Promises, promises
In 1997 the Communist dictatorship in Bejing promised the people of Hong Kong that they'd have local autonomy, including electing their own officials, after the British colony was forced to rejoin China. In 1994, Russia, then a corrupt democracy and now a corrupt dictatorship, promised not to use force or threaten to use force against Ukraine in return for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons.
We know how both these promises worked out. You can bet that no country is going to give up its nuclear weapons. any time soon. And Taiwan is even more unlikely than before to join China on the basis of the promise that Beijing would allow the people of Taiwan their own democracy.
Dictators think promises are a joke.
Tripartite march of the thugs
While the U.S. focuses on confronting the perverts of the Islamic State, the fascist dictatorship in Russia continues to try to eat away at adjacent states and the other big fascist dictatorship, China, continues its attempt to take over the entire South China Sea. Their neighbors waver between appeasement and something a bit braver as the thuggery gets worse.
Francis Fukuyama's idea in the '90s of the inevitable triumph of liberal democracy seems more frayed than usual this year.
Llewellyn King: Habits to develop and monsters to avoid
No one having asked me to give their commencement address this year, I have decided to give it anyway. Here. I have been reading reports of these addresses, mostly given by public figures, some stirring debate, demonstrations and boycott. All in all, the passion is wasted because most of these addresses are not worth the fuss, the fee or the honorary degree. They occupy the unhappy space between a Sunday sermon and a sales meeting. Having exhorted the students to heights of moral rectitude they urge on them a manic menu for striving; of getting to the top of the class of life by making a lot of money and keeping America in front of China, India and, on a good day, Germany.
To read these addresses is to be told that life is a marathon in which most of the participants are from Asia and the United States is on the slippery slope to oblivion, and it missed the starter’s pistol shot.
With fine irony, it is many of those who have made a hash of national policies and foreign adventures who feel the most obliged to urge the bewildered young people of the class of 2014 to sally forth and do great things. I would humbly suggest they sally forth and live their lives: less striving, more living.
My commencement wisdom:
Do not be defined by where you work, but by what you do. Working for the dominant institution in your field may sound swell at a cocktail party, but it is almost guaranteed to be less fun and less invigorating than a lesser institution, which is not inhabited wholly by strivers. Strivers can be very tedious.
The same goes for the institution you are leaving. Worry less about where you studied and more about what you learned.
The best thing I can advise any young person is to have a well-stocked mind. It is a bulwark against adversity, a comfort in disaster, and a place where you can find strength all the days of your life; in success and disaster, in helping to heal a broken heart – and there are going to be broken hearts aplenty in this class, as there have been in all the preceding graduating classes.
Life has stages and it is worth knowing them, without being dictated to by them. In your twenties you will suffer Cupid’s arrow, the ecstasy and pain of love, make your professional mistakes, and begin the intriguing business of finding out who you are.
The thirties are the great decade: The idealism is intact, most of the mistakes are in the past, and you have the enthusiasm and energy to make your move in life. It is a golden decade when everything starts to come into focus.
The forties are for consolidating, watching children grow and deciding what is possible.
From age 50 on, you are in the harvest years. Harvest the rewards of being good at what you do, the respect of your peers, while as ever stocking your mind -- the permanent joy of learning, and especially of learning that you have not taken the human pilgrimage alone.
I have known too many people who do not know the reward and sanctuary of reading. Prodigious readers, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, would read in the five minutes before a meeting, or while waiting for a call to come through. It was the secret life that balanced the public life.
My father was not a lettered man, and reading was not something that came easily for him. As result, he missed the great community that is open to all with the good fortune to know how to read.
Do not fence yourself in — and do not let others do it for you. Do not believe that you have aptitude for this or that on a hunch: Please find out.
I have made a living as a public speaker and broadcaster for many decades. But a lawyer, in a traffic case, once told me that she would not put me on the stand because she felt I was not good at speaking in front of people. The terrifying truth is that I accepted her judgment – and lost the case.
Besides being corralled by false knowledge of ourselves, the other great monster lying in wait for you is rejection. We all dread rejection, not just those who meet it constantly like writers and sales people. Fear of rejection is a great disabler; fight it, you are not unique that way. Treat “no” as the prologue to “yes.”
Good luck.
Llewellyn King, of Washington, D.C. and Rhode Island, is executive producer and co-host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His e-mail is lking@kingpublishing.com.
Moment of truth for the West
At the Museum of Russian Icons, in Clinton, Mass., in the show "The Tsars' Cabinet,'' which highlights 200 years of decorative arts under the Romanov dynasty. Russian oligarchs around Vladimir Putin also love to collect these items.
