The plane crash that killed Poland’s president and 95 others is a tragedy for the Polish people and a loss of a good friend for the United States. For Poland’s neighbor Russia, however, it’s an opportunity to push for hegemony over Eastern Europe, as in the Iron Curtain days.
For the Russian bear is back. Like Dracula rising from his coffin, it now stalks the world long after we thought it dead and buried. And President Obama’s feckless handling of foreign affairs is giving Russia’s authoritarian leadership a chance like no other to expand its power — and steadily diminish ours.
Some will believe the Russian account of the crash, that the Polish pilot deliberately endangered the lives of his president and the entire upper echelon of his country’s leadership by trying to land in a thick fog despite repeated warnings from Russian ground control.
Others won’t believe — remembering that President Lech Kaczynski was a bitter foe of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and how Putin’s dreaded FSB (the KGB’s successor) was linked six years ago to a plot to poison Ukraine’s president.
Either way, expect new, perhaps irresistible, pressure on Poland to toe the Kremlin line. Throw in the START treaty that Russia extracted from our president just last week, and anyone who imagined we won the Cold War had better think again.
Americans watched the Soviet Union implode in 1990, and saw Russia reduced to a national basket case. Her former empire splintered into 15 independent republics, from the Ukraine and Georgia to Kyrgyzstan. Her once-mighty army, navy and nuclear arsenal split the same way.
American policymakers simply wrote Russia off as a country without a present, and no clear hope for the future. Soviet experts like Condoleezza Rice, once the heavyweights of every Washington think tank, scrambled to find other work.
They should have realized that a country rich in resources from oil and natural gas to iron, gold and diamonds wouldn’t stay poor for long — and that a nation with a long history of aggressive imperial expansion wouldn’t rest easy at having shrunk to a size smaller than when Peter the Great became czar.
In 2000, Russians elected Putin president. As rising oil prices began to fill Russia’s coffers, he promised to restore Russia’s pride and power — with the price soon revealed as the end of her 10-year chaotic experiment with democratic freedom.
Putin the ex-KGB agent had learned a valuable lesson buried in the ashes of defeat: Communism had held back the Soviet Union. When it came to intimidating Russia’s European neighbors as well as her own people, the cold, naked exercise of power for power’s sake worked far better — especially when the United States insisted on looking the other way.
So, for 10 years, America sat by while Putin massacred the Chechens, murdered dissident journalists and jailed Russia’s leading industrialists while installing his cronies in their place.
We sat by while Putin tripled Russia’s defense budget, helped Iran build and equip its nuclear reactor at Bushehr and sent the mullahs advanced missile systems and nuclear-sensitive technologies.
The US did nothing, for Rice and others insisted that nothing interfere with our effort to get Russia to endorse UN sanctions against Iran — a country the Russians were helping to arm.
Finally, in the summer of 2008, the brutal Russian incursion into independent Georgia made the Bush administration change its mind about Putin. But then came a US election, and a new foreign-policy team. Far from learning from Bush’s mistakes, Obama is now determined to compound them.
The first step was abandoning our democratic Eastern European allies, including Poland, that had defied Putin by agreeing to host US missile-defense systems in their countries: Obama dropped the plan because it offended the Russians. This was followed a week ago by the START treaty that locks us into permanent nuclear decline while Russia is free to modernize its nukes and even build its own missile-defense shield.
And the very day the treaty was signed came the coup against the government of Kyrgyzstan, which is a vital air-supply line to our troops in Afghanistan. Like the crash that killed Kaczynski, this eliminated a leader who had defied the Kremlin over a US base in his nation.
What’s next? Putin and his puppet president, Dmitry Medvedev, now say they won’t support any gasoline boycott against Iran — the one sanction that might halt the Iranian nuclear program as it comes into the final turn.
We won’t know the truth about this weekend’s crash until the plane’s “black box” flight recorder is safely out of Russian hands. But we already know the truth about Putin. People laughed when Bush said he’d looked into Putin’s soul and saw a good man. Obama has looked at Putin’s bloodstained hands and sees a leader we can deal with.
Arthur Herman’s most recent book is “Gandhi and Churchill.”