The next stage will be to explore the nature of the Russian challenge. What is Russia really up to in its neighborhood and beyond – e.g., in the Middle East? What is it that its leader and elites want? To what extent is Russia’s foreign policy a mere tool of the Kremlin’s regime preservation, as some, including in Russia, claim? Other key questions include: How much does Russia’s challenge matter to the United States and Europe, in the global scheme of things? And can Russia sustain it? The author’s answer to the last question is probably “yes”, and that both Russia and the challenge it is posing to the current US-dominated global system should not be discounted.
This leads to the logical question of dealing with the challenge. There have been efforts at consolidating allies and partners, isolating and sanctioning Russia, helping Beijing keep a distance from Moscow, and countering the Kremlin propaganda. How effective have these been? What is the outlook for these essentially punitive policies? What chances of success does the hardline approach – keep the pressure on until Moscow’s will breaks – have? Compared to that, do the pragmatists stand a better chance of getting a satisfactory arrangement? Various scenarios will be offered.
Since the stand-off is serious, how can the risks be reduced? What confidence-building measures need to be taken? What channels of communication need to be used to send and receive messages without danger of a fateful misunderstanding? While accommodation with Russia will carry a cost that few in the West today, particularly the United States, are prepared to pay, is some modus vivendi with Russia possible? How to be able jointly to oppose Islamist extremism, terrorism, and WMD proliferation while continuing to live in the wider environment of confrontation?
Finally, what about the Russians themselves? How do they see their place and role in the twenty-first-century world? How genuine and how permanent is their shift to Asia? In the emerging Greater Eurasia, from the Pacific to the Atlantic, is Russia the east of the West, or is it becoming the west of the East, and does this matter at all? What would a future relationship with the United States and the European Union look like from a Russian perspective? How would that fit into the general universe of Moscow’s foreign policy? Should the Russians fear the West?
1
Analysis of Fears
Fears of Russia in the West predate the Cold War (1947), the formation of the Red Army (1918) and the Bolshevik revolution (1917). A good summary of them could be found in an article by Frederick Engels in 1890, “The Foreign Policy of Russian Tsarism.”[5] To Engels and his colleague Karl Marx, the principal source of fear was the expansionist nature of the Russian state, which, in its quest for hegemony in Europe and Asia, devoured some of its neighbors and subjugated others. Russia’s rampant expansionism was made even more repugnant by the authoritarian and repressive character of its domestic regime.
This view from the West has not changed much, despite the peaceful toppling of the communist system by the Russian people in August 1991 and the unprecedented voluntary dismantlement of the historical Soviet/Russian empire in 1989–91. This process was not only led by Moscow, which accepted that 25 million ethnic Russians would be left outside the Russian Federation, it also drastically reduced the country’s armed forces and scaled back the defense industry. Today, the Russian state often continues to be credited with an “essentially predatory nature,” with a clear “preference to squeezing foreign countries to patient construction at home.”[6]
Just before Hillary Clinton stepped down as US secretary of state at the start of Barack Obama’s second term, she called Vladimir Putin’s project of a Eurasian Union an attempt to restore the Soviet Union. Beneath the veneer of “regional integration,” Putin’s goals, in her view, were “rebuilding a lost empire” and “re-Sovietizing” the Russian periphery; his method, like that of his predecessors, was “always testing, and pushing one’s boundaries.”[7]
Whether Putin was aiming at a new edition of the empire or at some loosely defined Moscow-led “power center in Eurasia,” one thing was clear. After a brief delusion in the early 1990s when Russia’s foreign minister confided in a former US president, who was stunned by the confession, that Russia did not have interests that differed from the common interests of the democratic West, Moscow has learned not only to define its own interests but also to assert them. The most vital of these interests have always been concentrated in the territory of the former Soviet Union.
Russia’s break with its empire was not immediately considered as final. As far back as 1994 Henry Kissinger warned about the risk of the “reimperialization” of Russia.[8] The very use of such an unwieldy term suggests that it was carefully chosen. The United States, with a long history of helping others – starting with the British – divest themselves of their colonial possessions, was clearly pursuing the same policy with regard to post-Soviet Russia. It was one thing for George H. W. Bush to fear the collapse of a nuclear superpower; once the division of the Soviet Union became official, and its nukes were secured, Washington became a supporter of the new states’ genuine independence from the Russian Federation. Moscow’s initial instinct to treat its ex-borderlands as something not-quite-foreign, captured in the phrase “near abroad,” immediately became suspicious and had to be resisted.
The new states themselves, for their part, sought to rely on US and, to a lesser degree, European support to protect their independence, which still looked too fragile. The West leaned hard on Moscow to make sure that the Russian forces left the Baltic States by 1994. By that year, the last remaining Russian garrisons had left Germany and Eastern Europe. Once their departure was completed, the Russian military presence in Europe, in geographical terms, reached its lowest ebb in three centuries. Moreover, almost immediately, the opposite tide began, as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic applied in the same year to join NATO. To many Russians, this was zero-sum at its starkest: even as Russia’s power was receding, it was being replaced by the expanding power of the West. No vacuum, no middle ground was allowed to exist. When Moscow began to protest against NATO’s eastern enlargement, however, these protests were interpreted by the West as imperial nostalgia, another cause for concern.
Meanwhile, other fears arose as some of the former Soviet republics experienced ethnic separatism. In newly independent Moldova and Georgia, separatist groups have come to rely on the military protection of the Russian army garrisons and political and economic support from Moscow. Even though ad hoc peacekeeping arrangements were reached soon after initial clashes, Russian forces in Transnistria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia were regarded by Chisinau and Tbilisi as occupiers, impinging on their newborn sovereignty and threatening their independence. To those with long memories, the Russian Federation was clawing back the territories of the former Soviet Union, much like Soviet Russia in 1918–20 was “reintegrating” the former imperial borderlands, snuffing out their short-lived independence. Thus, the most serious fear of Russia is that of Russian imperialism.
A major contributor to the fear factor is the Kremlin’s willingness to use military force, starting in the Russian North Caucasus in the 1990s and the early 2000s against local separatists turned extremists, which many in the West chose to see in terms of a colonial power fighting a national liberation movement. “The Kremlin has shown,” said the historian Norman Davies, “that it is quite prepared to use armed force; the West has shown that it is not.” Davies meant, not against Russia: US and other Western militaries had been consistently using force since the early 1990s. The problem, of course, was the practical impossibility of attacking a nuclear superpower. This, in Davies’s view, “creates an asymmetrical relationship with Russia, militarily weak but mentally decisive, which can expect to get almost anything it wants.”[9] Although this is obviously an overstatement, it points to a key problem: for all its military superiority that it has been using elsewhere quite liberally, the United States lacks serious military options vis-à-vis Russia.
5
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
6
Norman Davies, preface to Edward Lucas,