(Respond via rwhitcomb51@gmail.com)
In September 1938, at the Munich Conference, Adolf Hitler promised French and British leaders, who felt compelled to appease him, that Czechoslovakia’s mostly German-speaking Sudetenland region would be ”my last territorial demand in Europe.’’ Within a few months, of course, the Nazis occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia and then invaded Poland.
Vladimir Putin is a power-mad political mobster of extreme cynicism and considerable paranoia, albeit not the world-historical sociopath that Hitler was. I have little doubt that the Russian dictator plans to try to seize more land in eastern Europe, perhaps part of Moldova and all of Ukraine and not just the eastern part, where, he and his associates like to say, they might need to “rescue’’ Russian speakers from virtually nonexistent “mistreatment’’. In the same way, Hitler often cited the need to “rescue’’ German speakers who lived in countries that Hitler wanted to seize in the pursuit of his “Thousand Year Reich’’.
Putin, like Hitler, seems obsessed with “encirclement’’ by perceived foes. Of course, most people in neighboring nations, who see close-up what goes on in Putin’s kleptocratic police state, would certainly not want to be absorbed by it. Meanwhile, why don’t more journalists and others note that Russia is far and away the largest country by square mileage. Without the powerful vector of Russian imperialism (which includes Soviet imperialism), it might seem passing strange that Russia would want/need to get even bigger.
But for a thug, no power or money or acreage is enough. Thus former KGB official Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th Century.’’ He’s talking about a regime that murdered tens of millions of people and that for a couple of years was a Nazi ally.
But a regime as nasty as Putin’s is not exactly good for business investment, and so Russia, for all its size, remains remarkably weak, if aggressive. Of course, the Chinese regime is also corrupt and brutal, but China has an entrepreneurial and disciplined people who have made the country an economic powerhouse anyway. The Russians, burdened by bad government and the associated alcoholism, despair and fatalism, and thus without a vibrant, diversified entrepreneurial culture, don’t have it. Without copious supplies of oil and gas, they would hardly have an economy at all.
Those fossil fuels give Russia a lot of power to get temporizing Europeans to tolerate Russian imperialism. It’s yet another reason to move faster to home-grown renewable energy – and gas exports from the U.S. What will it take to get the Germans, etc., to accept some short-term pain in return for the long-term security that would come from the demise of Putin’s dictatorship? That short-term European pain could include a cutoff of Russian gas supplies in response to sanctions on the Putin regime.
Many of Putin’s cronies and maybe the dictator himself have Riviera real estate, bank accounts, money-laundering operations and other assets in the West. Indeed, something that the West has going for it now that it didn’t have in Soviet days is that the Russian regime and the former Soviet functionaries who stole state assets under the drunken Boris Yeltsin have so much property abroad. And Russian oligarchs like to travel in and indeed live in the West. They should be squeezed very hard.
The Russians have far more to fear from tough Western sanctions than the West has to fear from the Putin regime. The question is whether the West has gone too soft and complacent to act firmly.
The sanctions by the Obama administration to squeeze some of Putin’s fellow mobsters are a start but far from enough. And the Europeans have not yet shown much backbone. Rhetoric is cheap. Western security demands that everything possible be done to weaken Putin’s regime. Now.
When George W. Bush did little when the Russians invaded tiny Georgia, a democracy, and stole some of its land, it emboldened Putin, who, like most bullies, is quick to sense weakness. He probably laughed his cynical laugh when Bush said early in his presidency that he had “looked into his {Putin’s} soul’’ and saw a man he could trust.
NATO must step up its military assistance to members Poland and the Baltic Republics and provide arms, air-defense technology, military intelligence and other defensive military support to Ukraine to make Putin think twice before marching on Kiev.
In 1956, President Eisenhower did virtually nothing when the Russians moved in to quash the Hungarian Revolution, killing tens of thousands of people. In 1968, President Johnson did nothing when the Russians quashed Czech attempts to wrest themselves from Soviet/Russian dictatorship. In 2008 President G.W. Bush did virtually nothing when the Russians invaded Georgia and stole some of that democracy's land. But these days, we do have potent weapons to discourage further Russian expansionism. But they require our will and patience.
Meanwhile, many Ukrainian leaders must profoundly regret that their nation gave up its nuclear arms in 1994 in return for security guarantees from the U.S., Britain and Russia. The hope then was that Russia would not go back to its traditional oriental despotism. One of Russia’s fellow tyrannies, Iran, which is hurrying to make nuclear bombs, will take a lesson from the Ukrainian crisis.
Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com) is a former editor of these pages and a Providence-based editor and writer. He runs the www.newenglanddiary.com site. He is a former editor at the International Herald Tribune and The Wall Street Journal.