To Russia with Realism

The US needs to develop a strategy towards Russia that resembles in its clarity and restraint existing US strategy towards China, and that is tailored to real US interests and real US strength.

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The Bernard L. Schwartz Fellows Program, American Strategy Program

As if the US did not have enough on its plate, the latest strongly anti-American statements of President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials have suggested the possibility of a new Cold War with Russia. And from the Russian point of view, these statements are only responding to a whole series of bitterly anti-Russian statements and actions by the US administration over the past year, including plans to bring Ukraine into NATO, the speech attacking Russia by Vice President Cheney in Vilnius last July, backing for Georgia in its conflict with Russian-backed breakaway republics, and the latest move to extend US anti-missile defenses to eastern Europe.

At best, deep mutual hostility between the USA and Russia represents a serious distraction from infinitely more important and urgent US problems elsewhere, including Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the rise of China, the deterioration of US influence in Latin America, and the looming threat of global warming. At worst, this tension could lead to Russia arming Iran against the USA, joining global energy cartels to put pressure on the West, and inflicting disastrous geopolitical humiliation on Washington on the territory of the former Soviet Union. This would occur for example if the US agreed to defend Ukraine and Georgia as part of NATO and then proved unwilling or unable to defend them when Russia attacked.

For while Russia obviously cannot remotely match US global power, we should remember the key lesson of Iraq, that all real power is in the end local: it is power that can be applied to a particular place or issue. Russia may no longer be a global superpower, but it is certainly a great power when it comes to Ukraine, Belarus and the Caucasus.

And by contrast with the launching of the Cold War, for the US to undergo these risks is not remotely justified by vital US interests. In the late 1940s, the Soviet Union was the heartland of a revolutionary ideology which threatened to suppress free-market democracy, freedom and religion across the world, and by dominating Western Europe and East Asia, and fomenting revolution in Latin America, to pin the USA within its own borders, surround it, and eventually stifle it.

Today’s Russia is like many US allies past and present: a corrupt, state-influenced market economy with a partly democratic, partly authoritarian system. Russia has no global agenda of ideological or geopolitical domination, but mainly wants to exert predominant influence (but not imperial control) within the territory of the former Soviet Union and the centuries-old Russian empire.

Moves by the state to dominate the oil and gas sector are unwelcome to Americans, but entirely in line with world practice outside the US and UK. Russian corruption is extremely serious, but on the other hand the fiscal restraint of the Putin administration has lessons to teach the present US administration, not the other way round. Like India, Turkey and many other democratic states past and present, Russia has used brutal means to suppress a separatist rebellion.

Like Turkey for several decades when it was a member of NATO, Russia combines an increasingly independent judiciary and respect for the rule of law with selective repression (both formal and covert) against individuals seen as threats to the state or the ruling elite. The media scene is rather like India until the 1980s: a combination of state domination of television with a free and vocal (but much less influential) print media.

Above all, when it comes to the main lines of its foreign and domestic policy, the Putin administration has the support of the vast majority of ordinary Russians, while the Russian pro-Western liberals whom we choose to call “democrats” are supported by a tiny minority -- above all, because of their association with the disastrous “reforms” of the 1990s.

So for the US administration and politicians to attack Putin in the name of democracy, far from rallying democratic support in Russia, only increases the anger of ordinary Russians with the US. It does not help when criticism of Russia’s record on democracy and freedom come from that notorious defender of human rights Dick Cheney, or when these statements are immediately followed by warm and public US embraces of even more notorious ex-Soviet democrats like President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan.

Russia today is by no means a very pretty picture, but to compare it in terms of repression and state control with the Soviet Union -- or indeed with contemporary China -- is grotesque. We should remember that as late as the summer of 1989, a Soviet leader who had suggested a Russia like this would have been received with incredulous joy by the West, as representing a future beyond our most optimistic dreams. And at that time, a Western policymaker who advocated such megalomaniac, horribly dangerous projects as drawing Ukraine and Georgia into an anti-Russian military alliance, and taking responsibility for their security, would have been regarded as completely insane.

Twice in recent years, I have assumed that US hostility to Russia, and anti-Russian US geopolitical agendas, would largely evaporate. The first time was immediately after 9/11, when the extent of the murderous threat of Islamist extremism to the US was fully revealed. It seemed to me self-evident that the American political elites would automatically reconsider their attitudes towards Russia. After all, since the end of the Cold War Russia had not been responsible for the death of a single American, or threatened a single truly vital American interest, and moreover had itself suffered terribly from Islamist terrorism.

