Under pressure, a Ukrainian court annulled the results and ordered a rerun. The schism within Ukrainian society remained so strong that even after the electoral fraud scandal, 44 percent of Ukrainians voted for the disgraced Yanukovych.
With 52 percent of the vote, Yushchenko’s victory was secure, but the Orange Revolution was not. Yushchenko’s presidency was defined by infighting, corruption, abuse of executive power, and ineffectiveness. Running for reelection in 2010, he got less than 6 percent of the popular vote. But Washington’s encouragement of the Orange Revolution had convinced the Kremlin that the U.S. was capable of unseating a government in the post-Soviet space. That was a game changer.[31]
To judge from its record of intervention in non-Western societies in the past twenty-five years, America’s urge to improve the world has become persistent, aggressive, and unyielding. Bill Clinton had called the United States the “indispensable nation,” and Barack Obama called it “exceptional.” Despite the fact that Obama’s declaration was largely for domestic consumption, intended to appease conservative audiences in the United States, Vladimir Putin responded with a furious piece on the op-ed page of the New York Times. “God created us equal,” he growled. “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. …It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States.” The interventionist intellectual Robert Kagan responded with a smile: “What gives the United States the right to act on behalf of a liberal world order? In truth, nothing does, nothing beyond the conviction that the liberal world order is the most just.”[32]
Where Putin saw geopolitical failure—Afghanistan “reeling,” Libya “divided into tribes and clans,” Iraq still in the throes of civil war—Kagan saw promising if unfinished political engineering. Most of the “sizeable” U.S. military operations of the past twenty years, he noted with approval, had not been responses to “perceived threats to vital national interests. All aimed at defending and extending the liberal world order—by toppling dictators, reversing coups, and attempting to restore democracies.”[33]
The interventionist politician most eager to seize the opportunity for another Kitchen Debate was Senator John McCain. Who is Putin to judge the United States, McCain indignantly asked in an essay posted on the Russian news site Pravda. “He has given you a political system that is sustained by corruption and repression and isn’t strong enough to tolerate dissent.” He had made Russia a “friend to tyrants and an enemy to the oppressed”; he did not even have enough faith in the Russian people to trust them to handle freedom. “I do believe in you,” McCain assured his Russian audience. “I believe in your capacity for self-government and your desire for justice and opportunity.” Exemplary in its tone deafness—McCain was talking to a foreign nation as one would to a delinquent child—the address became infamous.[34]
Furthermore, no term McCain used—“justice,” “opportunity,” “freedom”—could be defined with any degree of precision. Twenty-first-century Americans do not see eye to eye on fundamental rights and liberties, and while debating these fundamentals is, of course, the norm of human existence, it is strange to demand that “they” be like “us” when “we” cannot agree on what we are. Why, for example, advocate gay marriage in developing countries at a time when homophobia was rampant among American presidential hopefuls?
What McCain no doubt viewed as a plain-spoken expression of universal values that only barbarians would oppose, Russians saw as an example of arrogant, almost willful cognitive dissonance. When it came to American support of the Russian punk group Pussy Riot, the dissonance came to seem grotesque.
In 2010, the members of Pussy Riot staged a flash mob performance in the national cathedral in Moscow, chanting “Mother of God, kick Putin out.” It is most unlikely that the action was intrinsically politicaclass="underline" the group’s prior performances had included copulation in a natural history museum. The event was more in the vein of Marina Abramović’s artistic provocation than Andrei Sakharov’s ideological dissent. No matter how we define it, however, it involved the desecration of a holy site.
Rather stupidly, a Moscow court sentenced the young women to jail terms. But when commentators in the United States declared Pussy Riot martyrs of the anti-Putin revolutionary movement, many Russians found it odd: they had not forgotten that just thirty years before, the privileges of Russian Christians had sat at the top of Washington’s human rights agenda. In the days of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, desecration of a church in Russia would have been called a godless Communist act. Yet on the day the 2014 Olympics opened in Sochi, Russia, the New York Times ran an editorial stating that no celebration of Russian Olympic hospitality should overshadow the plight of the women of Pussy Riot. Americans saw no contradiction: they had spoken out for freedom of religion for Russian Christians when that was under assault, and they spoke out for Pussy Riot’s freedom of expression for the same reason—even if that expression offended the very Christians they had once supported.[35]
But Russians did see a contradiction, and to them it smelled of opportunism. Washington seemed willing to support any dissent in Russia—pro-church under Communism, anti-church under Putin—so long as it undermined existing authority. If the Western campaign of solidarity with the women of Pussy Riot had any practical effect at all, it was to compromise the opposition in the eyes of the pro-Putin Russian majority.
Obama’s ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul, certainly did not see it that way. He had come up with the concept of a “dual track” in Russia: dealing simultaneously with the government and the opposition. Arriving to Moscow in January 2012, he cheerfully introduced himself to the Russian media as a “specialist on democracy and revolution.” The timing could not have been worse: Moscow was going through the strongest anti-Putin protests ever. McFaul apparently thought he had arrived just in time for the start of the Russian Spring.
The Kremlin did not hesitate to make its displeasure clear. Harassed by government TV crews, who seemed to know the ambassador’s schedule better than his assistants did and shadowed his every move, McFaul eventually lost his cool, publicly called Russia a “barbaric, uncivilized country,” and in February 2014 angrily submitted his resignation—in the midst of the crisis his “dual track” diplomacy had facilitated.
Twenty years earlier, the then “pro-Western” Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev told Clinton’s Russia hand Strobe Talbott: “It’s bad enough having you people tell us what you’re going to do whether we like it or not. Don’t add insult to injury by also telling us that it’s in our interests to obey your orders.” Talbott’s assistant at the time, Victoria Nuland, good-naturedly commented: “That’s what happens when you try to get the Russians to eat their spinach. The more you tell them it’s good for them, the more they gag.” In his memoir, Talbott smirks: “Among those of us working on Russia policy, ‘administering the spinach treatment’ became shorthand for one of our principal activities in the years that followed.”[36]
When, at the end of the spinach years, Russia handed a landslide electoral victory to the xenophobic strongman Vladimir Putin, Talbott and Clinton acted surprised. Nuland, meanwhile, moved up in the world, making a name for herself in December 2013 on the streets of the Ukrainian capital, Kiev.
32
“A Plea for Caution from Russia: What Putin Has to Say to Americans About Syria,”
33
“A Plea for Caution from Russia: What Putin Has to Say to Americans About Syria”; Kagan, “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire.”
34
“Senator John McCain: Russians Deserve Better than Putin,” Pravda.ru, September 19, 2013, http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/19-09-2013/125705-McCain_for_pravda_ru-0 (retrieved February 20, 2015).