World politics and food exports, espionage and Made in Italy food: everything is linked, and Coldiretti raises the alarm: the clash with Russia has already cost very dearly to our producers of cheeses and cured meats, due to the sanctions and against – sanctions between Brussels and Moscow, and with recent news reports the situation is likely to worsen. The agri-food sector is the only sector still directly affected by the embargo decided by Russia in 2014 for the crisis in Ukraine. “To the direct damage of non-exports” observes Coldiretti “is added the insult of the spread on the Russian market of imitation products, which have nothing to do with Made in Italy, made in Russia and from third countries not affected by the embargo”.
The Russian embargo was decided, at the time, to react to the European economic sanctions imposed on Moscow. But does all this make sense? The current of thought that prevails today, with great clarity, at the political and mass media level, in America and in Europe, argues that yes: Putin must pay a price for his aggressive policy, and what we have decided and what we do is appropriate. There is a minority that argues: in seven long years, the sanctions on Russia have not freed even a square centimeter of Crimea, so what is the use of keeping them? They only hurt us Italians and Europeans, not Putin; calculating the cost / benefit ratio, they should be abolished. Then there is a more extremist thesis (Far abusive language): but who cares about Ukraine, let’s just think about our economic interests as a shop, let’s abolish the sanctions and that’s it. And an even more extreme one (Far abusive language, a fortiori): Putin is not that bad, he deserves to be understood and treated better. This is the wholesale position of the so-called sovereignists.
And finally there is a position that is the most difficult of all to sustain, complicated to explain, advocated only by a handful of people, and which does not arouse any “hola” from fans: it is that of the “realistic” school of international relations. , supported today by Henry Kissinger, and until recently also by another dean of the category, George Kennan. Kissinger has, and Kennan had, a very bad opinion of Putin, his regime and his foreign policy; however, both Kissinger and Kennan have always maintained that national interests must be negotiated with everyone, even with enemies, however unpleasant they may be, and that moves must be calibrated on the basis of effectiveness, always taking into account the balance of power and costs. and benefits, and that international politics is not a court in which good and bad are judged and then sentences are carried out. Perhaps (and we allow ourselves to say, with a thousand doubts: perhaps) the current political debate around Russia would benefit from greater articulation than a diatribe between the anti-Putin and the alleged pro-Putin, as if one or the other were bearers of some intellectual or moral installment.
In the specific case of Kennan, who was at the time the father of the doctrine of containment of the USSR and then the most authoritative critic of its ideological drift, since the time of Stalin he considered garrulous displays of antipathy towards a foreign leader as the level intellectually lower than one can touch in international politics. One wonders what would you think of Western anti-Putin rhetoric today. In his time, Kennan rejected any American demonization of the person of Stalin, despite the fact that he himself thought (obviously) all possible evil. In turn, Stalin regarded Kennan as a visceral anti-Soviet, and in 1952, when Kennan was ambassador to Moscow, he expelled him as persona non grata, the only American ambassador to undergo this treatment (a fact which Kennan later exhibited throughout life with coquetry). At the turn of the 40s and 50s, Kennan was among those who pushed America to oppose Stalin and the Soviet Union with the utmost decision, but for him these were de facto political realities, with which they had to make the accounts, without futile rhetorical impulses, neither with invectives nor (for example) with economic sanctions. Kennan is no longer with us, having passed away in 2005, so giving him an opinion on the world of 2020 involves, on our part, an element of risk; however, he had time to see Putin’s first six years in power; and considering that Kennan himself has never approved any economic sanctions to the USSR by Stalin or Brezhnev, it is legitimate to ask, would he approve today those in force against Putin and his Russia no longer superpower, which no longer has the Union behind Soviet or the Warsaw Pact, which must be satisfied with a GDP lower than that of Italy, and which no longer exhibits any ideology of global challenge like the communist one? Would Kennan accept today to justify the current economic sanctions affecting Moscow, and personally some Russian senior leaders, to punish them for the Crimea and the Donbass? We do not force his hand, but at the very least there is no doubt about it.
And this, we repeat, not on the basis of shop interests, not on the assumption that principles must be sacrificed on the altar of exports, and without claiming that Putin is better than he appears. The point is that national interests must be negotiated with everyone, even with enemies, however unpleasant they may be, and moves must be calibrated on the basis of effectiveness, always taking into account the balance of power, costs and benefits, because politics international is not a court in which good and bad are judged and then sentences are carried out.
The author of this article published the book Arcana empires. Cold War and geopolitics: George Kennan from Stalin to Putin (Mimesis Edizioni, 2020) with a preface by Domenico Quirico.