The second time was in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq, as the extent of the debacle there, and of US military overstretch became fully apparent. Once again, it seemed to me that US policymakers would instinctively wish to reduce their military commitments elsewhere accordingly, or at the very least not seek to undertake any news ones -- especially of course given the rise of Chinese military power, and threat to Taiwan, in the Far East.

As we know, things have not turned out that way. Instead, hostility to Russia in the Bush administration, both parties in Congress, and the US media has only grown. So too have US ambitions vis a vis Russia. In the first half of last year, the administration, with the full support of the Democrats, was pushing hard towards an offer of a NATO membership action plan for Ukraine at NATO’s summit in Riga last November, in the face of private Russian threats of drastic retaliation, including a massive program of arming Iran against the US.

The case of Ukraine and NATO is worth considering as a prime example of the deep irrationality affecting US policy in the former Soviet Union. For it is not just a question of Ukrainian NATO membership infuriating Russia, real though that threat is -- and understandable: after all, the Russians have lost far more men fighting in Ukraine in various wars than have died in all America’s wars put together, and the Russian flag was flying over the naval port of Sevastopol before the United States was even created.

Even more important are two more facts which are almost never mentioned in the US debate on this subject -- if one can call it a debate. The first is that according to every reliable opinion poll, the great majority of Ukrainians do not even want NATO membership, being convinced that far from bringing Ukraine greater security, the issue would lead to fierce internal divisions in Ukraine, and potentially even split up their country, as well as vastly increasing the threat from Russia.

Leaving aside the deep historical and cultural ties between much of Ukraine and Russia, Ukrainians are well aware of how economically dependent their country is on Russia, and how little by comparison the West has done to help them. Until it was reduced at the start of 2006, Russia’s annual gas subsidy to Ukraine was worth more than four times as much (between $3 and $5 billion dollars) as the whole of US aid to Ukraine in the five years since 2000 (less than $800 million). Millions of Ukrainians work legally in Russia and send remittances back to their families which make an immense contribution to the Ukrainian economy. By contrast, only a handful of Ukrainians receive work visas for the US and the European Union.

The second fact is that if Ukraine does become a member of NATO, the US cannot defend it. Given US commitments in the Middle East, where is Washington to find another army with which to defend Ukraine? Would any US administration be prepared to re-introduce the draft in order to defend Ukraine? If it did, would any US Congress agree? And even if one can imagine this happening in some parallel geopolitical universe, even then would there be any chance of US troops being used to shoot down demonstrators in eastern and southern Ukraine calling for their regions to break away from Ukraine in order to remain allied with Russia?

This entire plan for Ukrainian NATO membership therefore violates one of the most fundamental rules of strategy: never make a really important, really visible commitment that you already know you will not be able to keep in a crisis, but from which you cannot withdraw without terrible humiliation. Above all, don’t do this if your move is actually going to increase the threat of crisis. To make false promises of this kind is not only deeply reckless, it is also deeply unethical.

The US administration also knew that if it had offered to suspend the offer of NATO membership, Russia would in return have become much more helpful with regard to stopping Iran’s nuclear program. Yet it was not opposition in Washington that led to the plan for a Ukrainian “Membership Action Plan” being shelved last year, for there was almost none. Only the collapse of the pro-Western “Orange” coalition that took power in Ukraine in 2004, and the return to the premiership of the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych, led to this crazy project being suspended. As a result, the US has infuriated Russia while gaining precisely nothing from the whole business.

Since all this was well known to experts on the former Soviet Union in Washington, and to many US officials, and many of them were willing to admit as much in private. Why then did they not speak out publicly against this? Why was there almost no public opposition to further NATO expansion in Washington?

The behavior of the US political and media elites with regard to Russia shows some of the same mixture of fanaticism and cowardice that afflicts the US “debate” on the Middle East. Powerful elements are obsessed with particular loyalties and hatreds; others, with no particular axes to grind but passionately concerned with their own careers, are cowed into silence by the prevailing atmosphere.

