FASTER, PLEASE: The American Brezhnev era is over.
Since 9/11, Washington has spent billions of dollars promoting “democratic norms” abroad. The policy mirrored the late Soviet Union’s attempts to promote communism in countries outside Moscow’s direct control, as witnessed under the leadership Leonid Brezhnev. And now at last it appears to have ended, following Donald Trump’s executive orders and yesterday’s State Department takeover of the United States Agency for International Development.
This American Brezhnev policy has had a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland effect: democratically elected leaders such as Ukraine’s ill-fated Viktor Yanukovych could be violently overthrown in the name of democracy. Over the past quarter century, countries such as Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia and Romania, have at one time or another been deemed insufficiently “democratic” (i.e. insufficiently in thrall to the dictates of Washington) and thus found themselves the target of sanctions and none-too-subtle propaganda campaigns. Under Joe Biden, such efforts were redoubled as “protecting democracy” became the leitmotif of American strategy at home and abroad.
Brezhnev 2.0 would not be possible without the scores of “independent media” outlets that receive funding from agencies such as USAID or from the constellation of “non-governmental organizations,” or NGOs, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute. NED’s first president, Allen Weinstein, famously bragged that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly twenty-five years ago by the CIA.” Now Donald Trump has frozen all manner of foreign assistance. And by defunding media projects, Trump has deprived Washington’s empire builders and their disciples of a crucial weapon in their project of overthrowing regimes deemed insufficiently pliable.
Trump’s funding freeze is one of those rare occasions when the prerogatives of the national security state are actually being challenged. As expected, the media is going bananas—after all, in the US, the priorities of the media and the national security state are often one and the same. Doubt it? Consider the current smear campaign aimed at former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard conducted by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, the New York Times editorial board and Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.
If American media outlets can be relied on to tee up the propaganda at home, government-and NGO- funded media outlets carry Washington’s water abroad. Allegedly independent media outlets such as CivilNet in Armenia, New Voice of Ukraine, the Kyiv Post and Magyar Hang in Hungary exist not because of domestic demand, but because they serve Washington’s political agenda.
Last year, both VDH and Niall Ferguson discussed DC being trapped in the Brezhnev era. At the moment, particularly given the breakneak speed at which the Trump administration is moving, it appears to be Morning in America again, to coin a phrase. And speaking of which!
This is also highly reminiscent of when Reagan himself replaced the portrait of Thomas Jefferson with Calvin Coolidge in the Cabinet Room on the very first day of his administration, as symbolism that there wasn’t just a new sheriff in town, he had a very different worldview than those — of both parties — who held the office for the previous half century.