A Different Dance--from Tango to Minuet
Mini Teaser: The internal condition of Russia has changed immensely for the better, and is continuing to change, though progress has not occurred as fast or as decisively as the Romantics had hoped.
In the glorious autumn of 1991 the Soviet kingdom of ideological
imperatives fell, and the foreign and security policies of Russia
began to be shaped by what might be called the "normal" factors:
domestic politics and the economy, history and geography. Suddenly,
Russia's course became open to variations--and meaningful
speculations.
Those in this country who speculated out loud almost instantly split
into two camps. Each ranged across party affiliations and spanned the
conservative-liberal divide, and each quickly acquired allies in the
mass media and among policymakers. One school of thought (let us call
it the "Historical") contended, in oversimplified essence, that a
nation's history is its destiny. Historic genes would see to it that,
sooner or later and mutatis mutandis, Russia would revert to its
age-long authoritarian and imperialist ways. The best known exponents
of this view have been Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski.
The opposing camp (call it the "Romantic") had its main advocates in
Jeane Kirkpatrick and, until last spring, Richard Nixon. The
Romantics argued that nations do change, and that democracy--even one
as tentative, fledgling, incompetent, and chaotic as Russia's--cures
historic ills, as in our time it has done already in the cases of
Germany and Japan.
It is clear today that both the Historicals and the Romantics were
partially right--and also that both have erred, although the
Romantics, so far, have been closer to the mark. The internal
condition of Russia has changed immensely for the better, and is
continuing to change, though progress has not occurred as fast or as
decisively as the Romantics had hoped. As far as foreign policy and
security are concerned, the process of change has turned out to
resemble not a highway, but a muddy and pitted country road that
zigzags, undulates and detours a great deal.
The justifiable concern caused in the West by the twists and turns of
the Russian course has been endowed with additional weight and darker
hues by a powerful mindset which requires a serious effort to resist.
That mindset arises and gains credibility from an undeniable fact:
for the last four centuries and until a few years ago Russia has been
at the heart of two relentlessly expansionist empires: first that of
the tsars and then that of the communists. Seen in this light, the
dips and loops in the road--from the alleged Russian involvement in
the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict (whether authorized by the Kremlin or
not), to the continuing presence of the Fourteenth Army in Moldova,
to the defense of the brutal communist dictatorship in
Tajikistan--easily acquire significance and portent well beyond their
actual scope.
Russia Great versus Russia Free
Yet alongside these disturbing developments there has unfolded a
dazzling spectacle of what might be called the Yeltsin revolution in
Russian foreign policy. From Ivan the Terrible through Peter the
Great and Catherine to Stalin, Russian state-building invariably
included three elements: first, a potent messianic streak (from
Russia as a "Third Rome," to Russia as the leader of the Slavs, to
the "heart of world socialism"); second, the relentless expansion and
strengthening of the empire; and third, dependence on massive
military strength. Yeltsin has radically revised (indeed, in many
instances, reversed) all three components.
The ideological dream has been interrupted--one hopes,
terminated--and Russia is learning to speak prose both to its own
people and to the world. The empire has been broken up. And the
military is being starved for funds and men, with a brutal
determination unprecedented in Russian history. The annual diminution
of the defense budget for three years in a row; the steadfast
adherence of the Yeltsin administration to the target reduction of
the armed forces to under 1.5 million (from 4.5 million just three
years ago); and the withdrawal from the Baltic countries controlled
by Russia for two centuries--these are only the most dramatic
manifestations of the military revolution.
But the most momentous development has been a break with another
national theme, one which, like a thread of steel, bound rulers and
ruled for centuries. This theme was the unquestioned and
unquestionable priority of national security and foreign policy
objectives over domestic concerns. The readiness with which the
latter were sacrificed to advance the former was the central
characteristic of the Russian state for at least four centuries. As
the great Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin succinctly put it in a
memorandum to Alexander I in 1818, "The first duty of the sovereign
is to preserve the internal and external unity of the state.
Solicitude for the welfare of social classes and individuals must
come second." Throughout Russian history, an overwhelming
preoccupation with the integrity of the empire was a critical brake
on domestic liberalization. As Adam Ulam has said:
"At decisive moments it was not only the government but also Russian
society which found itself unable to opt clearly for freedom if its
price seemed to involve the threat to the country's unity and
greatness. [In 1990, it was precisely such a threat that moved
Gorbachev, belatedly and unsuccessfully, to attempt to slow down the
reforms.]"