This combination was to be seen in last year’s bipartisan report on Russia by the Council on Foreign Relations, several of whose signatories would almost certainly not have put their names to this disastrously arrogant and insulting document if they had not felt intimidated by their superiors and the general Washington mood. In the case of the non-debate on NATO membership of Ukraine, once the leaderships of both the Republicans and Democrats had committed themselves to this, no Washington expert who hoped for a job in the next US administration -- ie most of them -- was going to raise his or her voice in protest. This is the way that most of the Washington think tank world works.

This in turn leads to the question of why the general US mood concerning Russia is so bad, especially when contrasted with attitudes to China -- a much more authoritarian state and a much more threatening future rival. Part of the reason is obviously the Cold War, in which the Soviet Union -- not “Russia," but too many people in the West never made the distinction -- was the principal enemy. Out of the Cold war came the particular influence in Washington of Polish, Baltic and West Ukrainian ethnic lobbies, with ethnic hatreds of Russia which long predate their countries’ subjection to Soviet Communism. And unlike in the case of China, the influence of these lobbies is not balanced by a powerful business and financial lobby with massive investments in Russia and therefore a massive stake in good relations between Russia and the US.

Finally, there seems to be a particular hatred of Russia on the part of many members of the Washington elite because long before the Iraqi disaster, Russia “betrayed the magic," the set of beliefs which have formed the ideological basis for the US global empire since the end of the Cold War, and which have been used to justify the costs of that empire to the US public.

At the heart of these are the beliefs that America represents and leads the spread of “Freedom” and “Democracy” in the world, and that countries which becomes democracies will automatically follow the US lead both politically and economically, if necessary sacrificing their own national interests in the process.

Put starkly, this is a completely irrational set of assumptions. It only seemed for a while to have some empirical basis because this mixture did work in former Communist Eastern Europe -- but that of course was only because nationalism in these countries was utterly committed to escaping at all costs from the hated domination of Moscow, and because the European Union did the heavy lifting in terms of economic aid and institutional transformation. This mixture does not work anywhere else -- not in Latin America, not in the Muslim world, and most probably not in China either.

In all these places, growing democracy is associated with growing nationalism (or, in Muslim countries, a mixture of this with religious radicalism), and therefore with hostility to the US. In the case of Russia, it was always quite crazy to think that the Russian public would willingly accept the replacement of Russia by the US as the predominant power in the former Soviet Union, any more than the US public will ever accept the loss of predominant influence in Central America and the Caribbean.

The reaction of Russian society against this US ambition was all the fiercer because in the 1990s, radical free market economic change proved utterly disastrous for ordinary Russians, plunging tens of millions into deep poverty and driving millions to an early death. The association by ordinary Russians of these changes with Western influence was not wholly fair, as the most rapacious and ruthless aspects of the process were the work of the new Russian elites themselves. Nonetheless, these justified their actions in the name of “westernization," and the proceeds of the Russian kleptocracy of the 1990s were to a great extent transferred to Western bank accounts, Western real estate and Western luxury goods, so the hostile reaction of ordinary Russians is also quite understandable.

In fact, we should be very glad that the Putin administration is as pragmatic as it is in its international policy, and as relatively law-abiding at home. During the 1990s, given what was happening to both Russian living standards and Russian national power and prestige, I and many other Western observers in Russia feared an eruption of outright Fascism, with catastrophic results for Russia and the world.

This is one reason why present US attacks on the Putin administration are so over-the-top. The other is that Russia should have begun the entire post-Cold war era with a certain presumption of innocence on the part of the West. After all, two years before it collapsed the Soviet Union had already withdrawn peacefully from Eastern Europe, on the informal promise that these countries would not be incorporated into NATO. This withdrawal removed the original casus belli of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West, which began not because of anything that the Soviet state was doing within its own borders, but because of that state’s domination of European states beyond its borders, and in ways which were clearly menacing to Western Europe and vital US interests there.

Moreover, all the repressions and conflicts which accompanied and followed the fall of the Soviet Union put together are still vastly smaller than those which accompanied the end of the French and British empires, both of them ruled at the time by Western democracies. One utterly forgotten French campaign in Madagascar alone was estimated by the French military to have cost 89,000 dead, the vast majority civilians. The British suppression of a minor rebellion in Kenya may have cost up to 100,000 lives according to two recent British studies.

