RUSSIA’S NEW FOREIGN POLICY
By Leon Aron
American Enterprise Institute
May 6 2009
Never has there been a Russia less imperialist, less militarized,
less threatening to its neighbors and the world, and more susceptible
to the Western ideals than the Russia we see today.
Few propositions about today’s world can be stated with greater
certainty: never in the four and a half centuries of the modern Russian
state has there been a Russia less imperialist, less militarized,
less threatening to its neighbors and the world, and more susceptible
to the Western ideals and practices than the Russia we see today.
Although obvious even to a person with only a cursory acquaintance
with Russian history, this state of affairs results from a long
series of complex, often painful, and always fateful choices made
by the first post-Communist regime. Some of the most critical
decisions were made between 1991 and 1996, when Russia was reeling
from economic depression, hyperinflation, pain of market reforms,
and postimperial trauma. Many a nation, even in incomparably milder
circumstances, succumbed to the temptation of making nationalism the
linchpin of national unity and cohesion at the time of dislocation
and disarray. From Argentina to China, Malaysia, and Indonesia, in
various degrees of crudeness and militancy, countries have recently
resorted to the palliative of nationalism to dull the pain of market
reforms or reversals of economic fortune.
In Russia, too, retrenchment and truculence were urged by leftist
nationalists inside and outside the Supreme Soviet and, since
1995, by the "national patriotic" plurality in the Duma (the lower
house of the Russian Parliament), which early in 1996 "annulled"
the 1991 Belavezhskie agreements formalizing the dissolution of the
Soviet Union. This deafening chorus is led daily by the flagships of
Communist and nationalist media–Pravda, Sovetskaya Rossia and Zavtra,
with a combined daily press run of more than half a million–and by
the nearly 300 local pro-Communist newspapers.
Yet even when the chance to propitiate the national patriots and to
reap a political windfall by adopting a rigid and hostile stance was
handed to President Boris Yeltsin on a silver platter, the Kremlin
passed–as in the case of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
expansion. After much blustering, Yeltsin chose to sign the NATO-Russia
Founding Act and to accommodate the United States and its partners
rather than to repeat (even if rhetorically) the cold war. "It
already happened more than once that we, the East and the West,
failed to find a chance to reconcile," Yeltsin said in February 1997,
when the final negotiations with NATO began. "This chance must not
be missed." The leader of the national-patriotic opposition and the
chairman of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Gennady
Zyuganov called the founding act "unconditional surrender" and a
"betrayal of Russia’s interests."
A Historic Disarmament
This instance was emblematic of a broader strategy of post-Communist
Russia. Between 1992 and 1995, Moscow implemented all Gorbachev’s
commitments and completed contraction of the empire inherited from
the Soviet Union–a contraction remarkable for being undertaken in
peacetime and voluntarily. On September 1, 1994, when the last Russian
units left Germany, most troops had already been removed from Poland,
Hungary, and the Czech Republic. In four years, Russia repatriated
(frequently without homes for officers or jobs for their spouses)
800,000 troops, 400,000 civilian personnel, and 500,000 family members.
Even as Moscow publicly and loudly linked its retreat from Estonia
to the granting of full civil and political rights to the ethnic
Russians there, it quietly continued to withdraw. In two years,
between the end of 1991 and the last months of 1993, the number of
Russian troops in Estonia diminished from 35,000–50,000 to 3,000. The
departure of the last Russian soldier from the Paldiski submarine
training base in Estonia in September 1995 marked the end of Russian
presence in East-Central Europe. The lands acquired and held during
two and a half centuries of Russian and Soviet imperial conquests
were restored to the former captive nations. Russia returned to its
seventeenth-century borders.
Unfolding in parallel was demilitarization, historically unprecedented
in speed and scope. Reduction is a ridiculous euphemism for the
methodical starvation, depredation, and strangulation to which Yeltsin
has subjected the Soviet armed forces and the military-industrial
complex. In a few years, the Russian defense sector–the country’s
omnipotent overlord, the source of national pride, the master of the
country’s choicest resources and of the livelihoods of one-third of the
Russian population–was reduced to a neglected and humiliated beggar.
