Hoof'n'mouth Disease

Love him or hate him, you've just got to admit that Joe Biden is endlessly entertaining. Quite aside from the whole "I never met a Kennedy quote I didn't claim as my own" fiasco that sank his campaign when he ran for President, I mean. If he isn't, indeed, actually not thinking before he speaks, one could almost be tempted to believe that he is deliberately trying to sabotage his Party. Frankly, the image of the President banging his head on his desk after every one of Joe's speaking engagements and asking himself "Why, why, why?" is somehow appealing, though that could just be me being too cynical again.

The thing is, Biden isn't an idiot. Far from it and, by all accounts, he is indeed rather intelligent. But, oh, those things he says . . . Look, folks, that line he ripped out during the last Presidential campaign about expecting a major international crisis during an Obama Administration wasn't a case of him "misspeaking," it was a warning. One that we may yet find out that we wish we had paid attention to, whatever you think of the current President. If we remember our History, Khrushchev tried to steamroll over Kennedy precisely because of JFK's relative lack of experience, too.

In a lot of ways, Biden reminds me of President Carter's brother, Billy and, no, that's not a good comparison. Among other things, for those of you too young to remember, Billy was the guy who traded in on his brother being President by creating and marketing "Billy Beer." Oh, yeah, and who was also acting as a paid lobbyist for Libya, something he didn't feel the need to tell anyone about until the press got wind of the story. If we remember, at that time Libya was right at the top of the State Department's list of terrorist-sponsoring nations, and was quite active in the Middle East and Europe blowing things up. But at least when Billy was running around embarrassing the President, we could all take comfort from the fact that he wasn't an elected official of the Government.

Now, it seems, the current Vice President has ticked off the Russians by calling them a "second-class" power. Now, if I were a Russian, with my Russian dreams of the nation being a Great Power and memories of a not-so-distant Soviet Union that influenced events in half the world, I'd probably be pretty ticked about such a statement, too.

The problem is, in this case, Biden is right.

Even when the Soviet Union existed, it was common among political science wonks to say that, really, it was nothing more than the world's most heavily-armed Third World power. Which was true, in that the only thing that gave the Soviet Union a claim to being a Great Power was the fact that it possessed nuclear weapons. Other than that . . .

One of the root causes for the demise of the Soviet Union was the fact that it was trying to match the United States dollar-for-ruble with an economy that was only three-quarters the size. Furthermore, under the direction of the centralized planning apparat, that economy was horribly inefficient. As an example, there was an old joke to the effect that there were four kinds of steel production in the Soviet Union: the production of steel, the psuedo-production of steel, the production of psuedo-steel, and the psuedo-production of psuedo-steel. Chronically short of raw materials and burdened with unrealistic production targets, managers in all sectors of the Soviet economy routinely falsified their numbers and the central planning bureau, aware that there was nothing it could do to fix the problem, was happy to accept.

Outside of its then absolute sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, there was very little that the Soviet Union exported to the rest of the world, except for weapons. Really, one could make the argument that the Soviet Union's most successful export was the AK-47.

It was no accident that the Russian economy essentially collapsed when the Soviet Union collapsed. Heavy and light industries, for example, suddenly found themselves having to compete in a market-driven economy they were neither trained for nor completely understood.

Politics are messy, and Russia suddenly found itself being abandoned by people who hadn't wanted to be Russian in the first place. The Baltic States, the Central Asian Republics, Ukraine, and the republics around the Black and Caspian Seas all jumped ship. The once-mighty Soviet armed forces found themselves unfunded, with their non-Russian personnel deserting to go back home. The situation became so bad that the Russian army was reduced to selling off its weapons on the black market and hiring its soldiers out as farmhands in order to survive. The Red Navy, which had once had the world's largest submarine fleet, found that fleet reduced to a relative handful of platforms. A navy that was used to accepting up to a dozen new ships a year found itself lucky to get one new ship every few years, and was forced to lay up all but the newest ships it had in order to survive. Even then, those ships rarely left port due to a lack of fuel and spare parts, a situation shared by the air forces, which had to suspend training because of a lack of fuel. To this day, the Russian armed forces have yet to recover from those shocks.

