Last week's jaw-dropping spy story, an appalling embarrassment for
the FBI, was also a powerful reminder of an unpleasant fact: Those difficult
Russians are still with us, occupying their huge landmass atop most of
the inhabited world, aiming their thermonuclear weapons at us, spying on
us, still alienated from our world and lost in their own. Damn those nasty
Russians!
But wait. There certainly are nasty Russians, but they aren't playing
this game alone. The United States is still on alert, literally, ever ready
to obliterate the Russians in a matter of minutes with the weapons we aim
at them. Spying? We caught the FBI agent working for them because a Russian
agent apparently working for us turned him in. Nearly a decade after the
Soviet Union's collapse -- taking with it any plausible basis for a Russian-American
war -- we're still in the grip of Cold War reflexes and assumptions. Who's
to blame for this nuttiness? That's probably a futile question. This tango
requires the usual number of dancers.
The latest spy story demonstrates how both countries remain on a kind
of automatic pilot. Robert P. Hanssen, the FBI man arrested last week,
allegedly began selling secrets to Moscow in October 1985, when theCold
War was still intense. Mikhail Gorbachev had been in poweronly seven months;
glasnost and perestroika were still just words in the Russian dictionary.
Now that Russia's military machine has crumbled and the Warsaw Pact has
dissolved, the idea of a "superpower confrontation" has become ridiculous
-- one could only happen now if the United States confronted itself. But
Hanssen kept on peddling his wares, and the Russians kept paying for them,
according to the charges. The spying game obviously has a life of its own.
For the spies, so does the Russian-American rivalry.
The truth is, the old, mortal rivalry is over. We really did win.
Nevertheless, the United States has a big Russian problem. The Russians
are in a mess at home, their secret policemen are in the ascendancy, and
so is anti-Americanism. Russia, the biggest nation in Europe, is not integrated
with its neighbors politically, nor does it participate fully in the global
economy. All those nukes, all that oil and gas, all those talented people
remain, at best, on the edge of the international community. The Russians
are scared, and resentful. And a resentful, unsuccessful Russia can easily
make life miserable for its neighbors, and for us.
The United States made the Russian problem worse during the '90s. We
sometimes gave too much assistance, as when Americans helped plot the Russian
government's economic reform policies. We focused most of our official
attention on one man, Boris Yeltsin, and his entourage, and not on pushing
Russians to work on democratic methods and institutions. We foolishly over-flattered
the garrulous first president of post-communist Russia, encouraging him
and his countrymen to pretend they had a much bigger place in the world
than they had yet earned. We paid too little attention to corruption, and
to politicians outside Yeltsin's orbit.
As the Bush administration prepared to take charge, it signaled its
desire to depart from the Clinton administration's Russia policy, first
by altering the bureaucratic arrangements for dealing with Russia from
Washington. It has downgraded the staff position on the National Security
Council that deals with Russia and it initially favored abolishing the
role of special ambassador to the countries of the former Soviet Union.
"They're organizing Russia down," said Arnold Horelick, an academic specialist
on Russia who was the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Soviet
Union in the late '70s. These changes are "bureaucratic and symbolic,"
Horelick added, "but they begin to matter," particularly if they make it
hard to recruit strong, senior people to work on the Russian account in
the new administration.
"Downgrading Russia" is part of an argument among Americans about how
best to deal with Moscow. Several of President Bush's foreign policy advisers
have participated in this debate, which is generally held among and for
insiders. The Bush people have tended to take a more skeptical stance:
Make the Russians earn their new place in the world, don't just defer to
them; show them how they can become important, don't try to make them feel
important; don't let them blackmail us with their weakness. But those views
don't add up to a real policy toward Russia. They're posturing.
A month in office has been enough to jolt the Bush team. No decision
has been made on abolishing the job of ambassador at large (the equivalent
of an assistant secretary of state) for the former Soviet Union, and sources
familiar with the matter said last week that Secretary of State Colin Powell
had heard eloquent arguments to preserve the role, if only to handle a
heavy workload more efficiently. "No one is going to marginalize Russia,"
Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser and a Russian-speaking
expert, said in an interview (see excerpts below).
To Russian ears, the argument over downgrading Russia combines insult
with condescension. Anti-Americanism has blossomed in Moscow since NATO's
bombing of Kosovo nearly two years ago. Many Russians have concluded that
the United States' real goal is simply to keep their country weak and insignificant.
Some Russian commentators take perverse satisfaction from evidence that
President Vladimir Putin has found ways to make the Americans mad. "Russia
has been showing itself an ever-more active player on the world stage lately,"
wrote Dmitri Gornostayev in Nezavisamaya Gazeta in December. This activism,
Gornostayev wrote, "is irritating U.S. policymakers. Moscow's decision
to renew full-scale cooperation with Iran has dealt a serious blow to American
diplomacy. And that could be only the beginning."
Happily, another Russian commentator pointed out what a silly comment
this was.
