Russia’s Doors, Putin’s Time

There are, and always have been, three doors to Russia, every one of which has been jealously guarded first by Russian Czars and in the Communist era by Russian Czars posing as proletarian workers such as Josef Stalin. There is a Western point of access (Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states), a Middle Eastern point of access (Afghanistan, Iran) and a Southern point of access (China). Access doors open both ways and, depending upon one’s point of view, President of Russia Vladimir Putin has now either opened or shut all the doors. It would be paradoxical, though never-the-less true, to say he has shut the doors by opening them.

Mr. Putin was featured as Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” in 2007. That year, China’s leader Hu Jintao was featured as a runner up.

Mr. Putin seemed to be on his way out, Time noted: “His final year as Russia's President has been his most successful yet. At home, he secured his political future. Abroad, he expanded his outsize—if not always benign—influence on global affairs.”

But in communist “post-communist” Russia, things are not always as they seem. Putin was never out; he was simply playing musical chairs with Russia’s second in command Dmitry Medvedev. It was Mr. Medvedev whose knee President Barack Obama tapped prior to his re-election to office to convey a message to Mr. Putin. Reuter’s caught the moment this way:

“President Barack Obama was caught on camera on Monday assuring outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he will have ‘more flexibility’ to deal with contentious issues like missile defense after the U.S. presidential election.

Obama, during talks in Seoul, urged Moscow to give him ‘space’ until after the November ballot, and Medvedev said he would relay the message to incoming Russian president Vladimir Putin.”

Mr. Medvedev apparently relayed the message, which may have been re-interpreted by Mr. Putin as indicating that Mr. Obama was a weak and indecisive president.

Proof of Mr. Obama’s weakness is strewn all over the world: There were no defense missile emplacements in Poland or any of the Baltic States; Mr. Obama’s “lead from behind” foreign policy in Libya and Syria had collapsed; the personal representative of the president of the United States, Libyan Ambassador Chris Stevens, was assassinated by armed militants associated with al-Qaida, a metastasizing group of terrorists that, the American public had been told during Mr. Obama’s second presidential campaign, had been decimated after Mr. Obama had cut short the video career of Osama bin Laden. For a moment there, it appeared that Mr. Obama had turned over his Middle East portfolio to the once and future Time magazine “Person of the Year,” Mr. Putin. And, of course, Mr. Putin was only too happy to lend a shoulder.

Next year, one may expect to find Mr. Putin’s mug on the cover of Time once again. Consider Mr. Putin’s triumphs: Mr. Putin has both shut and opened the Middle Eastern access doors. He is providing help to Iran in the county’s march towards the acquisition of nuclear weapons. The western door opens to natural gas pipe lines running from Russia through an as yet partly dismembered Ukraine to Europe, which can ill afford an interruption in energy supplies. The United States might supply Europe with sufficient energy resources, but its President, convinced the country can run on fuel cells, has been dithering on the opening of a Canada supplied energy pipe line. Afghanistan, which occasionally has provided a route used by Islamic terrorists to strike at the heart of Russia, has been, since the Taliban chased Russia out of the country, operating under an American protectorate now crumbling everywhere in the world. So long as an American Cerberus guards the Afghan door to Russia, the Islamic threat to Putin will be considerably reduced.

Most recently Mr. Putin and Chinese president Xi Jinping have struck what Charles Krauthammer has styled in a recent column “a spectacular energy deal — $400 billion of Siberian natural gas to be exported to China over 30 years." This last foreign policy gesture opens and closes the last of Russia’s doors. 

Mr. Putin’s “pivot to Asia” is a live option, Mr. Krauthammer writes, while Mr. Obama’s pivot to Asia has become a dead letter. Mr. Obama’s “withdrawal from the Middle East — where from Egypt to Saudi Arabia, from Libya to Syria, U.S. influence is at its lowest ebb in 40 years — is a fait accompli.”

Mr. Krauthammer’s columns are not read in the White House by Mr. Obama, who appears to have settled comfortably into a position of unarmed neutrality. His is the kind of foreign policy that is to be expected from a president chronically unable to determine friends from enemies. Those who cannot read the times will be done in by them.

