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CIAO DATE: 11/00
International Affairs:
A Russian Journal
A "Quasi-Alliance" Between the United States and Russia
A. Bogaturov *
The Russian-American summit held in Moscow in June 2000 did not bring any radical changes. Seen against the background of deliberations about an inevitable cooling between the two countries this fact can be interpreted as a sign of stability. Bill Clinton, somewhat older, is still invincible, desirable and adored despite of (or probably thanks to) the scandals by the nation. The US expert community agrees that, had the Constitution allowed another term, he would have won it. Let's cast a look at the results of the Democrats' eight years at the helm in the sphere of Russian-American relations. How will the two powers cooperate? The last decade of this cooperation can be best described as a "quasi- alliance."
The word "quasi" which means "as if" and "to a certain degree" is the best term to be used to describe the ambiguous nature of relations between Russia and the two key centers of world politics: western (Atlantic) and eastern (Pacific). The former embraces the US and "old" Western Europe as its core; the latter consists of China, all doubts and vacillations notwithstanding. Formally, the relations between them and Russia are based on insistently declared good will yet the sides are divided with profound, including geopolitical, contradictions that can be kept under the lid. The result is respectable; the words that describe interstate relations are changing slower than the relations themselves at the turn of the century. The evolution is fascinating–the result is hard to predict. I have posed myself a more modest task: to formulate the real meaning of the United States' Russian policy and look into the processes which Washington is trying to control through what it calls partnership with Moscow.
***
The US foreign political resource was dramatically boosted when the Soviet Union, the strongest US competitor (since the US-British rivalry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), retreated from the scene. With the "Soviet bloc" removed the United States could tap new huge economic possibilities to rehabilitate its national economy. It translated into numerous organizational, strategic, political and psychological advantages the turn towards allied or partner relations with the United States that swept the world.
Self-appreciation of the American elite and society as a whole skyrocketed; the Americans became deeply convinced that their development pattern was absolutely the best. This produced an emotional messianic upsurge to spread "American democracy and the market economy" well beyond the geographical limits within which the US foreign policy has been acting for several centuries.
The newly acquired resources and the newly formulated ideas about America's place in the world produced a new hierarchy of tasks the Clinton Administration has been working upon for two terms. It rests on a "triple" goal: to restore the United States' economic leadership which suffered serious setbacks in the last two decades; to prevent any new equal rivalry; to set up a powerful economic and strategic platform based on a renovated system of the US network of partners and allies. This will allow the country to preserve, in the twenty-first century, the best positions in the international division of labor and technological, economic and military-strategic competitiveness in any possible context (China, India, Islamic coalitions or any combination of them with or without Russia.)
At the turn of the twenty-first century the United States started moving to world domination frighteningly fast. Today, as never before, the old and hitherto unrealized idea of a nearly unrestricted domination of America and its civil, political and consumer ideas seems much more convincing. We are living amid intertwined and contradictory trends, two of them emerging as central in the United States' policy towards Russia: extended American influence with the use of para-force and force, on the one hand, and a rising wave of latent anti-American sentiments across the world (Western Europe and East Asia included) with the exception of post-socialist patches in Central and Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union.
Increased American influence does not rest on its absolute economic might, increased military potential and an ideological attractiveness of its democratic system alone. Its influence was boosted by the fact that the Soviet Union and its allies removed themselves from world politics. The rigidly competitive bi-polar system that had existed between 1945 and 1991 collapsed. This produced a striking effect, which pushed America to those parts of the globe that had been closed to outside influences for many decades, the former socialist countries.
The last years of the Clinton Administration brought spectacular economic advance: the budget deficit problem has been settled, the foreign trade credit balance has lost its edge. The nation is still living beyond its means spending and consuming more than is accumulated and produced yet the state's economic policy and budget spending have become much more rational than before. There is no talk of an imminent economic stagnation. In the last ten years the United States has finally increased its economic efficiency and reached the level of Japan, its main ally and rival.
The idea of "renovation of the American house" with which President Clinton had entered the White House in 1992 was realized eight years later. In the social sphere it proved possible to carry out painful yet absolutely necessary measures to curb the growth of "legally parasitic strata" and expectations; the system of social insurance was changed partially, etc. The nation, on the whole, has recognized the Democratic rule as successful, which allowed President Clinton to weather the Monicagate storm.
No longer confronted by the USSR the United States cut down military spending and channeled the money to fundamental research, the cornerstone of its scientific and technical potential. Scientific and technical results were imported from abroad on a wide scale; skilled personnel and new ideas arrived from Russia and the former socialist countries. It was a veritable army of promising scientists and engineers which, in the last ten years, left Russia and the socialist camp to settle in the United States.