Millions more died in Indochina, Algeria, Africa and the Indian sub-continent as a result of colonial wars or post-colonial civil wars and ethnic cleansing. And with the exception of Algeria, the British and French wars to preserve their empires, like the US wars in the Muslim world today, took place thousands of miles from the shores of Britain and France. The Chechen wars have taken place on Russia’s own sovereign territory. The valid parallel is not to Iraq, but to past US campaigns against the Native Americans in North America itself.

Before the Union collapsed, it was confidently predicted by most Western observers that the Soviet establishment and the Russian people would fight to the death rather than allow Ukraine and other areas to become independent. Nothing of the sort occurred. In Kazakhstan, more than ten million Russians were incorporated in the independent state of Kazakhstan without a single act of violent protest or armed intervention by Moscow.

But instead of this leading to Russia beginning the post-Cold War period with a presumption of innocence in the West, from the day that the Soviet Union collapsed -- and while Soviet troops were still withdrawing from eastern Europe and the Baltic states -- prominent voices in the West simply continued previous rhetorical lines about how both the former Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia embodied permanent Russian drives towards empire and aggression.

Thus George Will declared in 1996 that, "Expansionism is in the Russians’ DNA;" Peter Rodman stated in 1994 that "The only potential great-power security problem in Central Europe is the lengthening shadow of Russian strength, and NATO has the job of counter-balancing it. Russia is a force of nature; all this is inevitable." And this was despite the fact that since the end of the Soviet Union no leading Russian figure with the exception of the clownish Zhirinovsky had expressed the slightest desire to dominate the Poles, Czechs and others -- on the contrary, the overwhelming sentiment in Russia was that past attempts to do so had been a dreadful mistake.

As Nikolas Gvosdev, editor of The National Interest, has very acutely pointed out, a critical problem in relations between Russia and the US since the fall of the Soviet Union has been that Americans have interpreted that collapse, and the Russian withdrawal from empire, as a straight Russian defeat and US victory akin to the US victory over Germany and Japan in 1945; whereas the Russians have always seen it as a deal in which they gave up enormous territories and influence in return for promises of Western partnership and massive economic assistance, neither of which was forthcoming.

In the eyes of Russians, their withdrawal from anti-American strategies in Central America, Africa and elsewhere was predicated on an assumption that the US and its allies would not seek to destroy their interests in the former Soviet Union. As a former Soviet officer once put it to me, “If we had known what you had in store for us, do you really think that we would have let the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc fall to pieces in the way that they did? We would have fought to the death to hold onto them, and you would have had another world war on your hands.” There won’t be a world war as a result of present US-Russian hostility, but the consequences could still be bad enough, especially when it comes to US interests -- and US lives -- in the Middle East.

The US establishment therefore needs to do two things when it comes to formulating policy towards Russia. The first is to cut out as far as possible emotional attitudes deriving from the Cold War, and instead approach Russia in the same spirit of pragmatism that the US approaches China. The second is to think hard and clearly about what are truly the most important interests of the US with regard to Russia, and what are secondary or minor interests.

In my view, a truly objective cold and analysis along these lines would lead to an identification of the following four vital US interests vis a vis Russia -- and these would in consequence be the only ones to which the US would devote real effort, and for which it would be prepared to make sacrifices elsewhere:

First, to keep Russian weapons and materials of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists, and to persuade Russia to prevent potentially dangerous countries like Iran from acquiring such weapons. This means amongst other things much stronger support and funding for the Nunn-Lugar program, designed to enhance the security of Russian nuclear, chemical and biological sites.

Second, together with Russia, to help prevent Islamist revolution and the creation of safe havens for Islamist terrorists in the Muslim regions of Central Asia and the Caucasus;

Third, to preserve reasonably open international access to the energy reserves of Central Asia and the Caucasus. This requires however not just new pipelines, but also improved relations with both Russia and Iran;

Fourth, to prevent any outbreak of major new conflict within or between states in the region, with all the suffering that this would involve for the peoples concerned, and all the disruptive effects this would have on the world economy and on international stability. This means the US strongly opposing any Russian military intervention in Ukraine and Georgia, but also refraining from trying to draw them into an anti-Russian military bloc, as both these moves are likely to lead to regional conflict.

In other words, the US needs to develop a strategy towards Russia that resembles in its clarity and restraint existing US strategy towards China, and that is tailored to real US interests and real US strength. Surely, the country that produced George Marshall, Dean Acheson and Dwight Eisenhower must still be capable, somewhere in its being, of this kind of strategic wisdom?