Winter is Coming (20 page)

The two most significant phone calls of the twenty-first century were made on September 11 and 12, 2001. Both were made by Vladimir Putin to George W. Bush after the al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The first call, just a few hours after the attacks, was received by Bush’s national security advisor Condoleezza Rice in a bunker under the White House, since Bush was unreachable on
Air Force One.
This is Rice’s description of the call from her 2011 memoir,
No Higher Honor:

I asked to speak to Sergei Ivanov, but Putin got on the phone. “Mr. President,” I said, “The President is not able to take your call right now because he is being moved to another location. I wanted to let you know that American forces are going up on alert.” “We already know, and we have canceled our exercises and brought our alert levels down,” he said. “Is there anything else we can do?” I thanked him, and for one brief moment the thought flashed through my head:
the Cold War really is over
(italics in the original).

Putin reached Bush the next day. Here is Bush’s description from his 2010 book,
Decision Points:
“When I talked to Vladimir the next day, he told me he had signed a decree declaring a minute of silence to show solidarity with the United States. He ended by saying, ‘Good will triumph over evil. I want you to know that in this struggle, we will stand together.’”

With two phone calls probably totaling sixty seconds of his time and costing him absolutely nothing, Putin had cemented himself with the Bush 43 administration as a friend and ally. Bush’s comment three months earlier about looking Putin in the eye and getting a sense of his soul had put him in an awkward position rhetorically, but this was real solidarity. Or at least it was accepted as real, and that perception is why it mattered, and mattered more than any actual cooperation ever could.

Putin saw the opportunity for exactly what it was. The first call was the most important despite not having reached the president. It etched Putin into the moment, into Bush’s mind, and forever into history as “the first foreign leader to call Bush on 9/11.” In the second call, the famously cold KGB man also spoke in terms the emotional and sympathetic Bush would most appreciate at the traumatic moment. Solidarity, struggle, a moment of silence, good and evil. . . . It was a perfect performance and it paid untold dividends over the next seven years.

Contemporary reports of the calls and their supposed significance for the new world order were no less enthusiastic. “The Cold War really was over” and now the historical enemies would unite in this new great war, the war on terror; that was the consensus. Putin was the first to realize how valuable an ill-defined, never-ending war could be, although others would catch on soon enough.

Putin jumped at the chance to portray 9/11 as another front on the war on terror Russia had been fighting in Chechnya for so many years. The fact that there was never evidence that the Chechens were a part of any global jihad didn’t prevent the Kremlin from claiming so routinely. Bush and Rice had both spoken out strongly against human rights abuses in Chechnya previously, but all that ended after 9/11. Mikhail Kasyanov, who was Putin’s prime minister at the time, later said that it was like a magic bullet that made all criticism disappear.

Putin’s promise of aid was real in this case, and Russia had the local expertise and connections to be useful to the American effort against the Taliban. So did several Central Asian autocrats, who were nearly as quick as Putin in realizing that this was a chance to escape US pressure over their own woeful human rights records. As al-Qaeda and the Taliban melted away in Afghanistan and the Bush administration’s eyes turned to Saddam Hussein and Iraq, Putin resumed his usual obstructionism.

What’s so wrong with solidarity and cooperation against a common foe after a horrible disaster? Nothing, of course. Nor do I think the Bush administration was too naive to realize that Putin was always seeking advantages for himself. As the Bush administration suggested at the time—and its members have made this clearer in their high stack of memoirs—it was a matter of priorities. If Putin would help with Afghanistan and provide intelligence that might save American lives, then that was far more important than pressuring him on civil liberties in Russia.

It’s hard to imagine many people disagreeing with this stance, and if this trade-off were the only possible option I would agree with it myself. The problem is that it is a fallacy to say that any cooperation with despotic regimes requires overlooking human rights. Nor does a moral foreign policy preclude pragmatic action in a time of crisis. A moral foreign policy means your positions on certain matters are clear no matter what, and that you won’t forget about them when it’s convenient. This is essential because otherwise human rights and moral issues become just another chip on the geopolitical gaming table. Not coincidentally, that’s exactly how Putin and other dictatorships treat human rights. They jump at every chance to gain leverage, to be helpful in the short term in order to better consolidate their repressive regimes and escape international censure. The free world must hold itself to a higher standard if it hopes to encourage others to do so.

A related fallacy says that taking human rights off the bargaining table weakens foreign policy, or even imperils national security. To take the bigger picture first, let us agree that the more liberal democracies there are in the world, the safer we all will be. “Never” is a risky word in any argument, but it’s safe to say that healthy democracies almost never make war on each other. In the long run, policies that promote the creation and success of more democracies improve national security. It is fundamentally flawed to believe you can achieve the ends of moral policy with the means of moral compromise. You cannot go north no matter how small the steps you take south.

The year 2014 was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of the great Soviet physicist and human rights beacon Andrei Sakharov. Rediscovering some of his lectures and articles at the time, I was tremendously impressed with his clarity of thinking on this cloudy topic. I knew he was a very brave man, of course, and he spoke as someone who had faced the most difficult moral battles anyone could face. The “father of the Soviet H-bomb” became an important voice for nuclear anti-proliferation. A hero of the Soviet Union became its prisoner and its most effective critic. His premature death in 1989 changed the course of the world, as I very much believe his presence would have guided Russia toward a better path than what we achieved without him. Sakharov was our Mandela figure, and without him it was too easy to pretend we could put the crimes of the Soviet Union behind us without ever truly facing them.

