covering Biden’s meeting with the Russian leader. But it’s presenting Americans with a distorted image of international affairs. China, the EU, Brazil, the Far East, and India are the countries that matter to the United States and its long-term economic and security interests. A summit meeting between Biden and China’s Xi Jinping is of far greater significance. Russia is, to quote Hyman Roth, “small potatoes.”
Critical Race Theory?
The latest craze sweeping right-wing America is critical race theory, which 16 states have passed or are considering laws to ban the teaching of in schools. Unfortunately, there is one problem: those who oppose critical race theory don’t seem to know what it is. Take Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts, who, when asked on a radio show to define it … struggled.
“So, the critical race theory — and I can’t think of the author right off the top of my head who wrote about this — really had a theory that, at the high level, is one that really starts creating those divisions between us about defining who we are based on race and that sort of thing and really not about how to bring us together as Americans rather than — and dividing us and also having a lot of very socialist-type ideas about how that would be implemented in our state,” Ricketts said, recommending the caller read about it.
Huh? In fairness to Ricketts, Nebraska has not yet passed a law banning the teaching of critical race theory, so Ricketts has time to get up to speed. Though he’s already made up his mind that it’s bad.
In Alabama, Republican State Representative Chris Pringle has proposed legislation making it illegal to teach critical race theory in the state’s public schools. So surely he can speak knowledgeably about it? Alabama.com columnist Kyle Whitmire tried to find out, and … it didn’t go well.
“It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people because of the color of their skin, period,” Pringle said.
That sounded very serious, indeed. Nazi-like, even. So I asked Pringle if there were any critical race theorists he could point to who have been spreading such toxic garbage?
“Yeah, uh, well — I can assure you — I’ll have to read a lot more,” he said.
.. Were there other examples he could give me where critical race theory was being put into practice?
“These people, when they were doing the training programs — and the government — if you didn’t buy into what they taught you a hundred percent, they sent you away to a reeducation camp,” Pringle said.
.. .Pringle is a Realtor, a homebuilder and general contractor and he dug through what he called his “executive suite” (the cab of his pickup truck) looking for an article he’d read. After a few moments of silence, he began to speak again, this time a bit haltingly.
“Here’s an — it doesn’t say who it was, it just says a government that held these — these training sessions …”
Pringle trailed off and I told him that, if he liked, he could send me a link to the article, but then he began to speak again.
“The white male executives are sent to a three-day re-education camp, where they were told that their white male culture wasn’t their —” he trailed off again.
I was worried that we’d lost our connection. These sorts of conversations sometimes end abruptly, but Pringle was still on the line and after a little more hemming and hawing he retreated to a common safe-space of politicians who’ve crawled too far out on a limb: He just wanted to start a conversation, he said.
“I introduced a very brief version of the bill to start the conversation, but it’s very difficult in this cancel society to have a frank discussion about racism in this country and this country’s history,” he said. “I mean, history is being rewritten and I’m not exactly sure of the accuracy of what’s there now and what they’re trying to change it into.”
Frankly, it would make things a lot easier if Ricketts and Pringle would be honest about this. Just say that critical race theory makes their white supporters angry (even though they don’t know what it is), and angry white people are their political base. That’s the reason why Republican state legislatures are seeking to ban it.
See, sometimes politics can be rather easy to explain.
Musical Interlude
Last night I saw my first live concert since February 2020. It was wonderful! The venue was the New York jazz club “Smalls,” and the first show featured the Eric Alexander Trio. While this clip is a quartet, it does include Joe Farnsworth, who played drums last night (and is fantastic). Enjoy!