Russia is still fighting a war in Chechnya. Their first foray into that region was a disaster, with the army eventually declaring "victory" because it could no longer tolerate the casualties. And then they had to go back in, with the same depressing results. Oh, well, c'est la guerre.

Much has been made of Russia's foray into Georgia last summer, and Russia would certainly like the rest of the world to believe that operation was a model of the military art. But, to anyone who has any experience in such things, it wasn't an example of watching a well-oiled military machine in action, it was like watching the Keystone Kops.

No one would ever accuse Georgia of being the next Napoleonic power to stalk Europe. Compared to the million-and-a-half man Russian army and excluding all the other personnel in the rest of the Russian armed forces, the 30,000 or so men in the entire Georgian military never stood a chance. And yet, it took the Russian army more than a week to subdue the Georgians . . .

We watched the mighty Russian Black Sea Fleet sally forth and take more than two days to neutralize the handful of patrol boats that constituted the Georgian navy, all five or six of them. We watched the Russian army skitter back and forth for over a week before the Georgians stopped shooting at them, unable to sustain offensive action beyond the immediate border areas of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. We watched the Russian air force, using precision-guided weapons, miss most of its targets . . . and not just miss, but miss badly.

The Russians would have the world believe that their move into Georgia was a "come as you are" operation, in response to a rapidly-changing situation on the ground there. But the sheer size of the force they sent in is the most convincng argument against that being the case. Just from a logistical standpoint, the Russians wouldn't have been able to sustain any operations in Georgia unless they had been planned out well before. And even with that planning, the operation was, in the end, largely a failure.

That doesn't argue well for Russia being a "Great Power."

Make no mistake about this, Russia is a nation of drunks that occasionally vomits up a genius. To our own peril, we forgot that every period of liberalization in Russian history has been followed by a "strong man" who quashes it. Putin is just the latest in that line of strong men and, while he may have delusions and visions of great power, he lacks the means to put those into effect.

The only real claims that Russia has to being a Great Power are her nuclear weapons - well, at least those weapons that they still know where they are - and the petro-dollars they're pumping out of Siberia in the form of oil and natural gas. And of the two, the energy reserves are by far the most important and useful. We've already seen the Russians try to use them as weapons to influence others, most notably with their on-again, off-again embargos on natural gas to Ukraine, and the one they tried with Europe. The thing is, those energy resources aren't going to last; aside from depleting them through drilling, other nations are going to look for alternative sources for oil and natural gas precisely because they don't want to be held hostage to Russian whims. And when that happens, aside from the arms factories, the Russians are going to be left with an industrial sector that is still the same shambles it was when the old Soviet Union disappeared.

Joe Biden is absolutely correct when he states that Russia is no longer a Great Power, and that that fact gives the United States some leverage over them in foreign affairs. As much as that may pain Russian pride, it's a fact of life. But while the Vice President sees opportunity in that, there is also danger. Not that Russia will lash outwards, as so many people who are still stuck in a kind of Cold War mindset think, but inwards.

Like everyone else, Russians are prisoners of their own history. In many ways, the problems looming on the horizon for Russia may be insurmountable. For example, just to modernize the infrastructure to make the nation competitive would take the combined GDPs of the G-7, and that's not likely to happen. Nor is it likely that the Russian government will be able to break the incestuous relationship between what capital-generating economic activities there are and the so-called mafiosi any time soon. Especially when many of the key government economic posts are held by those same Russian "mafia."

For much of its history, the word "Russia" was a geographic expression and did not refer to a state. The danger is that Russia is on the verge of that slipping back into being just a geographic expression. There isn't a whole lot that the rest of us can do about that, except, perhaps, to not have the bad grace to remind them of it.