Losing Russia

The Costs of Renewed Confrontation

Dimitri K. Simes

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2007

Summary:  U.S.-Russian relations are deteriorating rapidly. Misguided and arrogant U.S. policies since the end of the Cold War have fueled resentment in Russia, and Vladimir Putin's increasing defiance is inflaming the West. But Washington and Moscow need not be adversaries. Both sides must act soon to avert renewed confrontation.

DIMITRI K. SIMES is President of the Nixon Center and Publisher of The National Interest.

Although Clinton met with Nixon, he ignored this advice and disregarded Yeltsin's worst excesses. A stalemate between Yeltsin and the Duma and Yeltsin's unconstitutional decree dissolving the body soon followed, ultimately leading to violence and tanks shelling the parliament building. After the episode, Yeltsin forced through a new constitution granting Russia's president sweeping powers at the expense of the parliament. This move consolidated the first Russian president's hold on power and laid the foundation for his drift toward authoritarianism. The appointment of Vladimir Putin -- then the head of Russia's post-KGB intelligence service, the FSB -- as prime minister and then as acting president was a natural outcome of Washington's reckless encouragement of Yeltsin's authoritarian tendencies.

Other aspects of the Clinton administration's foreign policy further heightened Russia's resentment. NATO expansion -- especially the first wave, which involved the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland -- was not a big problem in and of itself. Most Russians were prepared to accept NATO enlargement as an unhappy but unthreatening development -- until the 1999 Kosovo crisis. When NATO went to war against Serbia, despite strong Russian objections and without approval from the UN Security Council, the Russian elite and the Russian people quickly came to the conclusion that they had been profoundly misled and that NATO remained directed against them. Great powers -- particularly great powers in decline -- do not appreciate such demonstrations of their irrelevance.

Notwithstanding Russian anger over Kosovo, in late 1999, Putin, then prime minister, made a major overture to the United States just after ordering troops into Chechnya. He was troubled by Chechen connections with al Qaeda and the fact that Taliban-run Afghanistan was the only country to have established diplomatic relations with Chechnya. Motivated by these security interests, rather than any newfound love for the United States, Putin suggested that Moscow and Washington cooperate against al Qaeda and the Taliban. This initiative came after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, by which time the Clinton administration had more than enough information to understand the mortal danger the United States faced from Islamic fundamentalists.

But Clinton and his advisers, frustrated with Russian defiance in the Balkans and the removal of reformers from key posts in Moscow, ignored this overture. They increasingly saw Russia not as a potential partner but as a nostalgic, dysfunctional, financially weak power at whose expense the United States should make whatever gains it could. Thus they sought to cement the results of the Soviet Union's disintegration by bringing as many post-Soviet states as possible under Washington's wing. They pressed Georgia to participate in building the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, running from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean and bypassing Russia. They encouraged Georgia's opportunistic president, Eduard Shevardnadze, to seek NATO membership and urged U.S. embassies in Central Asia to work against Russian influence in the region. Finally, they dismissed Putin's call for U.S.-Russian counterterrorist collaboration as desperate neoimperialism and an attempt to reestablish Russia's waning influence in Central Asia. What the Clinton administration did not appreciate, however, was that it was also giving away a historic opportunity to put al Qaeda and the Taliban on the defensive, destroy their bases, and potentially disrupt their ability to launch major operations. Only after nearly 3,000 U.S. citizens were killed on September 11, 2001, did this cooperation finally begin.

FROM SOUL MATES TO RIVALS

When George W. Bush came to power in January 2001, eight months after Putin became president of Russia, his administration faced a new group of relatively unknown Russian officials. Keen to differentiate its policy from Clinton's, the Bush team did not see Russia as a priority; many of its members saw Moscow as corrupt and undemocratic -- and weak. Although this assessment was accurate, the Bush administration lacked the strategic foresight to reach out to Moscow. Bush and Putin did develop good personal chemistry, however. When they first met, at a June 2001 summit in Slovenia, Bush famously vouched for Putin's soul and democratic convictions.

The events of September 11, 2001, dramatically changed Washington's attitude toward Moscow and prompted a strong outpouring of emotional support for the United States in Russia. Putin reiterated his long-standing offer of support against al Qaeda and the Taliban; he granted overflight rights across Russian territory, endorsed the establishment of U.S. bases in Central Asia, and, perhaps most important, facilitated access to a readily available Russian-armed and Russian-trained military force in Afghanistan: the Northern Alliance. Of course, he had Russia's own interests in mind; to Putin, it was a blessing that the United States had joined the fight against Islamist terrorism. Like many other alliances, U.S.-Russian cooperation on counterterrorism came into existence because of shared fundamental interests, not a common ideology or mutual sympathy.

Despite this newfound cooperation, relations remained strained in other areas. Bush's announcement in December 2001 that the United States would withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, one of the last remaining symbols of Russia's former superpower status, further wounded the Kremlin's pride. Likewise, Russian animosity toward NATO only grew after the alliance incorporated the three Baltic states, two of which -- Estonia and Latvia -- had unresolved disputes with Russia relating principally to the treatment of ethnic Russian minorities.

At roughly the same time, Ukraine became a source of major tension. From Russia's perspective, U.S. support for Viktor Yushchenko's Orange Revolution was not just about promoting democracy; it was also about undermining Russia's influence in a neighboring state that had joined the Russian empire voluntarily in the seventeenth century and that had both significant cultural ties with Russia and a large Russian population. Moreover, in Moscow's view, contemporary Ukraine's border -- drawn by Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev as an administrative frontier between Soviet provinces -- stretched far beyond historical Ukraine's outer limits, incorporating millions of Russians and creating ethnic, linguistic, and political tensions. The Bush administration's approach to Ukraine -- namely, its pressure on a divided Ukraine to request NATO membership and its financial support for nongovernmental organizations actively assisting pro-Yushchenko political parties -- has fueled Moscow's concerns that the United States is pursuing a neocontainment policy. Few Bush administration officials or members of Congress considered the implications of challenging Russia in an area so central to its national interests and on an issue so emotionally charged.

Georgia soon became another battleground. President Mikheil Saakashvili has been seeking to use Western support, particularly from the United States, as his principal tool in reestablishing Georgian sovereignty over the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, where Russian-backed separatists have fought for independence from Georgia since the early 1990s. And Saakashvili has not just been demanding the return of the two Georgian enclaves; he has been openly positioning himself as the leading regional advocate of "color revolutions" and the overthrow of leaders sympathetic to Moscow. He has portrayed himself as a champion of democracy and an eager supporter of U.S. foreign policy, going so far as to send Georgian troops to Iraq in 2004 as part of the coalition force. The fact that he was elected with 96 percent of the vote -- a suspiciously high number -- along with his control of parliament and Georgian television, has provoked little concern outside the country. Nor has the arbitrary prosecution of business leaders and political rivals. When Zurab Zhvania -- Georgia's popular prime minister and the only remaining political counterweight to Saakashvili -- died in 2005 under mysterious circumstances involving an alleged gas leak, members of his family publicly rejected the government's account of the incident with a clear implication that they believed Saakashvili's regime had been involved. But in contrast to U.S. concern over the murder of Russian opposition figures, no one in Washington seemed to notice.