Beyond Boris Yeltsin

Philip Zelikow

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 1994

Article preview: first 500 of 3,668 words total.

Summary:  By casting its lot wholly with Boris Yeltsin, the Clinton administration has missed what should be the larger aim of U.S. policy toward Russia - security for the West. The former Soviet nuclear arsenal still looms as a threat, and Russia?s conventional weapons trickle out to America?s global adversaries. The United States needs to state and pursue clear security goals, regardless of who prevails in Russia?s politics.

Philip Zelikow is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University?s John F Kennedy School of Government. Formerly a Foreign Service Officer with the Department of State, he served on the staff of the National Security Council from 1989 to 1991.

FOLLOWING AMERICA?S ENDURING INTERESTS

Beset by foreign policy crises in Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti, President Clinton and his chief advisers have argued over and again that they are at least getting the big issues right. They invariably point to their policy toward Russia as the exemplar of this success. Indeed, the administration deserves great credit for energetically organizing multinational economic assistance to the former Soviet Union. It also chose wisely to endorse Russian President Boris Yeltsin?s dictatorship during the September struggle with his parliamentary opponents--though it was inconceivable that any American administration could have lined up behind Ruslan Khasbulatov and Aleksandr Rutskoi. The real choice was whether to support Yeltsin with strong words or weak ones.

Individual accomplishments, however, must be judged against some external standard. The best measure of success with Russia is the extent to which America and its friends have become safer and more secure. Judged by this ruler, the results are troubling. The Clinton administration has elevated support for internal reform in Russia--a means to an end--into an end in itself. It is revealing that the administration?s own policy czar of all the Russias, Strobe Talbott, has emphasized to the Congress that, "Bill Clinton made clear that support for reform in the newly independent states would be the number one foreign policy priority of his administration."

While there has been much support for reform, there has been less success so far on the objective of enhancing America?s security. American policies have not kept pace with the growing danger of dispersal of nuclear weapons and materials within the former Soviet Union. Russia and other republics could still become important conventional arsenals for America?s adversaries. And the record of cooperation in "global problem solving" with Russia has gone from excellent at the end of 1991 to problematic by the end of 1993.

After Russian?American rapprochement swelled into a genuine entente between Moscow and Washington during 1990 and 1991, both the Bush and Clinton administrations were hopeful that they might press on to turn the relationship into a true "strategic partnership" or quasi?alliance. These hopes are now fading. In the years ahead it will be difficult enough to protect the old entente as the path to democracy grows more tortuous, divergences between Russian and American interests become clearer, and the Russians react to a geopolitical relationship they increasingly consider to be one?sided.

President Clinton has wholly cast America?s lot with Yeltsin, despite having criticized President Bush for too strongly and lengthily attaching American interests to Mikhail Gorbachev. The alternative to the current U.S. policy is not abandonment of Russian reform. It is the articulation of coherent policy goals that transcend internal Russian politics. The adhesion to Yeltsin risks encouraging within Russia exactly the polarized, anti?American tendencies that Washington fears. The United States should make clear that its policies are guided by the lodestar of enduring American security objectives, whatever Russian faction prevails. Such a position can more easily be explained and defended to Congress and the American people. ...

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