Winter is Coming by Gary Kasparov Read Free Book Online

they can always get worse. Barack Obama came into office with hardly any foreign policy experience and saddled with overwhelming domestic challenges. He also had a clear mandate from an American people burned out on long unpopular engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq: fix America and leave the rest of the world alone. There was little chance that Obama, the idealistic newcomer, would challenge Putin in any meaningful way despite adding the Orange Revolution-savvy Mike McFaul to his foreign policy team.
    What happened was still much worse than I expected. The Obama administration trotted out its reset plan, complete with Hillary Clinton’s inaccurate button. Imagine the message this warm overture sent to Vladimir Putin. (Technically, the recipient of the message was Dmitry Medvedev, but let’s not trifle with such absurd pretenses.) If Putin occasionally seems incredulous at the relatively robust international response to his 2014 invasion of Ukraine, perhaps it’s because he is simply waiting for his next reset button.
    In her 2014 memoir, Hillary Clinton goes to great lengths to defend the Reset and to explain that she was never taken in by Putin. Ironically, this post-facto position follows the same pattern as the memoirs of her political adversaries: George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld. With near unanimity, often with very similar phrasing, they all say they knew Putin was a bad guy, but they had no choice but to do business with him. (Bush 43 is the most forthcoming about the possibility he had misjudged Putin, as I’ll discuss later.)
    As someone who has been yelling from every rooftop and op-ed page about Putin’s nature and ambitions for over a decade, the sight of so many powerful US politicians agreeing with me as soon as they are out of office is infuriating. Their books give no space at all to what they might have done differently to influence Putin’s behavior while they had the power to do so. The idea that the United States might have threatened to isolate Putin, to cut him and his billionaire cronies off, to use the stick after he had eaten all their carrots, never comes up.
    When the US government finally did take limited steps to respond to the Putin regime’s many abuses, it came only after Putin had achieved total power in Russia and a sense of complete impunity. And the move didn’t even come from inside the administration. The Magnitsky Act legislation that levied asset and travel sanctions on some Russian officials for human rights abuses was championed by American-British investor Bill Browder. One of his Russian investment group’s lawyers, Sergei Magnitsky, was arrested in 2008 by the same corrupt law enforcement officials whose massive fraud he had exposed. A year later he died in pretrial detention after being beaten and failing to receive adequate medical attention.
    The Magnitsky legislation was Browder’s retaliation in a way, and at first the Russian officials on the list were only a few who were directly related to Magnitsky’s persecution and death. It’s notable that the Obama administration fought against it from the start, and it was only signed into law as part of a House bill that also normalized trade with Russia, which had previously been restricted in some ways by the famous 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment.
    The Obama administration followed Europe’s embarrassingly cautious lead in applying sanctions against Russia and to Putin’s allies in the wake of Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Despite the overwhelming and bipartisan congressional support for doing more-arming and training Ukraine’s military in particular— Obama continued to echo Merkel, Hollande, and other European leaders talking about “finding a peaceful solution” when there was already a war in progress. They insisted on referring to Putin as someone who would negotiate in good faith, even after he triumphantly admitted in March 2015 that he had been lying about the