Russian President Vladimir Putin’s year-end press conferences are becoming more like theatre performances every year.
In fact, I got the impression watching his three-hour show yesterday that it was worthy of actor Spalding Gray’s four-hour, one-man show, Swimming to Cambodia.
Except that, there is probably more truth in Gray’s theatrical script than there ever is in Putin’s political spin.
In this case, Putin strutted and fretted his hours up on the stage mostly blaming the United States for all that ails Russia. You know: a rouble plummeting in value, foreign companies competing with rich Russians to divest as much as quickly as possible, and falling oil prices making the economic foundation of his highly touted Novorossiya seem like quicksand.
But Putin blaming the United States for Russia’s economic woes is rather like Nixon blaming the Soviet Union for Watergate.
Remarkably, even when Putin blurted out a relatively factual and cogent argument, he promptly undermined it by weaving it into a larger theme that could only make sense in the parallel universe he’s trying to create in Russia.
For example, here is what Putin said about the obscene amount of money the United States spends on military defense:
The budget of our defense ministry for the next year has increased, in dollars it is about $50 billion. The Pentagon budget is almost 10 times bigger…
[A]nd you want to say we are the aggressors?
(Channel 4 News, December 18, 2014)
I sympathize. In fact, here is how I presaged Putin’s main point years ago (albeit with respect to China, not Russia):
American foreign policy has long been characterized by insidious hypocrisy and egregious double standards. And nothing demonstrates these features quite like the Bush Administration insinuating that China is becoming a regional and international menace because it has budgeted $45 billion in military expenditures for fiscal 2007. After all, Bush has budgeted $625 billion to feed America’s military industrial complex for this same year.
(“Who Says America Is Concerned about China’s Booming Military,” The iPINIONS Journal, March 11, 2007)
I disagree, however, with Putin’s insinuation that Russia’s comparatively small budget completely refutes any claim that it is an aggressor.
For this is rather like a scavenging hyena devouring the carcass of a gazelle, then accusing a plant-eating elephant of doing so just because the elephant is, well, 1000 times bigger.
What’s more, it was the undisputed record of Russia’s aggression (not just in Ukraine, but Georgia too) that forced the United States and Europe to impose the sanctions that are contributing so much to its economic woes.
This is why Putin analogizing Russia to a big bear just feeding itself and protecting its territory was the most self-flattering and self-delusional part of his very self-indulgent media performance yesterday.
The reality, of course, is that sanctions and the plummeting price of oil have him looking now like a preening czar wearing no clothes. Moreover, I fear that, like any bully, Putin will feel compelled to flex his military muscles (by picking on one of his weaker, non-NATO neighbors) just to cloak himself again in the aura of a superpower He-Man: beware Transnistria, Moldova, Georgia.
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