The three years of freedom Sakharov had before his death were largely owed to just the sort of moral stand he advocated. In the October 1986 Reykjavik summit between Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, the American president disappointed Gorbachev by staying firm on American commitment to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). A series of bold proposals and counterproposals to drastically reduce, even completely eliminate, their nuclear arsenals fell apart. Reagan was criticized by many at the time, and was even distraught about the result himself, but as we know in hindsight this refusal to give an inch in Reykjavik was a serious blow to Gorbachev’s hopes to save the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev returned home realizing that if Reagan wasn’t going to throw him a lifeline, dramatic reforms in domestic policies were the only way the USSR could survive. Perestroika began. One of Gorbachev’s first acts, heavy with symbolism, was to call Andrei Sakharov to release him from six years of internal exile and abuse. Sakharov was elected to the new parliament in March 1989, but died of heart failure just nine months later.

Sakharov was not a pie-in-the-sky idealist. He championed universal principles but was well aware of the limitations of trying to influence the Soviet regime. When he wrote a letter entreating the US Congress to pass what ultimately became known as the Jackson-Vanik amendment, in 1973, Sakharov stayed with the matter at hand—Jewish emigration from the USSR—instead of making grand speeches. He was a crafty verbal tactician. Knowing he couldn’t openly call for legislation that was seen as punitive toward his home country, Sakharov wrote that the USSR had been “developing under conditions of intolerable isolation” and made the case that the amendment would alleviate that isolation, and thus was actually beneficial to the USSR.

This was a clever and ironic maneuver, since the Jackson-Vanik amendment was devised to pressure the Soviets into relaxing emigration controls by tying them to trade relations, and was clearly a tool of isolation of the Soviet
regime,
not engagement. But it engaged the Soviet
people
and held out the hand of friendship and freedom to them directly, a critical distinction. What could be a more effective criticism of the Soviet Union than millions of its citizens yearning to be free? When discussing the amendment in his memoir, Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin wrote that any demand for emigration was “a reproof to our socialist paradise” and “that anyone should have the temerity to want to leave it was taken as a rank insult!”

Sakharov’s letter to Congress also made use of the dissident tactic of “civil obedience,” demanding that the Soviet government respect its own laws and international laws. “The amendment does not represent interference in the internal affairs of socialist countries, but simply a defense of international law, without which there can be no mutual trust.” The anti-Putin movement adopted this tactic as well. Our protests were often based on demands that the government abide by the Russian constitution, which, in theory, guaranteed rights of assembly and speech that the Putin regime routinely violated.

Sakharov’s letter was published a few days later on a full page in the
Washington Post,
leading to Leonid Brezhnev’s rage and the bizarre statement that the letter was “not just an anti-State and anti-Soviet deed, but a Trotskyist deed.” Ironically, the administration of Richard Nixon was just as angry about it.

Sakharov was an opponent of detente, a word he and other dissidents accurately saw as a euphemism for appeasement. His fellow dissident and collaborator Natan Sharansky summed up the resistance to their movement from the “realist” camp led by Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, who saw the Soviet dissidents as troublemakers who threatened to derail his carefully balanced realpolitik. Sharansky writes, “Kissinger saw Jackson’s amendment as an attempt to undermine plans to smoothly carve up the geopolitical pie between the superpowers. It was. Jackson believed that the Soviets had to be confronted, not appeased.”

Sharansky, who has himself spoken and written with great eloquence and authority on moral policy, goes on to cite his friend: “One message [Sakharov] would consistently convey to these foreigners was that human rights must never be considered a humanitarian issue alone. For him, it was also a matter of international security. As he succinctly put it: ‘A country that does not respect the rights of its own people will not respect the rights of its neighbors.’” Putin’s Russia is a perfect example of this truth.

The moral policy view was shared by another well-known dissident, exiled author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who used the American founding fathers to illustrate the point. At a lecture in New York City on July 9, 1975, Solzhenitsyn said, “The men who created your country never lost sight of their moral bearings. They did not laugh at the absolute nature of the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ Their practical policies were checked against that moral compass. And how surprising it is that a practical policy computed on the basis of moral considerations turned out to be the most far-sighted and the most salutary.”

If I may take the liberty of boiling Solzhenitsyn’s prose into an aphorism, the most moral policy also turns out to be the most effective policy. Believing otherwise leads to false trade-offs that imperil liberty without enhancing our security.

After discussing it for years, when the United States moved to finally revoke Jackson-Vanik in 2011, I complained about the timing of the move. The borders of Russia were open, so the original purpose of the amendment was obsolete. But to lift this landmark piece of human rights legislation while Vladimir Putin was returning Russia to totalitarian darkness was a terrible idea. More than anything, the measure confronted the USSR instead of appeasing it and said very loudly and clearly that individual freedom mattered. Jackson-Vanik was a relic of a past era, but it was a powerful symbol. To repeal it without putting something in its place would send a message that either the United States no longer cared about these universal rights or that America believed Putin’s Russia was not an authoritarian regime.

In 2011, I joined the global campaign launched by Bill Browder to promote the Magnitsky Act, partly as a way of replacing Jackson-Vanik by once again connecting American (and later European) foreign policy with human rights abuses in Russia. I gave several lectures in DC and wrote op-eds urging Congress and the Obama administration not to reward Putin for destroying Russian civil society and for persecuting those who exposed his crimes.