Propaganda Reset

peaking at the 45th Munich Conference on Security Policy on February 7, 2009, Vice President Joe Biden said:

The last few years have seen a dangerous drift in relations between Russia and the members of our Alliance. It is time—to paraphrase President Obama—it's time to press the reset button and to revisit the many areas where we can and should be working together with Russia.

The following month, on March 29, in Geneva, Switzerland, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov. To symbolically promote the “press the reset button” approach touted by Biden, she presented Lavrov with an actual red button that had the word “reset” written on it in both English and Russian. Unfortunately, someone failed to translate “reset” into the accurate Russian “perezagruzka,” instead mistranslating it as “peregruzka,” a word that carries the meanings of “overcharge” and “overload.”

That someone was Michael McFaul. To be charitable to McFaul, who served as U.S. National Security Council (NSC) director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs and later U.S. Ambassador to Russia under Obama, he was not a translator. The Clinton team should have refrained from such a silly PR stunt in the first place; the red button evoked the apocryphal “nuclear strike button” in Lavrov’s mind. But they should have at least processed the translation through official State Department translators instead of having a staffer run it by McFaul on the fly. The historian Mark Ajita analyzed McFaul’s “bad Russian” and concluded that anyone not familiar with the Russian information technology space (where “reset” entered the language as slang) could have made the same mistake. If anything, McFaul did the best he could despite institutional failure. 

McFaul’s latest book, Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder, can be thought of as another failed effort to reset things. This time, he’s out to reset Washington DC’s imperial propaganda so that his unwitting audience can, in the words of Retired U.S. Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, “live permanently in the afterglow of World War 2.” After more than 30 years of post–Cold War geopolitical disaster, McFaul has valiantly attempted to relegitimize what he calls “the liberal international economic order.”

As with the reset button, or the actual reset policy he helped craft, McFaul is doing the best he can despite inimical circumstances. His new book fails to reset the propaganda. It merely overloads readers with the glittering generalities of a dying mythology. And at $35 in this late imperial economy, one might feel it overcharges as well.