To Russia, with loathing?
Are we supposed to hate Russia again? Not “hate” in a jingoistic sense. Not “Russia” in terms of its people. But, you know, are we supposed to boo and hiss and shake our star-spangled banners at what Russia stands for these days?
Boycott Sochi!
This has been a season of mutually assured aggravation. A thawed Cold War, now a generation gone, has simmered to a Tepid Spat.
“I was able to get a sense of his soul,” former president George W. Bush said of Russian president Vladimir Putin in June 2001.
“He’s got that kind of slouch,” President Obama said earlier this month after canceling plans to meet with Putin because there was “not enough recent progress in our bilateral agenda,” as White House spokesman Jay Carney put it.
From soul-searching to slouching, in a dozen years.
From diplomatic “reset” to diplomatic “pause” just during Obama’s tenure.
The cause? Russian scholars blame Putin, whose return to the Kremlin in May 2012 inaugurated this period of recalcitrant conservatism, renewed anti-Americanism and intimidation of dissidents and political challengers. He has given up on Russia’s more progressive, urban middle class in favor of appealing to traditionalists in small towns and agricultural areas that exist on government donations, says Leon Aron, director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
“His sense is ‘give them the red meat,’ ” says Aron, who grew up in Moscow. “Give them cultural policies that would establish the regime as a defender of traditional Russian values. He’s reaching into fairly dangerous stuff: into Russian nationalism, into xenophobia, into selective recovery of the Soviet symbols, including Stalin.”
Putin’s support among his constituents, like Obama’s, has eroded over the past five years, but so has Russia’s view of the United States. Russians favor China over the United States by a margin of 11 percentage points, according to the Pew Research Center. And the United States now occupies a position in the Russian psyche usually held by Georgia or Estonia: Least friendly country, according to Maria Lipman, scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center, who says that the Russian government has positioned the State Department as a villain just as the Soviet empire did with the CIA.
“When you hear on television on a daily basis that America wants to do harm to Russia, to impose its will on the rest of the world, of course it works,” Lipman says. “Foreign policy is being driven by domestic developments, and anti-American rhetoric has been instrumental in responding to the defiance in the streets, the protests against the regime. In one of his earliest responses to the unprecedented scene of mass political rallies, Putin said [the protests] were inspired by Hillary Clinton.”
Now the American public has begun to respond in kind. After Putin signed a law last month that limits public expression of support for nontraditional relationships (read: gay), the American peanut gallery suggested boycotting the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, or at least boycotting Stolichnaya vodka. (Never mind that Stoli is made in Latvia and owned by a Luxembourg company.)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/to-russia-with-loathing/2013/08/18/12a62ae4-051c-11e3-a07f-49ddc7417125_story.html