Begun with an 80 percent decrease in defense procurement ordered
by Yegor Gaidar in 1992, the decline in the share of the Russian
gross domestic product spent on the military continued from at
least 20 percent to 5 percent–7 percent today. Yeltsin promised to
reduce it to 3 percent by the year 2000. According to Sergei Rogov,
a leading Russian expert and the director of the USA and Canada
Institute, the 1996 expenditures for organization and maintenance of
Russian armed forces were at least 2.5 times lower than in 1990, for
procurement and military construction 9 times, and for research and
development 10 times. When, in May 1997, the government implemented
an across-the-board spending cut ("sequestering"), defense was again
hit the hardest: its already delayed funding was reduced by another
20 percent.
Along the way, the Russian army shrank from around 4 million in
January 1992 to about 1.7 million by late 1996. In July 1997, Yeltsin
signed several decrees mandating a reduction of the armed forces by
500,000 men, to 1.2 million. A week later, the minister of defense,
General Igor Rodionov, referred to himself as the "minister of a
disintegrating army and a dying fleet."
At the same time, Yeltsin promised what surely will be the coup
de grâce of Russian militarism: the ending of the draft and the
institution of an all-volunteer armed force of 600,000 by the year
2000. Even though this plan almost certainly will take longer than
three years to implement, a mere talk by the Russian leader about
ending almost two centuries of conscription epitomized the distance
that the new country put between herself and the traditional Russian
(let alone Soviet) militarized state. In the meantime, following the
Supreme Court’s October 1995 decision that allowed local judges to
rule on constitutional matters, Russian judges have thrown out dozens
of cases brought by the army against the "deserters" who exercised
their constitutional right to alternative civil service.
The extent of the rout of the formerly invincible defense sector
became evident in the twelve months following the 1996 presidential
election. An often sick president fired two defense ministers, the
head of the general staff, and the commanders of the paratroop and
space forces, and he ordered the retirement of 500 generals from the
immensely bloated Russian field officers corps.
No other Russian or Soviet leader, not even Stalin, attempted to
remove at the same time as many pillars of the national defense
establishment for the fear of destabilizing the regime (to say nothing
of risking one’s neck). With the 40 million votes that he received
on July 3, 1996, Yeltsin apparently felt no fear. Dictatorships and
autocracies depend on the army’s good graces; democracies (even young
and imperfect) can afford to be far less solicitous.
The Rationale of Disarmament
Russia’s historic disarmament results from political and economic
democratization, not from a weak economy, as often suggested–as
if national priorities are determined by economists and as if,
throughout human history, economic rationale has not been invariably
and completely overridden by fear, hatred, wounded national honor,
messianic fervor, or a dictator’s will. In our own century, where
was a "strong economy" and excess wealth in the Soviet Union in the
1930s and after World War II; in Vietnam between the 1950s and the
1980s; in Cuba since the 1960s; in Ethiopia under Comrade Mengistu;
in an Armenia fighting for Nagorny-Karabakh; in a Pakistan developing
a nuclear arsenal; or in an Iraq starving its people to produce the
mother of all weapons?
No, the shrinking of the Russian military is due to the weakening of
the Russian state’s grip on the economy and to the constraints imposed
on imperialism, aggressiveness, and brutality by public opinion,
the free mass media, and competitive politics, which have forced
the Kremlin to end the war in Chechnya. Tardy in bestowing on Russia
its other blessings, Russian democracy has already made high defense
expenditures and violent imperial projects quite difficult to sustain.
Most fundamentally, Russian demilitarization is a consequence
of rearranged national priorities, of a change in the criteria of
greatness, and of society’s gradual liberation from the state. Russia
has abandoned the tradition of the unchallenged preponderance of
the state’s well-being and concerns, particularly in the matters
of foreign policy and national security, over domestic economic
and social progress. The vigilance against foreign aggression, the
strength of the fortress-state, and the allegiance and sacrifice to
it have been replaced in a new national consensus by the goals of
societal and individual welfare, new civil and political liberties,
and stabilization within a democratic framework.
In June 1997, in a television address to the nation on the seventh
anniversary of the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Russia, Yeltsin
said: "A great power is not mountains of weapons and subjects with
no rights. A great power is a self-reliant and talented people with
initiative…. In the foundation of our approach to the building
of the Russian state . . . is the understanding that the country
begins with each of us. And the sole measure of the greatness of our
Motherland is the extent to which each citizen of Russia is free,
healthy, educated, and happy."
