Ukraina - USAs generelle politikk bør likne Trumans - The Economist

 

Great-power politics

In Ukraine, Biden must relearn Truman’s lessons from the cold war

America once again seeks to curb Russia and China without blowing up the world

Mar 26th 2022

WASHINGTON, DC

Joe Biden entered the White House last year styling himself on Franklin Roosevelt. The better model today might be Harry Truman. His words to Congress 75 years ago this month—“It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures”—girded America for the cold war. Those words have a new resonance as Ukraine, helped by the West, battles to resist Russia’s month-old invasion.

As in the 1940s and 50s, the world is separating into distinct blocs. The Eurasian giants, Russia and China, are again making common cause. America is seeking to counter them by mustering allies around their periphery, from Europe to Japan. Truman’s America was engaged in a fight against communism; Mr Biden sees a global contest against autocracy. The cold-war strategy of “containment” is being studied for the current age.

Understanding Russia’s president
Writers have grappled with Vladimir Putin for two decades

Greyness, greed and grievance have been the dominant themes

 

Mar 26th 2022

He warned us. Vladimir Putin gave notice of who he was, and what he was capable of, in “First Person”, a transcript of interviews published in 2000, at the start of his overlong rule. In his youth, he recalled, he had been a tough little hoodlum who fought rats in the stairwell of his communal-apartment building and, later, brawled with strangers on the streets of Leningrad. “A dog senses when somebody is afraid of it,” he had learned, “and bites.” He prized loyalty and feared betrayal. He was hypersensitive to slights, to both his country and himself (concepts which, in the decades that followed, became perilously blurred). 

He bore grudges.One of them was over the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the interviews he reminisced about a jaunt to Abkhazia and a judo tournament in Moldova: the Soviet empire had been his wealth and pride, and when it fell, he took it hard. “I wanted something different to rise in its place,” he said of the lost Soviet influence in eastern Europe. Frantically burning papers as a kgb officer in Dresden in 1989, grieving the “paralysis of power” that seemed to have afflicted Moscow, he came to associate protesting crowds with disintegration. Corruption, meanwhile, was only to be expected in Russia, he implied—“and if somebody thinks that somebody stole something, let him go and prove it.”