Speaking truth to power: more lessons from the Scott Ritter case
This essay will not be about Scott Ritter, the man, but about related issues that arose in a virtual discussion via the Comments function here or in direct emails to me over my ‘contrarian’ remarks with readers of these pages and viewers of my two youtube.com interviews that went on air yesterday. Please note that I am responding to the serious, respectfully couched questions and/or criticism that comes my way, not to poison-pen tirades which also show up in Comments and are systematically deleted.
As I said, my overarching intent was to explain to the two generations of Americans who have entered public life as teachers, journalists and other roles as influencers since 1989 what the rules of behavior were for people of my generation who lived through Cold War 1.0. After 1989, relations with the great adversary, the USSR, seemed to be headed for normalization with its successor state, the Russian Federation, and the rules of caution we practiced were quickly forgotten.
The first rule was never to take money or its equivalent in goods and services from government agencies of the adversary in exchange for doing ‘favors’ of one kind or another. That was considered to be a sure path to entrapment. This particular issue is at the crux of today’s case against Scott Ritter, though it is set in the context of a law, the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), that is so old and so little used by the authorities that most Americans have never heard about it.
Quite apart from any legal vulnerability from taking money or favors, taking money from RT, Sputnik or equivalent simply does not look good to the broad public one is hoping to influence. It tends to compromise the high ideals one is supposedly serving when speaking truth to power.
In fact, FARA was the model for Vladimir Putin’s law on foreign agents that raised such a hullaballoo over the alleged link between autocracy and restrictions on freedom of information when Russia enacted its own equivalent act several years ago. That act was also largely the model for a bill directed against foreign NGOs that the parliament of Georgia, the Caucasus nation, passed a couple of months ago after being denounced by angry and at times violent street demonstrators in Tbilisi who were in the pay of the usual American, British and EU intelligence services.
In what follows, I will discuss why the underlying notions of FARA as it will likely be applied to Ritter are grossly out of touch with the dynamics of how states formulate foreign policy and what room is open for would be domestic influencers or influencers from abroad. This discussion will necessarily lead me to the issue of what is the dry residue of all efforts by a domestic Opposition movement to change the direction of foreign policy. If we cannot do that, then what are we in fact achieving by our writings and nonstop appearances in media? Finally, I will share my thoughts about the legacy of Professor Steve Cohen in questions of speaking truth to power. That will take me into the swamp of the general cowardice of academics, but so be it.
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There are several different nets set by FARA to catch Americans who are ‘agents’ of foreign powers and are active in public life. The ostensible objective of the law is not to prohibit Americans from acting as influencers on behalf of foreign paymasters but to require that they register with the Department of Justice. That registration would all by itself tend to discredit these people in the eyes of their intended audiences. To be seen as a foreign puppet or shill is no recommendation of honesty or trustworthiness.
The category into which Ritter’s case falls is those who are paid by a foreign country to engage in public relations, to exert influence on public opinion through publications and other means and ultimately to have an impact on the direction of the foreign policy of the United States in one direction or another.
The underlying notion of how foreign policy is set on which FARA is grounded does not correspond to reality. In the United States, as in most countries, foreign policy is the prerogative of the Executive branch of government, which is under no obligation to listen to public opinion and in fact does not listen to it. For more than 30 years responsible polls have shown that the American public does not want forever wars, does not support America’s role as global policeman, and yet this has in no way been reflected in the country’s behavior on the international stage.
To be sure, under the United States Constitution the Legislative branch, namely the Senate, has the power and obligation to monitor and control the setting of foreign policy and its implementation, including vetting those nominated by the President to implement his policies at the Department of State, and powers over the budget to rein in or let out appropriations for given foreign policy operations.
In practice, Congress has for decades now mostly abdicated its oversight function. Its bipartisan majority on foreign policy questions tends to operate in sync with the Administration. Nonetheless, foreign powers can and do exercise influence in greater or lesser degree on Congress. Not through paying journalists but through payments to Congressmen to help finance their electoral campaigns. This ‘lobbying’ is precisely the mechanism used by the most successful influencer of all with respect to U.S. foreign policy, the State of Israel. Other countries do the same but with fewer tangible results. As for journalists, and in particular journalists from the alternative media or online portals today, their access to Congressmen is nil and the cash they could bring to electoral campaigns is negligible. End of story.
I do not mean to suggest that this is the way things have always been in the past or how they may remain in the future. In the 1970s and 1980s, I was a member of what I would call a platform created by academics, businessmen and print media to promote détente: the American Committee of [sic] East-West Accord (ACEWA). On the board of directors, there was George Kennan, then teaching at Princeton, and by this time publicly rethinking the Containment policy of which he was the author back in 1949.. The chairman was Donald Kendall, the long-serving chairman and CEO of Pepsico, who was also chair of the US-USSR Trade & Economic Council. I was there in the name of the corporate giant who was my employer. Steve Cohen was there as a protégé of Kennan.
ACEWA was a top-down organization that did not want a big membership. Its ambition was lobbying Congress, setting up meetings in the ‘watering holes’ of Congress with select Representatives and Senators for quiet chats while ensconced in leather armchairs and nursing their glasses of bourbon on ice. It had a publishing activity on the side, and this is where I made my contributions to their work.