Unless this new consensus is extinguished by an economic catastrophe
and a return to a dictatorship, Russian militarism is not likely
to recur. For that reason, as stated in one of Ronald Reagan’s
magnificently vindicated theorems–nations mistrust one another not
because they are armed; they are armed because they mistrust one
another–Russia, while far from a model of openness and consistency,
is easier to trust today than at any other time in its history.
The Chinese Angle
This connection between democratization and national security
policies makes the Russian case so different from the Chinese. For
the same reason, one should not expect any time soon a reversal in
the enormous Chinese military buildup and modernization, helped by a
burgeoning economy and fueled by resurgent nationalism, with which
China, unlike Russia, chose to anchor and unite the nation during
its dizzying economic transformation.
Historically, the key feature of a transition from a traditional to a
modern society and from a village- to an urban-based economy was the
"disposal" of surplus peasantry. Everywhere this process was attended
with enormous societal convulsions, revolutions, violence, and cruelty
(England showing the way.) For Russia, the problem was "resolved" by
the terror of Stalin’s collectivization and industrialization. For
China, with its 800,000,000 peasants, the resolution is still
ahead. The justified fear of instability felt by the Chinese political
class, already anxious about the migration of millions of destitute
peasants into the cities, is the single biggest impediment to Chinese
democratization–and to the prospects of a Chinese demilitarization.
China is relevant in another respect, as well. Of all the morbid
fantasies about the innumerable facets of the alleged Russian menace,
the prophecy of a coming Sino-Russian alliance directed against
the United States is intellectually the most embarrassing one. What
historical precedent is there to support such a forecast in the case
of two giant nations that vie for regional superpowership, share
nearly 3000 miles of border (much of it in dispute), and have for
centuries competed for the huge underpopulated land mass to the east
of the Urals? As with history’s other pair of perennial combatants,
Germany and France, such an accord will have to wait until both
countries are stable and prosperous democracies–not in our lifetime
and, alas, perhaps not in our children’s, either. In any case, should
it ever come to pass, an alliance of two democracies is unlikely to
be anti-American.
To be sure, there will be periods of rapprochements when, as today,
Russia will sell its submarines and MIGs, and Chinese migrant workers
and entrepreneurs will flood the Far East and Siberia, setting up
Chinese language schools for their children and opening the best
restaurants in Ekaterinburg, Irkutsk, and Khabarovsk. Russia will
attempt to play the Chinese card in its dealings with Washington–just
as China, at the same time, will be using a Russian card in
its relations with the United States, which will remain far more
important to both than they will be to each other. Just as certainly
a Sino-Russian truce will be followed by acrimonious and perhaps
violent ruptures.
Post-Soviet Space
Along with finding its place and role in the post-cold war world,
Russia also had to make some critical choices about the "post-Soviet
political space," as the territory of the former Soviet Union has been
referred to in Moscow since 1992. At that time, everyone–from the
national patriots on the Left to the radical free marketeers on the
Right–agreed on four things. First, a stable and prosperous Russia
was impossible without a modicum of stability in the "post-Soviet
space," which from Moldova to Tajikistan erupted in a dozen violent
civil and ethnic wars. Second, some sort of mending of millions of
ruptured economic, political, and human ties ("reintegration") was
imperative if the entire area was to survive the transition. Third,
with the "new world order" buried in the hills around Sarajevo, Russia
could count on no one but herself in securing peace and stability in
the area. Finally, Russia’s preeminence as the regional superpower
was not negotiable.
Beyond this agenda, which still stands, the consensus dissolved into
two sharply divergent objectives and strategies. One was aimed at
making the post-Soviet space resemble the USSR as closely as possible
and as quickly as possible. The cost–in money, world opinion,
or even blood–was no object. All means were acceptable, including
the stirring of nationalist and irredentist tendencies among the
25-million-strong ethnic Russian diaspora in the newly independent
states–just as Serbia did in Bosnia and Croatia. In this scenario,
the regime in Moscow was urged at least to threaten recalcitrant
states with the politicization of the ethnic Russian community and the
"massive redrawing of borders" to join to the metropolis the areas
heavily populated by ethnic Russians, especially northern Kazakhstan
and eastern Ukraine. Advocated largely, but not exclusively, by the
nationalist Left, this is an imperial, revanchist, and ideological
agenda.
