Foreign Wars and Domestic Politics

When things aren't going so well for a president, it can be useful to find a scapegoat. Foreign threats are also useful distractions. The movie "Wag the Dog" told us that, as if we hadn't seen the pattern repeated many times in our political history.

We can see the same phenomenon in a recent Washington Post dispatch from Moscow about the Russian parliamentary elections, which resulted in a big win for political parties aligned with President Vladimir Putin. Andrew Roth interviewed a Moscow pensioner:

“The president’s party, who else would I vote for?” said Nadezhda Osetinskaya, a 67-year-old pensioner and former nurse who lined up before polls opened at 8 a.m. at a school in northwest Moscow.

Osetinskaya had her share of complaints. Prices for food and medicine are increasing, she said, and she required support from her children to live on her $250 monthly pension. She was unhappy with the quality of care at a hospital where she receives treatment for a kidney ailment. The city had carried out years of road work, she said, but the potholes on her neighborhood streets are legion, probably the result of corruption. 

But on broader questions, she enthusiastically supported Putin, lauding the recent annexation of Crimea and blaming Russia’s economic difficulties on a Western conspiracy. Voting for United Russia was a way to support Putin, she reiterated.

So this voter is unhappy with rising prices, poor health care, and government corruption. But she supports the longtime incumbent because he's fighting a war and blaming Russia's problems on someone else. (Maybe Snowball!) Blaming America has worked for the dictators of Cuba and Venezuela, not that they've ever allowed a real election.

Writers have often seen the true nature of rulers and politics. Henry Adams wrote a century ago, "Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds."

And Shakespeare understood the value of foreign military adventures to rulers long before that, when he wrote in Henry IV, Part 2,

I cut them off and had a purpose now

To lead out many to the Holy Land,

Lest rest and lying still might make them look

Too near unto my state. Therefore, my Harry,

Be it thy course to busy giddy minds

With foreign quarrels...

It still works.