Bush’s Bumbling Meets Putin’s Paranoia

We’re all familiar with the counsel never to attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity. Russians have undoubtedly heard this maxim. Russians do not seem to care for it.

Or at least, the KGB-smelted brutes that have installed themselves as the country's ruling clique do not care for it. Today’s menacing illustration is Vladimir Putin’s state of the nation address, in which he denounced the Bush Administration’s plans to bring its missile defense fantasies to Poland and the Czech Republic and announced that Russia will respond in kind by putting a “moratorium” on compliance with the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty:

Mr. Putin said, the Kremlin would use its future compliance with the treaty as a bargaining point in the dispute with United States over American proposals to install missile defenses in Europe.

Mr. Putin’s announcement, made in his annual address to Parliament, underscored the Kremlin’s anger at the United States for proposing a new missile-defense system, which the Bush administration insists is meant to counter potential threats from North Korea and Iran.

The missile defense program of the 1980s was a scientific daydream that became a budgetary fiasco that a dim but lucky president warped into a useful diplomatic tool. The missile defense system of today is a scientific daydream that has remained a budgetary fiasco that a dim and jinxed president has warped into diplomatic mayhem.

It worked in the first place because the Soviets were convinced that Yanqui technology was essentially indistinguishable from magic, a deeply flawed assumption that has persisted and been mixed with the Napoleon-on-Elba complex of post-Soviet Russia. More than anything, the Kremlin is a devotee of classic realpolitik and aspires to resurrecting itself as a great power. Any ideologically-driven action in the region is interpreted as an en passant the Pentagon planned eight moves ago, an encroachment on the Kremlin’s sphere of influence and an insult to Russia – in amidst his ranting about phantom technology, Putin “also chided the West for what he called meddling in Russia’s domestic affairs in the guise of democracy-promotion efforts.” Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International being, of course, natural allies of the Bush Administration.

Worried yet? Wait till you see how Condoleezza Rice responded to Putin’s paranoia:

“The idea that somehow 10 interceptors and a few radars in Eastern Europe are going to threaten the Soviet strategic deterrent is purely ludicrous, and everybody knows it,” Ms. Rice said before a meeting of NATO foreign ministers expected to focus on the missile-defense dispute.

“The Russians have thousands of warheads,” Ms. Rice said. “The idea that you can somehow stop the Soviet strategic nuclear deterrent with a few interceptors just doesn’t make sense.” [Emphasis added, naturally.]

I would like to believe that this is some clever back-channel diplomacy, a way of subtly but forcefully telling the Russians that if they want to fume about starting a new cold war they’d better be damn serious, that the U.S. government knows what it’s doing and we’re ready to face them down old school.

But I’ve learned a few things about this Administration over the past six years. I’m not quite prepared to attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.