Perhaps ACEWA had some slight influence on key Congressmen. However, it missed its opportunity to grow its ranks and greatly expand its public heft in the 1980s, when ‘progressive humanity’ and U.S. academics in particular were moved to action by the Reagan administrations Star Wars legislation and by delivery of U.S. cruise missiles to Germany to threaten the Soviets. ACEWA chose to remain a closed gentleman’s club under instructions from its chairman: Kendall was close to Reagan and did not want to embarrass the President by ACEWA, with its corporate financiers, appearing to back the anti-war movements on campus and in the streets.
The old ACEWA folded its tents in the months following the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the reason for its existence seemed to have been resolved, no thanks to its own efforts. A new ACEWA, this time The American Committee for East-West Accord was established by Steve Cohen and myself in 2015 when relations between the United States and Russia had again deteriorated to what we may call Cold War 2.0. But it, too, was a gentleman’s club at the behest of its single most important financial backer, Cohen’s wife, publisher of The Nation magazine. The members of its Board of Directors included several big names in American politics and academic life, but under its charter there were to be no general members. That ACEWA was dissolved after Cohen’s death and a successor organization was created with similar structure and modus operandi. So much for lobbyists working on the side of the angels by talking to Congress to gain leverage over foreign policy.
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Moving on to the question of the ‘dry residue’ of all the writings and video appearances of the present-day Opposition personalities, myself included, I maintain that we have nil effect on the conduct of U.S. foreign policy but do have a mission worthy of our time. That mission is to give comfort to the millions of citizens of the United States and of countries around the world who rightly distrust the propaganda and disinformation disseminated by their government spokesmen and by the servile major media but are confused by events and feel intimidated by their situation as a tiny minority of doubters among a sea of aggressive believers in the Washington narrative. They wonder if the world has gone crazy or if they are in fact wrong not to ‘go with the flow.’
At the end of the day, we who are the public face of the Opposition will provide the retrospective track of intellectual history, the path not taken today, when the Russia-Ukraine war finally ends under terms close to what we are saying, when Israel’s wings are finally clipped and Western Asia emerges from the present catastrophe into a better age of peace.
This vision will surely not satisfy what firebrands there are in the Opposition movement, but I believe they are very few in number and that they will probably move on to other conflicts without looking in the rear view mirror.
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I conclude this essay with a few words about the legacy of the iconic figure in the Opposition to U.S. policy on Russia, Professor Stephen Cohen. As I said yesterday, I was in almost daily contact with Cohen in the period ahead of our creation of the new ACEWA for a period of over two years when I finally quit their Board upon concluding that it was a do-nothing organization in its U.S. incarnation, whereas I had expended great efforts on its behalf in Brussels, without necessary support from New York.
I say up front that Cohen and I never saw eye to eye on many things but were bound together by the desire to serve détente. Cohen was a closet Communist sympathizer, in the sense that he hoped for the continuation of the Soviet Union in some ‘Communism with a human face’ corresponding to the views of the Bolshevik martyr Nikolai Bukharin, who was the subject of his dissertation. Cohen’s biography of Bukharin was eventually published and became a best-selling book, by academic standards. It brought him into contact with one reader of that book, Mikhail Gorbachev, and established a friendship that lasted to Cohen’s death.
Cohen leveraged his entrée into the high circles of the Kremlin into a position as news commentator on Russian matters for major U.S. television channels. He retained this visibility up to 2014, when U.S.-Russian relations headed in an accelerated downward spiral following the Russian take-over of Crimea and the outbreak of the Russia-supported resistance of the Donbas to rule by the nationalists in Kiev who had been installed by Washington.
In the period after 2014, Cohen was subjected to vilification by his academic colleagues. His attempts over several years to establish a fellowship program for graduate students of Russia were accompanied by vicious attacks on him and of the Russia he loved.
This was the context for the sage advice that Cohen gave me to avoid doing anything that might discredit the Opposition movement. By way of example, he turned down invitations to Valdai for the reasons I cited yesterday, namely to avoid any appearance of impropriety, of taking money or favors from the Russians.
This point has been raised by one reader, who claimed that times change and that Cohen today would stand by Scott Ritter. My answer is that yes, it is likely that Steve Cohen would stand by Ritter today, but not because the times have changed. The simple fact is that Steve Cohen was forgiving of occasional treachery and of the generalized cowardice that he saw around himself in the academic world.
When I raised with him the question of how one acquaintance or another was publishing pro-Russian rubbish in a Russia-sponsored paper or journal, he said to overlook that, because the fellow still had a kid to send to college and should not be deprived of his means of making a living.
Cohen was especially forgiving of those a generation or more younger than himself. As he argued, no one would take away his Social Security payments and others should not be prevented from putting bread on the table by being compelled to act as he did and studiously avoid conflicts of interest.
I never agreed with him on this. As I thought, better to be a taxi driver than a university assistant professor who must always bite his tongue and chime in with colleagues supporting the hegemonic policies of the powers-that-be.
Let us be perfectly honest. There are hundreds if not thousands of professionally trained experts on Russia or on other subjects of international politics who do not publicly say a word against our present policies. What they may say at their kitchen tables does not count.
As I look around, I see only two full professors who brave the taunts and ‘slings and arrows’ of their academic colleagues and speak out forcefully. These are John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs. I salute them for their courage and for their skillful presentation of the international geopolitical situation for the benefit of their hundreds of thousands if not millions of followers.
Regrettably, Steve Cohen himself was for much of his career less brave. However, at the end of his life he threw caution to the winds and wrote his most honest and most compelling book: War with Russia? I heartily recommend it to those who wish to see how university learning can occasionally speak truth to power.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024