In the other model, which might be called postcolonial, reintegration
was given a far less ambitious content. Its advocates relied on the
incremental pull of a privatized Russian economy and its democratic
stabilization to do the job. Its time frame stretched over decades.
Haltingly and inconsistently, Russia opted for the latter game
plan. Even the April 1997 "union" with Belarus–which some American
observers hastened to declare the beginning of Russia’s inexorable
march to the West–has been quietly but substantially diluted and
slowed to a crawl, despite the Kremlin’s rhetorical fanfare, the
conjugal ardor of Belarussian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka, and
the exuberance in the Duma. Already, five months later, in September,
First Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov declared that "unity" between
Russia and Belarus, with its Soviet-style economy and Lukashenka’s
dictatorship, would be just as impossible as a union between North
and South Korea. A week later, ostensibly in retaliation for the
jailing of a Russian journalist in Belarus, Yeltsin refused to grant
permission for Lukashenka’s plane to enter Russian air space.
Regarding the maintenance of regional dominance, however, there
ought to be no illusions: Russia is likely to deploy much the
same combination of roguery, bribery, and diplomatic pressure that
great land powers have used for millennia to assert control over
a self-declared sphere of influence. Heading the list are economic
and military assistance to friendly regimes and the denial of aid
to neighbors deemed insufficiently accommodating. In the case of
especially recalcitrant countries, support for all manner of internal
rebellions is always an option. Given the economic and political
fragility of most post-Soviet states, their dependence on Russian
resources (especially energy), and their susceptibility to ethnic
and civil strife, Moscow’s stance could sometime make a difference
between a young state’s life and death.
Relations with Neighbors
While relentlessly probing for weaknesses, exploiting their neighbors’
troubles, and taking advantage of openings to further its regional
superiority, the postcolonial policy is constrained by a cost-benefit
analysis. There is a wariness of open-ended, long-term, and expensive
commitments in the "near abroad." Such considerations were anathema
both to Russian "messianic" (the Third Rome) and, especially, to Soviet
"ideological" (world socialism) varieties of imperialism.
Most critically, Moscow has chosen not to cross the thickest lines
in the sand: independence and sovereignty of the CIS nations. While
"near," the Confederation of Independent States is still "abroad." In
the end, this is the critical distinction between the imperial and
the postcolonial modes of behavior in the region.
This difference is akin to the one between twisting someone’s arms and
cutting them off. Much as observers may (and do) find both activities
equally reprehensible, to the arms’ owner the actual choice makes
a great deal of difference. Unlike some American journalists and
columnists, whom they quickly learned to overwhelm with complaints
about Russia, the leaders of neighboring nations from "near" and even
"medium" abroad know only too well the alternative to the arm-twisting
postcolonial choice.
Hence their wholehearted support for Yeltsin in his September-October
1993 confrontation with the Left-nationalist radical supporters of
the Supreme Soviet. The Czech President Václav Havel said October
4 that the clashes in Moscow were not simply "a power struggle,
but rather a fight between democracy and totalitarianism." In a joint
statement Presidents Lennart Meri of Estonia, Guntis Ulmanis of Latvia,
and Algirdas Brazauskas of Lithuania called the struggle in Moscow "a
contest between a democratically elected President and antidemocratic
power structures." Their Moldovan counterpart, Mircea Snegur, called
the Supreme Soviet supporters "Communist, imperialist forces who want
to turn Russia into a concentration camp." "In my thoughts I am on the
barricades with the defenders of Russian democracy, as I was next to
them in August 1991," Eduard Shevardnadze said in a message to the
Kremlin on the late afternoon of October 3, 1993, when the outcome
looked quite grim for Yeltsin. "Deeply concerned about the events
in Moscow, I am again expressing my resolute support for President
Yeltsin and his allies."
