Profiles in Courage: In memoriam of de Margerie and Bradlee

Amidst the wholesale muting of progressive and engagement-oriented voices regarding Russia’s relations with the West in media and academic circles, Carter Page explains how the lives of two leaders help demonstrate the shifting forces of political transformation today.

Two giants perished on Tuesday, from each side of the Atlantic. A few minutes after midnight on October 21st, Total SA’s Chairman and CEO Christophe de Margerie was pronounced dead following a tragic collision at Vnukovo Airport in Moscow. Just hours later, longtime Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee died that same day of natural causes at his home in Georgetown. The cities where each lost their life symbolically represented the toughest battleground where these men respectively waged some of their most courageous fights.

Although scions of prominent families, they audaciously stood poised against precisely the greatest political powers of their times in their home countries and the West in general. Their individual sagas and experiences offer deep insights into many fundamental shortfalls found in Western media organizations, universities and governments today. The voices of de Margerie and Bradlee stand in stark contrast to declarations by other intellectual and popular voices whose more recent meager performances have exacerbated many current predicaments in world politics.

When Henry Kissinger suggested in his book World Order that the Watergate scandal was “ruthlessly exploited by Nixon’s longtime critics”, certainly Bradlee stood at or near the top of that U.S. President’s purported critics list. Under his leadership as Executive Editor of the Washington Post, he encouraged two young reporters in their twenties, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, to advance their investigation of a crime at the Democratic National Committee Headquarters. Having brought this break-in to light, the events that followed eventually led Nixon to become the only U.S. President that ever resigned from office in the wake of the embarrassment from these mistakes.

Just as Ben Bradlee helped to reshape history in the 1970’s, Christophe de Margerie questioned widely held conventional wisdom regarding Russia in more recent years. Since February 2007 until his untimely passing this week, he served as CEO of Total SA, France’s largest multinational integrated oil and gas company. Standing alongside BP and Royal Dutch Shell as the European representatives among the six global supermajors, under de Margerie’s leadership Total took on increased investment exposure in Russia. Some of its large multibillion dollar investment projects there have included Yamal LNG and an 18% stake in Novatek, Russia’s second largest gas company.

Sanctions: Unfair and Unproductive

Hours before de Margerie’s death, he gave an impassioned speech that echoed Bradlee’s speaking truth to power approach: “Total is analyzing the impact of sanctions on its business in Russia from legal, economic and other angles. We hope we are allowed to keep most of our business going, particularly in view of the commitments we have taken towards both your government and our Russian partners. This is because our strategy has absolutely not changed. We are committed to Russia. We want to continue to invest in your country and we are still ready to bring the best of what we have.”

“We are against sanctions, in general. I have said it time and again. You have heard it. And I have not made myself very popular in my own country, as I am often accused of promoting our selfish interest. Actually, if I don’t like sanctions, it is because I believe they are both unfair and unproductive. On the contrary, we are of the view that political issues require political solutions. And that it is a failure of diplomacy, when the only tools left are sanctions.”

Exceptional Voices of Reason

Although often without multibillion dollar investments underscoring their commitment, a few other loud voices have occasionally arisen above the anti-Russian propaganda at the intersection of media and academic circles today including John Mearsheimer. Former U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul who almost singlehandedly steered U.S.-Russia relations into shoal waters during his stint in the Obama Administration challenged Mearsheimer’s conclusions. As the poster child for the failure of diplomacy which de Margerie alluded to this week, McFaul’s response to a recent Mearsheimer article was correctly assessed by Mearsheimer himself:

“It is not surprising that Michael McFaul and Stephen Sestanovich disagree with my account of what caused the Ukraine crisis. Both the policies they helped frame and execute while in the U.S. government and their responses to my article exemplify the liberal foreign policy consensus that helped cause the crisis in the first place.”

Only occasionally heard in popular media and academic circles, Stephen Cohen stands as another rare outlier and voice of reason against the broad consensus.

As head of Total’s Middle East operations in 1995, de Margerie had also previously played a key role in reestablishing relations with Iran. One Iranian official was quoted as saying during that era, "Total was the first foreign oil company to sign agreements with Iran despite US threats, which is very important for us..." He similarly was a central force in advancing the company’s ventures in Iraq, including development of their Halfaya project in the South and the Harir Block in Kurdistan.

While 63-year-old de Margerie was struck down at the height of his career, Ben Bradlee passed away a few months after his 93rd birthday and many years after going into semi-retirement with an emeritus editor title. Although members of different generations, their shared tendency to question authority enabled each to have a monumental impact throughout their careers. Unfortunately and with rare exceptions such as other Western business leaders and a small handful of professors like Mearsheimer, the general tendency of media and academic professionals to no longer effectively challenge popular beliefs surrounding Russia as well as Iran and Iraq has helped enable recent policy failures.

Carter W. Page is Founder and Managing Partner of Global Energy Capital LLC, an Adjunct Associate Professor at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs and Energy Fellow at the Center for National Policy in Washington.