Russia's weight is still felt from Western Europe to China and Japan,
not least because it's so near dozens of nations, from Greenland in the
West to the United States -- Alaska -- in the East. But Russia is more
than a looming presence: The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 shaped the arc
of the 20th century. Russian resourcefulness and determination were critical
to the defeat of Hitler, and then kept the Soviet Union competitive with
the Americans to make the Cold War into a terrifying contest for transcending
superiority. The country has always produced large historical figures,
from Peter the Great and Catherine the Great to Khrushchev and Sakharov.
Times are tough, but the Russians aren't going to slip off the edge of
the world and disappear.
Finding ways to bring free, non-communist Russia into the community
of nations was the biggest challenge of the 1990s, and no one -- not in
the Clinton administration, not in Europe, not in Russia -- rose to it.
The Russians themselves failed most dramatically.
These failures shouldn't surprise anyone. Integrating Russia into the
world order is a huge task, in part because the devastation left by seven
decades of communist rule can't quickly be repaired. Nikolai Shmelyov,
an economist in Moscow, observed recently that a third of Russia's industrial
capacity is useless, yet much of it pretends still to operate. Russia produces
a steadily smaller proportion of the food it consumes. Environmental degradation
is ubiquitous, and in some areas catastrophic. Russian men have a life
expectancy of less than 60 years, one measure of the country's deteriorating
public health.
Russia remains an unnatural country, suspended between a horrific past
and an uncertain future. Because the Soviet Union disappeared without bloodshed,
the old regime was never fully displaced. Russia is still ruled by members
of the Communist Party nomenklatura, defended by the old Red Army, snooped
upon by the old KGB (all with new names or labels). The rule of law remains
largely a dream. Corruption is taken for granted -- as it deserves to be,
because it is so common.
The prevailing political culture under Putin is unsavory. Putin has
empowered the political police, demonstrated his discomfort with forceful
opposition, revived a crude Russian nationalism, and made political hay
by waging a brutal, fruitless war in Chechnya. Yet Putin, like his countrymen,
craves acceptance in the West, and insists that Russia is a European nation.
Some Russian commentators have had the courage to tell their countrymen
the truth. Sergei Blagovolin, a political scientist, noted recently in
an interview with the Moscow newspaper Segodnya that Russia was still undergoing
"the process of understanding the fact that Russia is no longer a superpower,
that we lost . . . ." Asked if Russia is now moving in the right direction,
he gave a poignantly candid (and accurate) reply: "It seems to me we are
moving in a circle. We are painfully searching for the right path."
The words of the man who appears to be Putin's principal foreign policy
aide, Sergei B. Ivanov, have a different cast. At a conference in Munich
earlier this month, Ivanov harangued NATO for causing, in Kosovo, "systematic
growth of violence and a political impasse threatening European and global
security." A U.S. missile defense abrogating the 1972 ABM Treaty, he predicted,
"will result in annihilation of the whole structure of strategic stability,
and create prerequisites for a new arms race, including one in outer space."
Ivanov's bluster nicely captures the frustrations of the Russians who
haven't come to terms with their country's poverty or its inability to
make its voice heard. Those frustrations help explain why the Russians
maintain their enormous espionage apparatus, one attribute of a superpower
to which they can cling.
Not that Ivanov's rhetoric is entirely hollow. The missile defense issue
is very real. That ABM treaty, an attempt to stabilize the arms race, is
now useful to Russia in at least two important ways: It is evidence (when
there isn't much) that they and the Americans still matter equally on a
big strategic issue, and it blocks a new competition which, if it comes,
would only advertise Russia's poverty and weakness.
If Congress and the Bush administration insist unilaterally on a missile
defense that violates, and nullifies, the ABM Treaty, Russia will be livid
(as may many other nations). It will also be furious if NATO expands to
include the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, thus
demonstrating Russia's helplessness and aggravating its sense of isolation.
America has its own truth tellers. One, former secretary of defense
James Schlesinger, observed recently that there are numerous Americans
"who come out of the Cold War [experience] and kind of miss the excitement."
Schlesinger, quoting Churchill, said victory in the Cold War argued now
for "magnanimity."
Rice is sensitive to Russian sensibilities. During last week's interview
she offered no compromises on missile defense or NATO expansion, but more
broadly, she said precisely what anxious Russians would most like to hear:
"The people who think a weak Russia is a good thing for the United States
are wrong. A weak Russia will only be a problem for the international
community."
A strong Russia is still just a dream, but not an unimaginable one.
Amid all the bad news there are hopeful signs: real economic growth last
year, the rise of a generation of productive entrepreneurs, an artistic
and cultural boom in Moscow. The 145 million citizens of Russia are members
of the nation that produced Pushkin and Dostoevski, Malevich and Brodsky,
Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich. One day, new Russian talents will again
astound us.
Americans will advance their own interests -- and Russia's, too -- if
they confront the Russian problem forcefully and magnanimously. We can
try to persuade the Russians they are welcome at the high table, though
only if they behave appropriately. We can show them the path to get there.
This will require persistent, creative diplomacy. Neither indifference
nor petty hostility will help.
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