When Russian foreign policy was reborn, Yeltsin, too, faced the same
cursed dilemma of Russian history: Russia great (that is, Russia
imperial) versus Russia free. He became the first Russian leader ever
to choose Russia free. Consider the magnitude of what Yeltsin did. In
December 1991, when he hammered the last nail in the coffin of the
Soviet Union in Belovezhskaya Pusha, he not only gave up all of the
imperial conquests of Peter, Catherine, and both Alexanders but
reversed the four hundred year old tradition in which the very
national idea of Russia was derived from that of the imperial state.
He "uncoupled" Russian identity and Russian statehood from the
Russian empire. Until then, the two had never been separate: the
emergence of the modern Russian state under Ivan the Terrible
coincided--after the conquest of the Kazan and Astrakhan
Khanates--with the birth of the Russian empire. The result of this
revolution may be summarized quite simply: not since the middle of
the sixteenth century when the Russian expansion began, has there
been a Russia less aggressive, less belligerent, less threatening to
neighbors and the world than the Russia we see today.
Liberal Disenchantment with America
It is quite clear today, however, that despite the justified euphoria
that attended the early stages of this revolution, it has not, in the
end, produced a Russian foreign policy that is uniformly and
unremittingly solicitous of the United States, or even automatically
accommodating of its interests.
Nor, in retrospect, could it have. Just as in Russian domestic
politics anti-communism is no longer viewed in Russia as synonymous
with democracy, but only as a necessary and in itself insufficient
condition for progress, so, while the radical break with foreign
policy objectives of the past creates a vital precondition for
Russia's re-integration in what Moscow used to call "the civilized
world," it does not in itself ensure a cloudless relationship with
the United States and its allies.
Between the August Revolution of 1991 and today, there has occurred a
major change in the ways in which the Russian political class views
Russia's proper role in its neighborhood and the world. In
particular, there has been a change in perceptions of Russia's
relations with the United States, whose motives and objectives have
been intensely--and less than objectively--re-examined in Moscow. The
most remarkable feature of this metamorphosis is the political
provenance of those affected by it. Until it occurred, there had been
a very stable correlation between domestic ideological positions and
perceptions of the outside world: the rejection of the West almost
perfectly coincided with reactionary--that is, in the Russian
context, leftist, statist and nationalist--domestic positions. But
starting in the second half of 1992, suspicion of the United States
and calls for a tougher foreign policy line in pursuit of Russian
national interests began to emanate from different and most unusual
ideological quarters.
Several months ago in Moscow, for example, a top official on the
National Security Council, having just enthusiastically described to
me a criminal justice reform that would provide additional and
weighty guarantees for the individual against the state, proceeded to
portray the U.S. policy toward Russia as based on raw force, narrow
egotistical interests, and condescension--all, in his opinion,
designed to deny Russia its great power status. One of the earliest
converts to this line among prominent, card-holding democrats was
Vladimir Lukin, ex-ambassador to the United States and now the
chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Duma. Today, he
is in very large and distinguished company.
Consider, as another striking example, a statement made last spring
by a leading Russian anti-communist and engineer of the Soviet
Union's demise, Gennady Burbulis. As Yeltsin's top aide and state
secretary, Burbulis was the second most powerful man in Russia during
the critical first year of the revolution, between September 1991 and
October 1992. Speaking in the House of the Cinema, the home of the
most radical democratic opposition to Gorbachev during perestroika,
in April, 1994 he responded to a question about the former Yugoslavia
and Russia's dispute with Ukraine over the Black Sea Fleet in these
terms:
"The lyrical phase of Russia's partnership with the world community
and, first and foremost, the United States, is over. We are moving
toward tough pragmatism, which they have pursued all along....The
world has been divided. Someone needs a Russia weak, dispossessed,
humiliated and endlessly dependent on everybody; others are not ready
to accept us as full partners in the world community, complete with a
distinct foreign policy and convincing arguments in its defense."