Hence, with an almost audible sigh of relief, the neighboring countries
welcomed Yeltsin’s victory over Zyuganov in 1996. The tone of the
greetings sent to the victor by the leaders of the new states far
exceeded protocol requirements. "The future development of Ukraine
depended on the results of the Russian election," President of Ukraine
Leonid Kuchma said on July 4, 1996. Yeltsin’s victory, he continued,
was "a signal that Ukraine should press ahead with economic reform."
For the proponents of the postcolonial choice, to which
demilitarization of conflicts in the near abroad had always been
central, 1997 was by far the most productive year. Following Yeltsin’s
near-miraculous resurgence after heart bypass surgery, Moscow moved
to settle all hostilities in the region. Only in Nagorny Karabakh,
over which Armenia and Azerbaijan had fought to a standstill, did
Russia fail to make some progress.
On May 12, Russia signed a peace accord with Chechnya, granting it all
but an official recognition of independence. Within days, after two
months of shuttle diplomacy by the Foreign Minister Evgeny Primakov,
Moldova’s President Petru Lucinschi and Igor Smirnov, the leader of the
self-proclaimed Transdniester Republic (a Russo-Ukrainian secessionist
enclave on Moldova’s border with Ukraine), signed in the Kremlin a
memorandum that effectively affirmed Moldova’s sovereignty over the
area. The signing was attended by Presidents Yeltsin and Kuchma as
"coguarantors" of the agreement.
In June, the Tajikistan regime, supported by Russia, and the Tajik
Islamic opposition ended five years of a bloody civil war by signing
in Moscow a Peace and National Reconciliation Accord. Primakov and his
first deputy, Boris Pastukhov, reportedly continued mediation until
the final agreement emerged two hours before the signing ceremony.
The same month Abkhaz President Vladislav Ardzinba spent two weeks
in Moscow with top mediators (Yeltsin’s Chief of Staff Valentin
Yumashev, Security Council Secretary Ivan Rybkin, and Defense
Minister Igor Sergeev) to discuss an interim protocol, drafted by
the Russian Foreign Ministery, for a settlement between Georgia and
secessionist Abkhazia. In August, Ardzinba traveled to the Georgian
capital, Tbilisi, for the first face-to-face meeting with Shevardnadze
since the war began in 1992. In his weekly radio address at the end
of August, Shevardnadze "expressed his appreciation" of Primakov’s
effort in arranging Ardzinba’s visit.
On September 4, in the presence of Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin
the presidents of North Ossetia and Ingushetia (autonomous republics
inside Russia) signed in Moscow an agreement settling a conflict over
North Ossetia’s Prigorodnyi Raion, which had festered since fighting
broke out in November 1992. During the next two days, in the capital
of Lithuania, Vilnius, Chernomyrdin held bilateral meetings with
the presidents of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. At the end of the
sessions, each of the presidents announced that his country would
"soon" be able to sign border agreements with Moscow.
Accord with Ukraine
But by far the most momentous diplomatic coup of that busy year was
the May 31 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership between
Russia and Ukraine signed by Yeltsin and Kuchma in Kiev on May 31. An
accord between Europe’s largest (Russia) and its sixth most populous
(Ukraine) nations is just as central to the stability of the post-cold
war European order as the French-German rapprochement engineered by
Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer in 1958 was to the postÿWorld
War II one. By the terms of the treaty, the two nations undertook
to "respect each other’s territorial integrity, confirm[ed] the
inviolability of the existing borders, … mutual respect, sovereign
equality, a peaceful settlement of disputes, non-use of force or
its threat."
The success of this settlement after five years of turbulent
negotiations is more stunning because so much augured failure. First,
the technical complexity of some issues bordered on intractability. One
issue was the fate of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, on which both
countries had legitimate claims. Another contentious point was the
sovereignty over the beautiful and fecund island of Crimea, where
ethnic Russians outnumbered Ukrainians by more than two to one. For
almost two centuries a staple of Russian poetry and the most popular
Russian resort, teeming with tsars’ summer palaces and dachas of the
best Russian painters, musicians, and writers, it was "given" to the
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954,
when the end of the Soviet Union and an independent Ukraine seemed
beyond the realm of the possible. Yet another political and emotional
hurricane was touched off by the status of the port and naval base
of Sevastopol, a symbol of Russian military valor. The defense of
the city in the 1854-1855 Crimean War against the British and the
French and in World War II against the Germans had earned Sevastopol
an honorary designation of City-Hero.
