A Dubious Partnership; Review of Fred C. Ikle and Sergei A. Karaganov, (co-chairs), Harmonizing the Evolution of U.S. and Russian Defense Policies (Joint Project of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC and the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, Moscow, 1993), 43pp.
To realists, it has always been axiomatic that one must deal with those who matter, even when they are least congenial. That paradigmatically realist institution, the nineteenth century Concert of Europe, not only treated war as a legitimate institution (to the outrage of its critics), but had an emphatic Great Power bias. That bias was deemed central to the Concert's aim of reconciling interstate conflict with international order. Conservatives like Castlereagh, nationalists like Bismarck and internationalists like Gladstone were all convinced that international order would be torn apart unless the interests of Great Powers were respected and kept in balance.
The Standing Group of this joint U.S.-Russian project--which includes, inter alia, a former Supreme Allied Commander Europe, a former U.S. Undersecretary of Defense, a former U.S. Army Chief of Staff and the last Chief of the Soviet General Staff--have brought these classical convictions to bear upon entirely novel circumstances. The novelty lies in the swift collapse of the power that "balanced" the interests of the United States for forty-five years. Though guarded in its manner of saying so, the report shows discomfort at the extent of the collapse of Soviet power, while welcoming the collapse of the ideology that made this power menacing by definition. If post-Communist Russia could be induced to play the part that post-Napoleonic France played after 1815, these contributors would harbor far fewer anxieties about the post-Cold War order than they plainly do.