Whence such a sharp departure from what used to be, only two years
earlier, an utter and near-universal enchantment with the United
States by Russian democrats? One reason is almost certainly the
initial existence of inflated and unfulfillable expectations. When
Russian foreign policy was reborn in early 1992, the so-called
"liberal-internationalists"--at the time unchallenged as the charters
of Russia's new course--brimmed with as much enthusiasm for the "new
world order" as did the Bush White House. Fresh from the burial of
Soviet totalitarianism, they were infused with a vision of the world
in which the old and tired notions of traditional power
diplomacy--all those "spheres of influence" and "zones of vital
interests"--were about to be made irrelevant by a kind of
multinational police force, led by the United States. In that dream,
the "civilized world" would swiftly and decisively intercede for
peace, democracy, and human rights and would check violence
everywhere, including, of course, in the territory of the former
Soviet Union.
Then came a conflagration of bloody ethnic and political fighting in
Georgia, Tajikistan, Moldova, and the escalation of the war between
Armenia and Azerbaijan, all of which coincided with the siege of
Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serbs. The sight of the international
community's impotence, its inability to enforce the "new world
order," or to contain, let alone settle, a savage ethnic conflict
very much like ones that were sweeping the Russian southern periphery
at the time, led the Russian "internationalists" to re-examine the
hopes they had for the ability of the United States and its allies to
restore a just peace anywhere. Assessing the Soviet-sponsored Cuban
military intervention in Ethiopia in 1977-78, Zbigniew Brzezinski
declared that "salt lay buried in the sands of Ogaden." As far as the
Russian "internationalists" were concerned, the "new world order" was
buried in the hills around Sarajevo.
But perhaps the weightiest reason behind the hardening of the Russian
foreign and national security postures was provided by that "iron
law" of post-revolutionary consolidation: when the dust settles down,
there is at least partial return to traditional national agendas and
traditional ways of articulating and implementing them. In Russia
this process resulted in a broad national consensus on key foreign
policy objectives, a consensus which emerged and solidified in 1992
and was codified in 1993.
The New Consensus
This consensus revolved around three strategic goals: Russia as
regional superpower; Russia as world nuclear superpower; and Russia
as a great--though not "super"--world power. The support for and
maintenance of each of these objectives will inform Russian behavior
for decades to come. Each goal will ramify through Russia's relations
with the United States. Ironically, it is the nuclear superpower
dimension, the thorniest of the bilateral issues in Soviet times,
that so far has proved to be the easiest to deal with. This despite
Russia's far greater reliance on the nuclear deterrent today when her
conventional capability is greatly reduced, and despite the
near-obsessive zeal with which Moscow went after the Ukrainian and
Kazakh weapons. It is in this area that the most unambiguous and
important achievement of the U.S. engagement in Russia's post-Soviet
strategic space has occurred: the de-nuclearization of Ukraine, which
opened the way to the implementation of START I and ratification of
START II. Some of this success undoubtedly is due to the
well-developed and still well-oiled machinery of arms control
negotiations, but most of the credit should go to a far more relaxed
posture on Russia's part, once it bowed out of the competition for
global superpower primacy.
Things get considerably more complicated as we approach the
geostrategic space in which Russia seeks to pursue the other two
goals of its core foreign policy agenda. Frictions with the United
States that spring from this pursuit are likely to be of a systemic
and recurrent nature, never to be completely "solved" and disposed
of, only more or less successfully managed.
In response to U.S. actions outside Europe, we should expect Moscow
to assume, at least initially, positions distinct from ours,
sometimes stridently so. Yet, ultimately, the posture is not going to
be antagonistic or even hostile. Reflecting a slow and very painful
adjustment to the fall from superpowership, this stance is not unlike
the foreign policy of de Gaulle's France: another great power, that,
having seen its relative importance vis-Ã -vis the United States
diminish precipitously, compensated by using every opportunity to
make up in rhetoric what had been lost in substance.
Russia's engagement of the United States and its allies in Eastern
and Central Europe--a "gray zone" between the abandoned global stance
and the intense, non-negotiable regional superpowership--is certain
to be more stubborn and sustained than elsewhere in the world. It
will include a resistance by all diplomatic means available, and a
heated, at times blistering, rhetoric. In extreme cases, the West
will face a choice between diluting and slowing down--or even
abandoning--its policies, and a serious deterioration, indeed a
possible breakdown, in relations with Moscow.