And then there were precedents of similar postimperial divorces,
all attended by horrific bloodshed: England and Ireland, India and
Pakistan, Bosnia and Serbia. In 1992, many a Western expert confidently
predicted a war between Russia and Ukraine, some even an exchange of
nuclear strikes.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle to the recognition of Ukraine as a
separate state was her unique place in Russia’s historic memory and
national conscience. Kiev was the birthplace of the first Russian state
and its first baptized city, from which Christianity spread throughout
Russia. No other part of the non-Russian Soviet Union was so pivotal
to Russian national identity as Ukraine. In no other instance was
the tempering of Russia’s imperial tradition and instinct put to a
harsher, more painful test than by an independent Ukraine.
In the end, Russia gave up Crimea and Sevastopol and ceded to Ukraine
the entire Black Sea Fleet. Some of Sevastopol’s naval bays were to
be leased, and half of the fleet rented by Russia from Ukraine, with
the payments subtracted from Ukraine’s enormous debt to Russia for
gas and oil deliveries, estimated at the time of the treaty signing
at $3-3.5 billion–perhaps the most generous, and least publicized,
bilateral foreign assistance program in the world today.
Revisionist or Not?
The most fundamental choice that Russia had to resolve both on
the world scene and in the post-Soviet space was the one between
nonrevisionist and revisionist policies. The former seek advantage
within the constraints of an existing framework accepted by the
majority of the international community. The latter are aimed at
undermining and changing the framework itself. Russia has chosen
nonrevisionism. She may bemoan the unfairness of the score (and does
so often and loudly), but she does not try to change the rules of
the game.
To be sure, the imperatives of history, geography, and domestic
politics will cause Russia to be less than happy about much
U.S. behavior in the world and to challenge it often. In poll after
poll, a majority of Russians agree that the United States was "using
Russia’s current weakness to reduce it to a second-rate power." As
de Gaulle said to Harry Hopkins, "America’s policy, whether it was
right or not, could not but alienate the French." Wherever the United
States provides an opening by seeming either not to care much about
an issue or, as in Iraq, to hesitate, Russia is likely to seize the
opportunity to further its claim on being reckoned with as a major
international player.
Yet, as with France, the tweaking, the shouting, and the occasional
painful kick in the shins must not be confused with anti-Americanism
of the kind professed by the Soviet Union, Iran in the 1980s, or
Iraq, Cuba, and Libya today. Russian truculence is not informed by
ideology. It is not dedicated to a consistent pursuit of strategic
objectives inimical to the truly vital interests of the United
States, and it is not part of a relentless, antagonistic struggle to
the end. Rather, it is pragmatic and selective. And when America’s
wishes are communicated at the highest level, forcefully, directly,
and unambiguously, Moscow is likely to moderate opposition and even
extend cooperation, as it did in Bosnia.
But just as Francis Fukuyama’s much misunderstood "end of history"
was never meant to suggest the absence of lapses, reversals, lacunae,
or lengthy and furious rear-guard battles, neither does the end of 75
years of relentless Soviet revisionism spell the end of our Russian
problem. Indeed, it may become worse before it becomes better. The
reason is the "underinstitutionalization" of Yeltsin’s foreign policy:
the lack of organizational and personnel structures that could
carry on the present policy in the absence of the impulse from the
top. The new foreign and security policies of Russia have stemmed
mostly from Yeltsin’s domestic political and economic revolution,
not from implementation of some long-term strategy or a conscious
effort at restructuring the policy-making process.
Yeltsin’s Passion
As every great and successful modern political leader, with a notable
exception of de Gaulle, Yeltsin is a domestic leader. His interests,
his instincts, and his passions, like Ronald Reagan’s (unlike Nixon’s,
Carter’s, or Gorbachev’s), are engaged mostly (and most profitably) by
his country’s domestic politics. For that reason, Yeltsin never cared
to establish a foreign policy alter ego (a Kissinger, Brzezinski,
or Shevardnadze): a strategic thinker and confidant endowed with a
great deal of power and independence.
