Two Pebbles in Putin’s Jackboot

V ladimir Putin has published his new naughty list, and, remarkably, it has only two countries on it: One is the United States — but you saw that coming — and the other is the Czech Republic.

Two peas in a pod? Or two pebbles in the same jackboot?

Czech–Russian relations have hit a rough spot, with Czech authorities recently having disclosed that a 2014 explosion at a Czech munitions depot was the work of Russian agents, an operation most likely run out of the Russian embassy in Prague, a beehive of covert action that has everything but a “GRU” sign in front of it. (It is amusing just how open these things sometimes are — in the 1990s, a newspaper editor in Delhi casually mentioned to me that a certain American diplomat was widely known to be the chief U.S. spy in India. This was common knowledge, but nonetheless the diplomat was in high demand on the social circuit.) The Russian attack probably was meant to prevent supplies’ being shipped from the Czech depot to forces fighting Moscow-backed rebels in Ukraine or to opponents of Russian client Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

That is a serious provocation — imagine the American reaction if some foreign mafia-state had staged a bombing of the Sierra Army Depot in California. But Prague did not react the way Washington would have, because Prague does not have the kind of power Washington does, and Czech leaders are for that reason obliged to think through their actions in a way American presidents sometimes don’t. But the oversized Russian “diplomatic” presence in Prague had long been understood to be a problem, and so the foreign ministry ordered 18 Russian diplomats identified as spies and covert operatives to be expelled, and henceforth will limit the Russian delegation in Prague to the same size as the Czech delegation in Moscow. Neighboring Slovakia (whose divorce from the Czech Republic in 1993 sent tremors through the spelling-bee world) announced the expulsion of three Russian diplomats in solidarity.

This convulsion must be a source of grief to the Czech president, Miloš Zeman, who is so abjectly pro-Moscow that the word “stooge” is directed his way from time to time. Zeman is the Czech version of a nationalist-populist in the style of Donald Trump, whose campaign he endorsed and supported. Like almost all leaders of his ilk, he is easily seduced by strongmen such as Vladimir Putin. (Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš, a wealthy businessman sometimes mockingly referred to as “Babišconi” after the Italian playboy-politician Silvio Berlusconi, is a figure cut from the same cloth.) Zeman has cast doubts on the work of his own intelligence services and denounced “hysteria” regarding Russian operations inside his country.

Both the European Union and NATO have supported the Czech Republic in this confrontation, as they should. And with the Czech Republic and the United States lumped together on Putin’s enemies list, you would think there’d be an opening for deeper and richer cooperation between the two countries. But it is not that simple. For all of the nationalistic “Make the Czech Republic Great Again!” talk among their most prominent leaders, the Czechs are keenly aware of their position as a relatively small (population 10.7 million) and relatively weak country. The Czech Republic’s choice, like the choice facing many EU nations, isn’t between ceding some sovereignty to Brussels or standing proudly on its own. It is between ceding some sovereignty to Brussels or coming under the domination of some larger power — if not Russia, then China — or the United States. The Czechs understand, or at least many of them do, that they would be such a junior partner in an alliance with any of these great powers that the arrangement would hardly deserve the word partnership.

At the height of the Cold War, minor powers fearful of Soviet domination were content to join a U.S.-led — U.S.-dominated — coalition. That came partly from the nature of the Soviet regime, but also from the nature of the American regime, and its great credibility. The effort to transform the North Atlantic Treaty Organization from a paper tiger into a fighting force was led by future president Dwight Eisenhower, the first to hold the position of supreme allied commander Europe. That was a different era of American leadership.

But the United States did not enjoy its remarkable postwar power solely or even primarily as a result of its military prowess. It was what you might call an integrated power: a military power, an economic power, a diplomatic power, a scientific power — and a moral power. Many of those pieces remain in place: The United States maintains the world’s most powerful military, it has the world’s largest national economy (still half-again larger than China’s), the world’s leading scientific centers, the world’s leading system of higher education, and most of the world’s most important businesses (China does not have a single company worth half as much as Apple, Microsoft, or Google; the European Union’s most valuable company is LVMH, a manager of luxury brands), and still enjoys a position of remarkable cultural prominence.

But there is a missing piece — the political one. The federal government cannot manage its finances or achieve the political goals attached to its military adventures around the world; Washington lurches from crisis to crisis, with a presidency traded among demagogues and incompetents and a Congress that cannot even follow its own appropriations process, stitching its fraying piecework together with a series of emergency measures. From relations with NATO to the debacle of Afghanistan to the ongoing push-pull with Beijing, the United States has shown itself no more constant as an enemy than as an ally.

And so the United States is a great power without great credibility — a great and powerful giant that nobody can quite trust.

This is in no small measure a story of institutional decay. There was plenty to criticize in the old political parties and the old press and other institutions of that sort, but as these have declined and decayed (it is an amusing feature of popular rhetoric that so many angrily denounce the party machines as though they still had any real power), they have not been replaced by new mediating institutions that moderate and discipline democratic passions. Instead, they have been supplanted by forces such as social media and populism, which inflame and spread those passions. The few formal guardrails that remain — the (frequently abused) Senate filibuster, the (imperfect) political independence of the Supreme Court — are under direct threat, at the moment from the Biden administration and congressional Democrats, though Republicans tend to cherish these mainly when they are out of power: Donald Trump performed enough flip-flops on the filibuster to make Simone Biles dizzy.

President Biden says he intends to put reinvigorating our alliances at the center of his visit to Europe at the end of the month, but even if he were the man for that job — and it is reasonably obvious that he isn’t — the task may be beyond achieving. It is wishful thinking to believe that our foreign policy can be unyoked from the dysfunction of our domestic politics — too many of our so-called realists have been unrealistic about that — and it is impossible to ignore the fact that this dysfunction is being aggravated by Biden and his get-while-the-gettin’s-good allies. President Biden’s apologists will make the same excuses as President Trump’s: that the other party is so intransigent and so irredeemable that efforts to build consensus or seek compromise are not only pointless but also a kind of treason, language that partisans on both sides have suicidally embraced. That leaves Americans fighting a cold war with the Chinese, with the Russians, and with each other.

You might think that the Czech Republic would look instinctively toward the only other nation on Putin’s most recent hit-list for the security that it cannot win on its own. But the view from Prague is a lot like the view from anywhere else: Our allies can see what’s going on in Washington as clearly as we can.

Our enemies can, too.