East-Central Europe will remain a source of strain because of the
built-in tension between two geopolitical tendencies, clearly evident
today. On the one hand, and reflecting an organizational credo that
appears to equate expansion with vitality, NATO will keep trying to
"anchor," police, protect, and eventually incorporate, the
post-communist nations of Europe. On the other, Moscow will continue
to resist Western expansion into the Slavic areas adjacent to Russian
borders, reflecting an historic anxiety which is at least as old as
West European fear of Russian imperialism, and which conjures up the
nightmarish images of a cordon sanitaire around Russia.
The resulting contention will be further sharpened by the
understandably relentless pressure of the Central European nations
themselves for membership in NATO. To them it is both the ultimate
symbolic imprimatur of their European lineage, interrupted by nearly
five decades of war and Soviet domination, and a Trojan horse with
which to penetrate the barriers of "fortress Europe"--a case of
traveling to Luxembourg and Strasbourg via Brussels. Both of these
prizes are far more real and urgent than any fear of the menace from
the East. In this regard, the contre-temps caused by NATO's decision
eventually to accept the Visegrad nations as members, while excluding
Russia, appears characteristic. Having failed spectacularly to deal
with a real threat to the European "new order" in Bosnia, NATO has
proceeded to make up for the defeat by advancing toward a commitment
against a threat that does not exist.
The Budapest Decision
For the United States, the endorsement of NATO's expansion, after
almost two years of resistance, could be a watershed. During the
previous three and a half years, under two administrations, Russia's
rapidly evolving domestic and foreign policies lent themselves to
three basic interpretations: the glass half-full, half-empty, and
not-clear-but-let's-wait-and-see. Until the December 5, 1994 CSCE
summit in Budapest, the U.S. appeared to be guided by the first and
the third estimates. The "Partnership for Peace," ingeniously devised
to postpone the crucial decision and buy time until truly informed
judgment becomes possible, epitomized this highly prudent and
responsible attitude. In Budapest, for the first time, the glass was
found half-empty.
The full impact of this fateful verdict on U.S.-Russian relations may
not be immediately apparent but is likely be very real and extensive.
In international politics, symbols are just as real a currency as
treaties and troop deployments. NATO's decision undermines the
tentative but hopeful paradigm of U.S.-Russian relations that emerged
at the Washington summit in September 1994. There, for the first
time, instances of divergent national interests were discussed
frankly. Some were resolved, others registered as disagreements to be
worked out later. Yet all were clearly demarcated and localized, thus
preventing them from poisoning the overall relation. That this
foundation for a mature relationship became possible was due to the
cumulative effect of those intangible but indispensable catalysts of
all genuine and lasting diplomatic rapprochements: good will and
trust. It is precisely these vital antidotes to strategic breakdowns
that have been seriously sapped by the U.S. endorsement of the NATO
expansion.
To the Russians, the implied exclusion from the "civilized world"
represents a judgment on the country's ability to complete its march
toward democracy. It is this pronouncement on the fate of the Russian
experiment, issued by the country still by far the most admired by
Russians, that accounts for the resentment across the political
spectrum and for the brusqueness of President Yeltsin's remarks in
Budapest. Yeltsin stated, "Europe, not having freed itself from the
heritage of the Cold War, is in danger of plunging into a cold peace.
Why sow the seeds of mistrust?"
Two weeks before Budapest, Vladimir Lukin, the chairman of the
Committee on Foreign Relations of the Duma and a leading contender
for the post of the minister of foreign affairs in the post-Yeltsin
government, commented in Moscow News on the Republican victory on
November 8th and its significance for Russia:
"The struggle [in the United States] between the two views on the
"Russian problem" is intensifying sharply. The first view holds
Russia a great nation which, on the whole, is proceeding in the right
direction and the progress of which will determine success or failure
of the "democratic wave" of the 1980s - 1990s. In the other view,
Russia is a semi-prostrate communist giant, immanently imperial and
aggressive, ruined by incompetent leadership and soon to be ready to
tread the same road [as in the past] that would lead, eventually, to
confrontation with the West. Until now, the first view has largely
prevailed. Yet the changes in the political climate in Washington
could push Clinton toward the other position."