There have been only two exceptions, two areas of international
relations that Yeltsin has firmly arrogated for himself. One is the
relationship with the United States, which Yeltsin single-handedly
salvaged by signing–against the advice and dire warning of virtually
the entire political class–the Russia-NATO Founding Act.
The other domaine réservé is the settlement with Ukraine, into
which Yeltsin put enormous personal effort and which he pushed along,
ignoring or evading dozens of stern resolutions by the Supreme Soviet,
the Duma, and the Council of Federation (the upper house of the
Russian legislature) and pretending not to hear fiery statements of
the country’s top political leaders, from his own ex-vice president,
Aleksandr Rutskoy, to the perennial chairman of the Duma’s Committee
on Foreign Relations, Vladimir Lukin, to the mayor of Moscow, Yuri
Luzhkov. After the treaty was signed, Ukrainian officials told
reporters that "only Yeltsin had the political will and strength
to drop Russia’s residual claims on Ukraine" and that the Ukrainian
leadership "prayed that Mr. Yeltsin would not die before doing so."
Outside these two areas, Yeltsin considers foreign policy a distant
second to his domestic agenda and is content to use it to accommodate
the opposition rather than to expend his political capital. The choice
of Primakov as foreign minister is characteristic: the man’s announced
objective of a multipolar world–without American hegemony but also
without a challenge to the key postulates of the established order or a
slide into a new cold war–made him the only key minister in Yeltsin’s
cabinet acceptable to all major political forces in the country.
In the next two years, the pitfalls of such a modus operandi will
become especially apparent. Until now, Yeltsin’s unique place in
Russian politics, his political weight, and the confidence that came
from a landslide victory in 1996 kept the vector of Russian foreign
policy pointed in the right direction. The president’s inevitable
physical decline and lame-duck status change a great deal. Like an old
bulldozer–once mighty and responsive but now more and more awkward,
slow, hard to handle, and with the motor nearly worn out–Yeltsin
today clears the boulders deposited by the receded Soviet glaciers
one at a time, with much screeching, creaking, and even retreats.
Any worsening of Yeltsin’s physical condition would further increase
the policy-making impact of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the
Russian diplomatic corps–perhaps the most authentic and recalcitrant
relic of the Soviet past among Russian institutions, a class whose fall
from the pinnacle of Soviet society in terms of material stature and
prestige can be compared only with that of the military. Predictably,
Russian diplomats’ zeal in defending the reformist regime often seems
less than overwhelming.
An additional toughness and shrillness in the tone of Russian foreign
policy rhetoric in the next two years will come about because of
domestic politics, as the Foreign Ministry will more and more look to
please the undeclared contenders in the 2000 presidential election,
all of whom seem far less impervious to nationalist temptation than
Yeltsin. Russian behavior in the latest Iraq crisis, with Yeltsin,
clearly disengaged, mouthing a bizarre line about World War III,
is a foretaste of things to come.
This must not take us by surprise. Seven years ago, an enormous
and evil empire, which had deformed and poisoned everything and
everyone it touched, broke to pieces. Yet its harmful rays, like
light from a long-dead star, will continue to reach us for some
time. The current Russian leaders came of political age and advanced
under the empire. They cannot be counted on fully to fashion a world
of which they know little. At best, in domestic politics, economy,
and behavior in the world, they will forge a hybrid. If we are lucky
(as we have been with Yeltsin), more than half the product will be
new and benign, while the rest will be instilled with various degrees
of malignancy. It is up to the next generation of leaders (with lots
of good fortune) to turn the hybrid into a purebred.
U.S. policy makers must be prepared to encounter the Soviet legacy in
Russian foreign policy–such as relentless and often senseless spying
or the sale of technology and weapons to nations hostile to the United
States–and to counter them with unflinching resolve. What will never
serve American interests, however, is the wholesale imposition of old
stereotypes on a different new reality, remarkably auspicious in some
of its key ingredients.
Leon Aron is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute. Another version of this essay was published in the April 20
Weekly Standard. For more information on the subject, see Leon Aron,
"The Foreign Policy Doctrine of Post-Communist Russia and Its Domestic
Context," in Michael Mandelbaum, ed., The New Russian Foreign Policy,
Council on Foreign Relations, May 1998.