As distinct from the leaders of the Reagan era the Clinton Administration used the favorable situation to strengthen the country's international positions. The United States never rested on its laurels: it wanted stronger world leadership and never stopped pushing it forward. This was obvious on the outward level as well: Madeleine Albright's nearly aggressive style sharply contrasted even with Warren Christopher's "mildly didactic" inflexibility (1992-1996) to say nothing of George Schultz's demonstratively balanced approaches of the eighties. It turned out, however, that the American conception of leadership of the nineties mainly belonged to the sphere of force and politics rather than to the economic and political sphere. This meant that the United States was not so much concerned with increasing and improving its own autonomous potential–its aim was to gain a key role in distributing and concentrating resources of other countries and in their use according to what it thought to be the best development strategy for the world.
This aim is not easy to reach because of anti-American sentiments present everywhere in the world. In Western Europe they are not pronounced yet becoming more and more obvious. The European countries are fully aware of their dependence on the United States in the military sphere. At the same time they are fully aware of considerable financial gains: this dependence allows them to trim their military spending. Today, after seven year of existence without the Soviet Union the Europeans have concluded that to ensure their security they need America much less than ten or fifteen years ago. Indeed, the potential threat from Russia, which has half of the former Soviet forces, has diminished dramatically. The new sensation (rather than awareness) of security (or an absence of danger) allows the US West European allies to talk about building up Europe's independence in all international spheres, starting with security, finances and economy. In 1995, when Chirac was elected president of France the supporters of European autonomy received a new stimulus and a new active comrade-in-arms. In December 1998 France and Britain issued a joint statement on a necessity of a defense potential for Europe independent of the United States. Its form and wording brought to mind much of what had been said in Europe before. Its context was strikingly different: it was for the first time that Europe spoke of military independence in an absence of a threat from the East.
This is not new and, therefore, not alarming. Anti-American sentiments are much more obvious in the developing or, to be more exact, newly developed world. This is best illustrated by India and Pakistan: nuclear arms have spread beyond the limits where the "old" nuclear powers could exercise more or less effective control with the Soviet Union still alive.
India's behavior seems to be significant. The country is economically weak; it is weaker than China and, probably because of this its leaders are as immersed in politics as the Chinese ones. They tend to react violently to the idea of American world domination in general and its concrete manifestations in particular. They find it hard to tolerate US interference in the South Asian regional affairs or in the issues related to India's desire to acquire the indispensable, from the Indian point of view, essential and outward attributes of a great power. To a certain extent this reminds of China of the early sixties when the Chinese leaders were consistently working for a nuclear status and exploited anti-Soviet arguments to forge a mobilizing ideology. India is trying to tap the anti-Pakistani and the etatist nationalist sentiments to bring the nation together.
Chinese foreign policy is also tinged with anti-Americanism yet the country is behaving as a politically mature subject should behave. There are no radical measures and there is a desire to combine a no-nonsense protection of the national interests and the advantages of a "soft integration" into the system of American interests in Eastern Asia. This economy-oriented pragmatism has softened the Chinese-American contradictions over Taiwan and China's latent desire to dominate the smaller and average Southeast Asian countries. This does not prevent China from promoting the "multipolar (polycentric) world" conception. Its interpretation there and elsewhere, Russia included, is indirectly anti-American to the extent to which it is emotionally charged with a protest against the actual adjustment of international institutes and mechanisms to the United States. In fact, the US itself is maintaining an outward appearance of a dialogue with its partners.
The stand taken by the countries of Central-Eastern and Eastern Europe (Serbia excluded) and the majority of the USSR successor states in Europe and Asia (with the exception of Russia and Byelorussia) strikes a grotesquely false note in the worldwide (open and latent) anti-American chorus. These countries are exploiting the US need of new satellites; this foreign politic course requires relatively little money to entrench themselves on the pro-American positions.
Indeed, coolness in the relations with stronger and more experienced partners makes new, even weaker, allies desirable. This will go on until the economic and other aid to the new states outweighs the political advantages of such alliances: this stage in their relations has not yet come. So far the "new democracies," the most enthusiastic supporters of American influence, regard it as an instrument of opposition to the remnants of Russia's presence. This is the way to fortify their independence and to extract profits from privileged cooperation with a rich partner.