An old and experienced American hand, Lukin was correct both in his
description of the Washington Weltanschauung and in the impact of
U.S. politics on the White House's change of policy.
The damage done by the NATO decision has been further deepened by the
context in which it was made and by its timing. Having, in effect,
declared Russia less fit than, say, Slovakia to participate in the
dominant security structure of Europe, the U.S. and their NATO allies
made little attempt to tie Moscow to the new world order by other
means: either by special arrangements between Brussels and Moscow
which would parallel those between NATO and the Visegrad nations, or
by greater Russian cooperation with, and perhaps a promise of
eventual participation in, the G-7.
The timing of the NATO decision compounded the harm, as it coincided
with the twilight of the Yeltsin phase of the Russian revolution. The
decision to draw a line separating Russia from the rest of Europe
presents the Russian political elite with a new geostrategic reality
which will undoubtedly shape their choices in the next two
years--precisely at the time when they will lay a blueprint for a
post-Yeltsin foreign policy.
The Near Abroad: Influence or Imperialism?
In no other area will this blueprint be more complicated and pointed
than in Russia's pursuit of regional superpowership. We would do well
to understand the place of the near abroad in Russian national
security.
Defense Minister Pavel Grachev voiced an assessment widely shared in
Russia when he stated that the most probable danger to his country was
"not a direct armed invasion but her gradual entanglement in
conflicts in neighboring nations and regions. Given the complex
interrelation and interdependence of the various [newly independent]
states and peoples, any armed conflict may evolve into a large-scale
war."
But Russian concerns in the near abroad go far beyond purely military
affairs. Much like the United States, which with the end of the Cold
War has revised and expanded its definition of national security to
include, for instance, free trade, the new Russia has redefined its
own national security posture by placing a very strong, perhaps
paramount, emphasis on progress toward economic prosperity and
democracy. The centrality of the near abroad to Russia stems
precisely from the view in Moscow that neither objective will be
achieved without first securing a measure of stability in the newly
independent states and then effecting economic re-integration with
them.
Tied to Russia--in some cases for centuries, and in all cases for
many decades--by a myriad of economic, political, social, military,
and human cords, the new states are seen by the Russians--and it is
here that the national consensus is the widest and the strongest--as
the keystone to Russian national security in a most immediate sense.
The key guiding document in the area of foreign policy, a kind of
National Security Directive Number One, signed by Yeltsin in April
1993, states this quite unambiguously:
"The vitally important interests of the Russian Federation are
connected, first of all, with the development of her relations with
the states of the near abroad. Russia cannot develop normally other
than on the basis of new economic and transportation ties,
cooperation in the area of defense, and in the settlement of
conflicts."
In addition, Russian tentative political stability is perennially
threatened by the prospect of an explosive exodus of ethnic Russians
from the countries of the near abroad, especially the 9.7 million
from Central Asia. In private conversations, both Russian officials
and politicians of very different political hues insist that they had
no choice but to defend the Afghan-Tajik border and support the
puppet communist regime in Tajikistan, about which they have no
illusions. They claimed that a victory of Muslim fundamentalists
there would result in the destabilization of the whole of Central
Asia and in the falling "dominos" of a massive Russian exodus from
Uzbekistan (1.6 million), and Kazakhstan (6.2 million)--an exodus
with which Russia would not be able to cope economically, socially
and politically. Already an estimated two million have emigrated to
Russia since 1989, and at least six million more are considered
likely to move in the near future.
If the French experience in the 1960s is a guide, the Russian pieds
noirs--impoverished, homeless, unemployed, and bitter--are also
likely to be profoundly reactionary. It took France (a far richer and
stable society in the 1960s than Russia is today, or will be any time
soon) two decades to digest and partially defuse a far smaller number
of French exiles from Algeria. Whether or not Russian refugees from
near abroad would organize themselves into an equivalent of the
Organisation Armée Secrète (an organization that, if formed,
thousands would join, and hundreds of thousands vote for), it seems
more than likely that the extreme leftist parties would respond very
quickly by advocating the restoration of the Soviet Union by force.
