Victor Davis Hanson knows as much about Russia…

as he knows about anything else, which is to say 1) very little and 2) not nearly as much as he thinks. I stumbled upon the following in yet another in his endless series of trite and meaningless posts at The Corner:

There is a sort of calm for a bit on Russia’s periphery, since its scared former satellites need time to digest that they are entirely on their own if a Georgia-like dispute flares up.

I am actually quite impressed with the sheer amount of rank stupidity the old raisen farmer has managed to pack into a single sentence. “Entirely on their own?” Really? Has his brain been so scrambled from the endless sophistry and mendacity, and the endless twisting of plain observable facts, necessary to mount any remotely plausible defense of the presidency of George W. Bush that he doesn’t know that many of the countries “on Russia’s periphery” are in a formal military alliance with the United States? Did he not get that memo? Was he too busy fantasizing about young muscular Greek boys in bronze armor throwing spears at one another to remember the small bit about NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, into the very heart of Russia’s “sphere of influence?” Does Hanson not understand that the United States is now legally obligated to treat an attack on the territorial integrity of the Baltics as an attack on its own?

It takes someone who is either profoundly stupid or profoundly dogmatic, and ideally someone who is both, to treat Russia’s meagre countermeasures to the massive expansion of American power in the former Soviet space as “aggressive” or “revanchist.” It takes someone who is much dumber and much more dogmatic to pretend, contrary to all evidence and basic logic, that any of the post-Soviet countries are “entirely on their own” in the case of trouble with Russia. We bailed out Georgia and gave them billions of dollars, and we are still training their armed forces. If that is leaving someone “entirely on their own” what would a “special relationship” look like?

To really put the icing on the cake, Hanson renders oddly passive the outbreak of war in the Caucasus, it just “flared up” sort of like a forest fire or a volcano: no one could have predicted that four straight years of nationalist posturing and Russian-baiting on the park of Saakashvili, as well as the bombardment of Tsinkhvali and the Russian peacekeepers stationed there, would have any consequences whatsoever! Note to VDH: the Georgians started the war against Russia. Was this a wise course of action? Surely American neoconservatives, who have yet to see a war waged by a “democracy” that doesn’t stir their loins, think so! Almost everyone else, including a very large number of Georgians, thinks otherwise.

And even if VDH wasn’t 100% wrong, would it really be so terrible if America signaled to the countries that border Russia that they must find some way of reaching accommodation with it? That, at the absolute least, they should avoid making deliberate efforts to provoke and antagonize it? That is disastrous? That is a moral outrage? Does he really think that the stridently anti-Russia positions of the Baltics, Poland, and Georgia, regardless of their morality and regardless of the emotional satisfaction they conjure, are remotely sustainable? Does he actually have such faith in America’s ability to endlessly project power that he thinks we can, in the long-term, out compete the Kremlin in countries that Russia borders and that it directly controlled for several centuries? If he does, it is an even more damning indictment of his intellect and the quality of his analysis. I personally think that, apart from preventing open warfare, America has no interest whatsoever in what happens on Russia’s borders (America somewhow managed to survive when Moscow controlled Georgia) , but no one in the U.S. government (Democrat or Republican) agrees with that. Is Hanson even aware of who Obama’s Russia advisers are? Does he really think that someone who hired the hawkish and democracy-pimping Michael McFaul as his Russia expert is actually preparing some sort of unprecedentedly dastardly realpolitique?

And, on a totally different note, I was just surfing the Weekly Standard’s website (the things we do to ourselves!) and came upon an even dumber reference to Russia. Kristol said: “In June 1978, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a not unworthy heir to the traditions of Athens and Jerusalem…” The idea that Alexander Solzhenitsyn was somehow an “heir” to the Western tradition would shock anyone that is not pig-ignorant, especially, most of all, Alexander Solzhenitsyn! Solzhenitsyn considered himself many things, but a defender of ”Western values” would be towards the very bottom of the list. Indeed you’d think Kristol, who if nothing else is capable of studiously memorizing 4-5 mendacious “facts,” would get his talking points right: Solzhenitsyn was only popular in the West when he was bashing the Soviet Union, he lost virtually all of whatever popularity he had ever enjoyed when he started criticizing capitalism, excoriating Boris Yeltsin, and supporting Vladimir Putin. I think Solzhenitsyn was a praiseworthy man and a very astute critic of Soviet communism, but, even during his exile in the United States, he could barely restrain his contempt for the poshlost’ of the modern West and would surely retch if he knew that he had posthumously become some sort of figurehead for the unthinking nationalism that is contemporary American neoconservatism.

CRITICAL UPDATE:

VDH is really on a kick these past few days. Today at The Corner he unloaded the following barrage of 100% certified neocon pablum:

Some have remarked at the unusually harsh rhetoric accorded to the Israelis over the Jerusalem issue, especially the assumed American loss of face. Perhaps. But this administration has been embarrassed quite a lot, whether Putin’s snub of the missiles-for-Iran-help deal, the pathetic outreach video et al.to the obnoxious Ahmadinejad, Chavez’s various antics, and the more subtle Chinese putdowns.

There was, of course, no such “deal.” The lame and ineffective attempt at “reset” (which, tellingly, we couldn’t find the right Russian word for)  was essentially a vague proposal to the Russians that amounted to: “We’re not going to be quite as abrasive and douchebaggy as we were for the past 8 years…but we’re still going to build ABM defenses in Europe, we’re probably still going to expand NATO, and we still expect you to do whatever we say. You guys on board with that?” Shockingly, the Kremlin did not react positively to this “deal.” I mean for Christ’s sake all Obama did was move the missile interceptors from Poland to Romania, that is cowardly appeasement? That is a huge diplomatic defeat for America? Really? What planet do these people live on?