The Premature Partnership

Zbigniew Brzezinski

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 1994

Article preview: first 500 of 5,341 words total.

Summary:  Rosy scenarios of a democratic, economically revitalized Russia are the basis for the U.S. partnership with Boris Yeltsin. Such views hinge on the assumption that Russia wants peace with its neighbors. But Russia cannot be both a democracy and an empire, and it now seems to be choosing the ­latter. In the ?near abroad,? the politically powerful Russian military hungrily eyes breakaway republics. By heaping aid on a corrupt economy and deferring to wounded pride, the United States will legitimize a Russian sphere of influence in Europe?s east and forfeit the fruits of its Cold War victory. A more even-handed diplomacy and distribution of aid among the former Soviet republics could temper Russia?s imperial impulse.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser to the President, is Counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Professor of American Foreign Policy at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.

AMERICA AND RUSSIA

For nearly 45 difficult years the United States pursued a remarkably consistent policy toward the Soviet Union. On the level of grand strategy, that policy was defined as containment of both Soviet geopolitical and ideological ambitions. The practical implementation of the policy of containment involved American geostrategic concentration on the defense of both the western and eastern peripheries of Eurasia, manifested by permanent troop deployments and defined by binding treaty commitments. The doctrine of deterrence, designed to neutralize any Soviet nuclear blackmail, reinforced this defensive posture.

Though the Cold War never escalated into direct American-Soviet warfare, on several occasions it did generate indirect military collisions. In the western extremity of Eurasia, American and Soviet forces twice confronted each other in Berlin, and in the east, U.S. troops were engaged in repelling the Soviet-supported invasion of South Korea, while the Soviet Union later provided Vietnam with the military wherewithal needed to expel the American armies. The closest the two sides ever came to a head-on collision occurred in Cuba because of the Soviet effort to leapfrog its strategic containment. Nevertheless, containment, which in turn made possible the vitally important integration into the Western camp of both Germany and Japan, relied heavily on the ingredient of power.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent end of the Cold War necessitates a new strategy, one that no longer views Russia as an adversary and in which the factor of power is no longer central. But if Russia is no longer an adversary, is it already an ally, or a client or merely a defeated foe? What should be the goal and the substance of a post-Cold War grand strategy toward a major country, destined one way or another to be a power in world affairs, irrespective of its current malaise? Is current American policy toward Russia guided by a well-considered and historically relevant successor to the grand strategy of the Cold War years?

This essay argues that the present U.S. grand strategy is flawed in its assumptions, focused on the wrong strategic goal and dangerous in its likely geopolitical consequences.

A POLICY OF IDEALISTIC OPTIMISM

After several years of unavoidable groping, during which Washington seemed to concentrate mainly on tactical help for two successively favored Kremlin leaders, under President Clinton a new U.S. grand strategy toward the former Soviet Union has finally crystallized. Ambitious in scope, characterized by internal consistency and driven by an attractive idealistic optimism, its essence can be summarized as follows: the goal of containment of Soviet expansion is to be replaced by a partnership with a democratic Russia. The strategy of partnership assigns the highest priority to aid for President Boris Yeltsin?s government while at the same time reinforcing that government?s self-esteem and confidence by emphasizing the special global responsibility that America and Russia share. It follows that as far as the former Soviet Union is concerned, the primary focus of U.S. policy is Russia.

The underlying and mutually reinforcing premises of this new ...

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