To note the deep domestic political, economic, and social roots of
the Russian policy in the near abroad is not, of course, to imply
that Russian behavior there should not be watched extremely carefully
for the clues that will help answer the all-important question: Is
Russia engaged in a purposeful, sustained and coherent rebuilding of
the empire--or is it merely fashioning a security belt, a "sphere of
influence" of the kind that for centuries has existed around most
great land powers?
The question, and the distinction, are critical because the answer
goes to the heart of our paramount concern: Russia's progress toward
a democratic state at peace with its own people, its neighbors, and
the world. For, unlike, say, French and British counterparts, the
Russian empire historically has never been compatible with Russian
liberalization. Because of the geography of the near abroad, a
determined effort at recapturing and consolidating the empire is
almost certain to be accompanied by a slide toward authoritarianism
and militant nationalism at home. On the other hand, the
establishment of an old-fashioned "sphere of influence" along
Russia's southern border, attended though it is certain to be by the
usual quota of nasty tricks, is likely to be non-lethal to the
Russian progress.
We need to establish, and inform Moscow of, a series of markers on
the perimeter where the "zone of influence" ends and open-ended
imperialism begins. Together such markers would constitute a kind of
conceptual tripwire around Russia and set off alarms and Western
opposition if crossed. These markers are not difficult to agree on,
and three are quite obvious. The largest of them involves Russian
behavior in relation to Ukraine, i.e., any and all Russian attempts
to pressure, Finlandize, or threaten Ukraine's territorial integrity,
be that in the Russian-majority enclaves of Crimea or in the
Northeast. The second segment of the tripwire should be placed on the
Russian border with the Baltic states and activated, for instance, by
Moscow's insistence on basing rights for the Russian fleet,
submarines and early warning systems; military build-up in
Kaliningrad and special "rights of access" to this Russian enclave
within Lithuania; or long-term "Treaties of Friendship and
Cooperation." The third manifestation of the imperial designs would
be an attempt to forcibly detach from Kazakhstan its six northern
provinces by inciting and abetting Russian irredentism there.
This distinction should form the basis for our reaction to Moscow's
actions in the near abroad. The rebuilding of the empire would be an
act of political will and should be resisted, expeditiously and
vigorously. The construction and management of a "sphere of
influence" is an inevitable geostrategic reality. While its harsher
manifestations may properly be criticized and an effort made to
persuade Russia to exert its influence by more civilized methods, the
reality should be acknowledged and the larger strategic stakes in our
relationship always be kept well in mind.
The Russian invasion of Chechnya is a case in point. At once
repugnantly brutal and inept, it should raise questions about the
nature of the present Russian regime and President Yeltsin's dramatic
physical and political decline. Yet the issue here is not imperialism
but separatism. Chechnya is not the Sudetenland of 1938, the eastern
Poland of 1939, or the Afghanistan of 1979. Rather, it is like the
Tamil regions of Sri Lanka, Turkish Kurdistan, or Indian Kashmir of
today: an area where a determined ethnic or religious minority seeks
independence from a larger nation of which it has been a part for
many decades. (And if Moscow does not make major concessions to the
Chechens, the situation there will unfold along the same lines: an
endless "dirty" war, fought with increasing brutality by both sides,
complete with terrorism inside Russia itself.)
To criticize Russian behavior in this war is not to criticize Russian
imperialism but, rather, the inability of the quasi-democratic polity
to resist the age-long tradition in which a "small victorious
war"--to quote Viacheslav Plehve, minister of the interior under the
last Russian tsar, Nicholas II--is seen as the shortest and most
reliable way of proving the effectiveness and ensuring popularity of
an unstable regime.
As far as Russian imperialism is concerned, the only point
conclusively proven by the wretched Chechnya affair is that even an
imperfect democracy erodes, if not cures, the imperial urge. Although
tardy in bestowing on Russia many of its other boons, Russian
democracy has matured enough to make lengthy military expeditions
very dangerous for the regime. The longer Russia persists on the
non-authoritarian path, the harder its leaders will find to undertake
even relatively minor "inside jobs," much less to enact grander
imperial designs.
The Honest Broker
Yet there is today a glaring disjunction between the attention being
given to the near abroad by the West in the form of close monitoring
of Russian actions and the West's inability and disinclination to
intervene effectively in the region itself. Given the obvious lack of
interest, funds, political will