Prevaricators, fence sitters and ‘low life’
In my recent article The National Interest has moved to Moscow, I discussed the dramatic repatriation to Russia in both the physical and moral sense of one of America’s best known Russia experts, Dmitry Simes. This occurred against a background of sharp deterioration in American-Russian relations and open hostility in the States to anyone presenting a middle ground on issues separating the two sides. This has made it very difficult for fence-sitters.
One other notable case of a fence sitter who abandoned the pose of neutrality and has become an open and unapologetic Russian patriot is Dmitry Trenin. Unlike Simes, Trenin did not have to move house, only to move office, since he was and is established in Moscow. From 2008 to 2022, Trenin headed the Carnegie Center, Moscow.
Let us not mince words, the Carnegie Center, Moscow like other NGOs bearing the “Carnegie” name combined with words like “Peace,” have been for decades projections of American Soft Power and defenders of its global hegemony. Given Trenin’s background in the Soviet-Russian military (1973-1993) and also in key defense related foreign relations activities (member of the Soviet delegation to negotiations with the USA over nuclear weapons 1985-91), I assume that he saw his job at the Carnegie Center as trying to promote mutual understanding between these adversarial countries. That was a worthy objective, no doubt. However, objectively speaking, his presence in the Carnegie Center, Moscow gave respectability to an organization that should have been shut down long ago because of its publications and activities directed against the existing order in Russia.
With the start of the Special Military Operation in Ukraine, Dmitry Trenin left the Carnegie Center and changed course 180 degrees. Already in May 2022 he spoke publicly in favor of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. He called upon Russia to be pursue its “war with the West” to successful conclusion. The West is the enemy, he said. Per Trenin, all Russians should back the government in this vital mission. These quotations and the respective sources are set out in Trenin’s Russian language entry in Wikipedia.
*****
Simes and Trenin are high professionals with doctorates in fields relevant to their daily activities. They have now realigned their activities with the changed times that leave little or no room for fence sitters.
Now I wish to direct attention to another high professional in the field of Russian – American relations, also the holder of a relevant doctoral degree in political science (Cambridge): Anatol Lieven. Unlike the two experts cited above, Lieven has remained a fence sitter and has, strange to say, gotten away with it and done very well for himself. Week after week he publishes articles that are arguably propaganda for the Ukrainian war cause and appear in the most prestigious journals and websites in the United States and the United Kingdom. Yet he still is listed as a contributor to the Valdai Discussion Club.
Please note, it is not my intention or my interest to go after one man for his inconsistencies and his lies in public space. I have bigger game in mind: those who employ Lieven, those who publish and promote Lieven as if he were an objective and serious contributor to discussion of policy issues. This big game includes the Quincy Institute, the American Committee for US-Russia Accord, where he is a member of the Board of Directors, and The Nation, which features his articles and pitches them to its subscriber base of Progressive Democrats.
Lieven’s professional career is an open book that you can read in his Wikipedia entry. Suffice it to say that he began his career as a war correspondent and served his time in some difficult locations including Pakistan, Afghanistan and Chechnya. He then rounded out his academic credentials and spent further years as a professor with Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service at its campus in Qatar. After leaving that post, he was appointed to the prestigious position of Director of the Eurasia Program at the Washington-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Now we see his name week after week as the author of articles dealing with Ukraine and the war with Russia.
Lieven is prolific and I will not take the reader’s time to look at his entire opus. Let us just consider three of his articles here. I provide the links below so that everyone can see the source and decide for himself/herself about the fairness of my remarks.
Just three weeks into the Special Military Operation, Lieven published an article declaring that “Ukraine already won the war.” His claims were quite outrageous and largely repeated the stories coming out of Kiev as regards Russian incompetence and the rally-round-the-flag phenomenon in Ukraine. Lieven gave no consideration to the issue of total subjugation of opposition voices within Ukraine during the consolidation of Zelensky's dictatorship.
A year later we find Lieven pursuing the same subject of how the war has hardened Ukrainian national identity. Here in what looks like a bit of real journalism he tells us that the Ukrainians are now maybe going too far in their disparagement of Russians, that in fact he has seen and heard ethnic slurs against Russians that border on racism. Regrettably, Lieven then disculpates the Ukrainians, lets them off the hook by suggesting that the Russians are doing the same. We read the following in his 17 April article in The Nation:
Once again, every day on Russian TV you can see hate-filled ethnic insults directed at Ukrainians (for example, portraying them as descended from miscegenated Polish serfs)
To this I say to Mr. Lieven that I watch a good deal of Russian state television and have never heard an ethnic insult of any kind directed against Ukrainians. To be sure, derogatory words do exist in the Russian language. However, Russians on television only speak of Ukrainians as “adversaries” (противники) or “neo-Nazis” and that is almost exclusively used by combatants in the field. My conclusion is that Lieven is lying through his teeth.
Finally, I point to Lieven’s 23 April article written from his hospital bed in Ukraine. This again tells the story of Russian military incompetence and Ukrainian valor as related by the Kiev regime. If we are to believe Lieven, the Russian air and missile strikes are ineffective and inaccurate, killing and maiming innocent civilians. Lieven passes along what he hears from his Ukrainian interlocutors without filter or logic test. He is doing no more or less in this regard than the BBC or Euronews, which are both propaganda disseminators these days, not objective news agencies.
I am aghast that not only the Quincy Institute but also the American Committee for US-Russia Accord have seen fit to present to their online readers the text of Lieven’s hospital bed report, which otherwise was published by the Sunday Times of London. Lieven is enjoying both prestigious backers and wide circulation at a time when what the United States and European publics badly need is sober reporting of the risks we face by continuing on our merry way towards the abyss through support for the Zelensky regime.
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/03/18/has-ukraine-already-won-the-war/
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/ukraine-russia-nationalism-war/
Also see www.usrussiaaccord.com
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023