In any case, the second appearance of Putin as Time magazine's’ “Person of the Year” is  imminent.

The Trouble With Lameduckery

The president’s office is time sensitive because of term limits. No president since Franklin Roosevelt has served more than two terms or eight years in office.

Mr. Roosevelt was the only president elected to a third term; his supporters pointed to the war in Europe as a reason for breaking with precedent. Mr. Roosevelt won a fourth term in 1944 during World War II but suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in office the following year and died. After more than a dozen years in office, the bloom had fled the rose.

The 22^ndamendment owed its inspiration to a precedent established by President George Washington’s farewell address and Thomas Jefferson’s aversion to monarchy. In 1807, Jefferson wrote in reply to a query from Vermont’s legislature, “if some termination to the services of the chief Magistrate be not fixed by the Constitution, or supplied by practice, his office, nominally four years, will in fact become for life."

New York Democratic Rep. Jose Serrano reintroduced a bill in Congress early in January of this year repealing the 22nd Amendment, but the bill is not likely to pass, however infatuated more than 50 percent of the American public and 90 percent of the news media have become with wunderkind President Barack Obama.

The presence of a presidential term limit presents both opportunities and problems for the chief executive.

Mr. Obama was looking on the bright side of his lameduckery when he whispered to then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he would have "more flexibility" to deal with contentious issues like missile defense after the U.S. presidential election.

During talks in Seoul, Mr. Obama “urged Moscow to give him‘space’ until after the November ballot, and Medvedev said he would relay the message to incoming Russian president Vladimir Putin,” according to a March 2012 Reuters report.

Two months after Mr. Obama begged Mr. Medvedev for more space, Vladimir Putin was elected, for a second time, President of Russia. The present Russian government, apparently unconcerned with Mr. Jefferson’s quibbles, is a product of centuries of monarchical government, followed by a promising but betrayed revolution, followed by 30 years of Stalinism, monarchy’s modern counterpart. Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev have managed to satisfy an apparent hunger in Russia for democratic forms by swapping jobs every so often, a modern tyrant’s answer to the 22^nd amendment.

Had Mr. Putin been running for president of the United States, he would not have been eligible to serve, because the 22^ndamendment is a bulwark against proto-Stalinist chief executives; it nips in the bud the megalomania of the larval tyrant by giving the president of the United States only two terms of “space” in which he may ruin the country and bring republican government to its knees.

Here is the hitch with lameduckery: At some point during a second term in office, it becomes obvious to presidential supporters that the duck is lame. At that point, politics pivots. During the second term of virtually every president who labors under the austere restrictions of the 22^ndamendment, the president is found gathered together with his ardent supporters during his first term -- including party leaders in the Congress -- and everyone in the room realizes that there is but one lame duck in the room; the rest of them will be running for re-election long after the president has strut his hour upon the stage. They begin to think, dangerously, of surviving in a political universe that does not include the nominal leader of their party. This is a prelude to funeral rights, the beginning of the end of what the French call “la trahison des clercs,” the betrayal of the intellectuals, in many authoritarian regimes the footstools of megalomaniacal tin pot political saviors.

Modern monarchical and authoritarian regimes, both fascist and communist, solve the problem by having non-subservient intellectuals -- usually violently or artfully repressed in authoritarian regimes -- shot or imprisoned or socially castrated.

Authoritarian regimes fail for a good reason: The larger and more omnicompetent a central authority strives to be, the more incompetent it becomes; a government that strives to do everything will do nothing well. There are no small errors in fascist or quasi-fascist regimes. Even in Cuba, the balled fist is loosening: One half of the Castro tyranny, Raul, a boilerplate communist, recently announced that he was considering term limits.

In governments operating under republican constitutions, the pivot, that point during which a party understands that the captain of the ideological ship will soon be departing, occurs usually midway into a second presidential term.

Assuming Mr. Serrano is unsuccessful in scuttling the 22^ndamendment, political commentators will begin mapping the ideological cracks in the Obama administration around the second year of the Mr. Obama's second term. A collapse in the economy will of course push the date closer to the beginning of his second term.