E-Notes

From Russia Without Love

by Alexander M. Haig, Jr., and Harvey Sicherman

March 2, 2001

Alexander M. Haig, former Secretary of State, is a trustee of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Harvey Sicherman is President of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

The FBI’s discovery of a still-active long-time spy for Russia reminds us that U.S.-Russian relations are not nearly as good as many people presume. Indeed, the last sixty days have been marked by a more openly anti-U.S. policy than we have seen in sometime from Moscow. In December, for example, Russian President Vladimir Putin, unlike his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, found it necessary to visit Fidel Castro and to extol his progress. Then Putin betook himself to Canada, where amidst negotiations over trade, he tried to persuade the Canadian Prime Minister to oppose American plans for missile defense. Finally, word leaked that a treaty was being negotiated between Russia and China intended to counter U.S. influence. A similar document had already been signed by Russia and Iran.

These excursions were surely not intended to please the United States. They are instead characteristic of post-Yeltsin Russia: a reassertion of Moscow’s interest in playing a global role increasingly opposed to Washington. This is the international counterpart to a domestic policy of recentralizing political authority, controlling the media and reviving the secret police.

While recently, in response to a CIA report highly critical of the relationship, Moscow denied any malice and offered instead a “partnership for stability,” these words ill-fit the situation. Instead, the Bush Administration will find a plate piled high with unsavory leftovers from the last decade of U.S.-Russian relations. At the top is a strategic misconception in Washington; the notion that Russia is a democratic partner whose main objective is to become part of the West. This ignores the tortured history of Russian attitudes toward Europe, ambiguous at best and belligerently hostile at worst. American boasts about victory in the Cold War fueled the natural resentment of a proud people suddenly cast down from global eminence to international beggar. We banked instead (quite literally) on Boris Yeltsin and a thin strata of would-be reformers to transform Russia in record time, offering only modest international support overseen by the supposed wise men of the IMF.

The results are fairly plain to see for those who would see it. Both democracy and capitalism now appear to many Russians as synonyms for chaos and crime. President Putin, whose style might be best described as “KGB-lite,” has skillfully used these views to reassert the primacy of the State. To his credit, he has been brutally frank in telling Russians that they are in terrible trouble, and that they can be rescued only by their own efforts. To his discredit, he has associated Russia’s recovery of self-respect with an increasingly anti-American tone, often only an updated version of the Soviet play book. NATO has once again become the enemy, and once again Americans (and others) are suffering arrest on trumped-up charges. The Russian military continue to blame the Kursk disaster on “foreign submarines.” The theme throughout is that U.S. “hegemony” must be cut down a size or two in the name of international “balance.”

Russian diplomats have also revived a perennial favorite, the “spheres of influence” concept. In their reading, the end of the Warsaw Pact should have meant the end of NATO, not its expansion; and the end of the Soviet Union in Central Asia means not independence for the new states there but rather a “soft” Russian domination of the “near abroad.”

Washington has largely ignored what seems to many to be a tragicomic pantomime of ghosts from the Soviet and imperial Russian past. But we should not underestimate it. Russia, even in distress, can make a great deal of trouble.

The United States will soon confront three areas of serious friction with Russia. The first is missile defense. Moscow’s objective is to oppose any American plan that renders the U.S. less vulnerable to missile attack and the best way to do that is to keep us pinned inside the obsolete ABM treaty and the hoary theology of mutual assured destruction. For a Russia unable to sustain its current nuclear arsenal, increasingly preoccupied with its conventional force, and unable to deploy the fruits of its own advanced research on missile defense, this makes sense. But does it make sense for the U.S.? Before entangling ourselves further with Moscow, the U.S. should take two steps: (1) confirm the technical feasibility of a missile defense for ourselves and our allies and (2) make the effort to persuade our allies that it should be done. These steps will also create the conditions for a useful discussion with Russia.

The second contentious issue is the Persian Gulf. Moscow wants continued high oil prices, not least to keep its own finances buoyant. The Russians have renewed their alliance with Iraq and favor the end of many constraints on Saddam. They are also cultivating Iran. If the Mullahs acquire a nuclear weapon anytime soon, they will do so primarily because of Russian assistance for a supposedly peaceful nuclear power program. Putin has thus cast Russia’s lot with the two most powerful and violently anti-American regimes in the region.

A third trouble is in the Caucasus. The U.S. and its allies have hardly restrained the savage Russian war to destroy Chechnya. Our major achievement, to facilitate an oil pipeline that promises an independent future for some of the Central Asian states, may now be compromised by Russian pressure on Georgia. That state, led by former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevernadze, fears quite rightly that its refusal to align its foreign policy with Moscow on regional politics and the oil pipeline make it a key target. The Russians still have military bases on Georgian territory and they have used the Chechnya war as an excuse to undermine Georgia’s independent ways. This is a “red line” for the U.S., so our diplomats say and indeed it should be. The very independence of the states born in the aftermath of the Soviet regime is at stake, not only oil. But what will we do about it? Or do we want Moscow to resume its domination of the region in the name of our common interest in opposing the spread of fanatical Islam, such as the Taliban of Afghanistan? Have we really calculated the costs of such collusion? Washington’s unwillingness to call a spade a spade on that and other issues has only discouraged the reformers in Moscow and encouraged their— and our— adversaries.

To sum it up, Putin’s Russia is neither a democratic partner nor a strategic partner of the U.S. We should not assume that Moscow aspires to be simply one more part of a West whose traditions and institutions it does not share. Instead, Russia is on the hunt to reduce American influence wherever and whenever it can. This is the substance of Moscow’s foreign policy today— a sorry outcome to a decade of extravagant American hopes for the better. Russia’s brief and occasionally intense love affair with the West following the failure of communism is over. The reality is Russia, once again “without love.”

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