Financial Times
Published: April 256 2007
These are depressing days to be a neo-conservative. Paul Wolfowitz has hired a former Clinton lawyer in a last-ditch attempt to hang on to his job at the World Bank. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, one of his protégés, has been found guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice and will probably go to jail. Conrad Black, one of the movement’s most generous patrons, is in the dock in Chicago. This troika of embattled freedom fighters is just part of a roll-call of reversal enumerated this week by The Economist, the weekly that once sympathetically chronicled their rise.
Fighting to preserve your liberty – when you had planned to devote your life to liberating the rest of the world – is bad enough. What is worse for these arch-ideologues is that they are intellectually discredited too, their worldview seen as having been blown apart on the killing fields of Iraq.
But while people in the Beltway, and even in Baghdad, may have decided they do not have much use for the neo-cons at the moment, there is one part of the world that needs them desperately: Russia. In one of those cruel twists of fate that seem to be a Slavic speciality, America’s international democracy-building agenda has been battered just at the moment when it might do Moscow some real good.
Boris Yeltsin’s death this week has been an opportunity to take stock of Russia’s recent, turbulent past. An important part of that judgment must be to remember how much, when it came to the Soviet Union, the neo-cons got right. Central planning did indeed turn out to be a less efficient way of running an economy than free markets. The subject peoples of the Warsaw Pact and many of the former Soviet republics did indeed prefer democracy and independence to communism and Soviet rule. Even the Russians, viewed by some as destined – by dint of history, culture and even geography – to despotism, opted for freedom in that crucial August of 1991.
The country’s progress since that apex of hope has been decidedly mixed. Many of Russia’s woes are at least partly due to the same failings that overly zealous western exporters of democracy have been blamed for elsewhere. Most damaging was the creation of the oligarchs – an act based partly on an extreme, Chicago-school-inspired faith in the power of private ownership, no matter who the owner was or how the property was acquired.
Yet for all the chaos and corruption of the Yeltsin years, and the repression and corruption of the Putin ones, there seem to be a few brave people in Russia who still think their country can be a liberal democracy. Their struggle is probably quixotic. After all, the combination of high oil prices, control of the mass media and a willingness ruthlessly to suppress political opposition kept a barely competent, geriatric Politburo in power for decades. Mr Putin and his cronies are not only a good deal richer, they are tougher and probably smarter. Even so, the opposition seems to have the Kremlin spooked – why else arrest Garry Kas-parov and risk transforming him from Soviet chess champion to democratic champion, or Maria Gaidar, daughter of arch-economic reformer Yegor?
When the neo-cons were ascendant, America’s and indeed the west’s duty to support democratic protesters such as these would have seemed obvious: remember our attitude to the far more marginalised dissidents and refuseniks of the Soviet-era. But today, as we learn the lessons of Iraq, we may risk forgetting those of the Soviet Union.
A few weeks ago I listened to a legendary American businessman reassure a Putin adviser that democracy comes in many forms and that it was a grave US mistake to try to impose the western version on other countries. Compare those appeasing words with the classic neo-con view of Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, expressed in Washington a few days later: “There is no place in the world where people don’t want to be free...America cannot bring democracy... What America can do is support people in the countries who want to build democracy.”
This month, many neo-cons had a lot of fun with former Iraqi finance minister Ali Allawi’s observation that, in going to war in Iraq, America had invaded an “imagined country” conjured from the outdated memories of Iraqi exiles. But imagined countries are not always a bad thing. Andrei Sakharov imagined a country liberated from Soviet rule. Garry Kasparov imagines one free of Kremlin authoritarianism. You do not need to be a neo-con to think that denying that possibility is not realism, it is defeatism.