Inside the United States there are supporters and opponents of the world leadership burden. The idea of a "strong and independent America" free from the "shackles" of responsibilities to the best and not so good partners is still very popular on the domestic scene. It should be added that the idea of an autonomous American power belongs to the official vocabulary. In real life the United States is trying, first, to weaken potential opponents by putting pressure on them or by "smothering them with embraces." Second, the United States is engaged in building up a legal, political, psychological and operational basis for a mechanism through which it will use the resources of their allies for its own aims.
This explains why the United States is consistently promoting NATO's eastward expansion. It is not merely a guarantee against a "revived threat from the East." The United States is not sure that it will discipline the Europeans outside NATO's paramilitary subordination where the junior members take orders from the only senior member.
This also explains why the American elite enthusiastically hails the ideas of integration and globalization, two cornerstones of American political philosophy of the late twentieth century. In the democratic school of political idealism the two conceptions embody the omnipotence and universal value of the worldwide patterns of progress and advance development. This means that in the political realism context they serve a substantiation of the idea of pooling world resources in the interests of Western society to let it survive and flourish.
This calls for a specified tactics Russia should follow when dealing with stronger partners. Being part of the process we cannot avoid it: what we have to avoid is a role of a passive object of Western influences. Having assumed an active role we should coordinate the measure of our opposition to partners with the degree of importance for Russia to remain the main owner of the vast expanses and non-renewable natural resources (Siberia's ecological resources) found in the central and northern parts of Eurasia. The importance of this will grow with time and serve one of few circumstances, which will help Russia restore its influence. There are a post-industrial perspective of wasteful sustainable development and of its opposite, an anti-industrialist, ecowholistic perspective of sparing natural resources and curbing production models to the task of harmonious relationships between the world community and the living and non-living environmental components.
No wonder the United States is regarding itself in this context the chief world power with a widely spread network of interest. In 1992, the freshly elected Clinton Administration with Christopher as State Secretary had no global designs. It was believed that the country had no adequate resources. The President and his State Secretary concentrated on "renovating the American house" which, the Democrats said, the Republicans had neglected. The Clinton-Christopher tandem was inclined to react to international events rather than follow an offensive foreign political course. They wanted to preserve the spheres of influence acquired in the eighties rather than extend them. The policy remained unchanged till summer 1993.
This was a period of at least two discoveries that amazed American diplomacy. First, the international atmosphere had become rarefied to the extent impossible in the bi-polar world: Russia which had supplanted the Soviet Union was no longer aware of its interests in vast spheres of international relations and world political areas. It stopped protecting its interests in Indochina, Central Asia, the Middle East, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, the Transcaucasus and South America. The second discovery was even more striking: the Russian leaders had taken the "mutual security" doctrine, popular during perestroika in earnest. They were behaving as if the United States had to look after Russia's interests as its own very much in line of democratic solidarity between Friend Bill and Friend Boris.
Clinton's democratism organically blended with the United States' geopolitical interests, while Yeltsin's democratism had nothing behind it expert his unawareness of Russia's interests and his fear that Russia had not enough resources to pursue an independent line in its relations with Washington. It was believed that this friendship would guarantee support of the international financial institutions. The first US powerful foreign political initiative was worded as "proliferation of democracy." Announced in fall 1993 by national security advisor A. Lake it marked a turn towards the conception of world leadership of the United States as the main truly democratic state and the pillar of democracy throughout the world. NATO's eastward movement was the main component of Lake's conception; the other being support for democracy in Russia. This combination explains why Washington paid much attention to its dialogue with Moscow and strained to convince it that its interests were in harmony with the planned NATO expansion.
The nineties can be describes as a "period of four democracies" in the relations between Russia and the United States. There were two Democratic administration in Washington; in Russia Yeltsin and his "proto-democratic" regime retained power for two four-year stretches. On the whole the entire period, and its first half especially, was dominated by formal ideological closeness. Riding the wave of naive and euphoric deliberations about the newly discovered ideals and values shared on both sides of the Atlantic the two leaders were nearly sincere when they announced a course towards a union with Moscow (cautiously in Washington) and partnership as the first step towards a future alliance with Washington (impulsively in Moscow.)
Romantically tinged speeches could not play down two important things: first, the outwardly strikingly similar regimes reached strikingly different results. The United States preserved its leading position and strengthened it. Russia retreated from the positions held by the Soviet Union and lost the positions occupied by the RSFSR on the eve of the 1991 Belovezhskie collusion. Second, the talk about the democratic foundations and a desire to cooperate did not mean that the US was prepared to help Russia preserve its international, political and geopolitical positions. The United States was not prepared, either, to miss a chance to employ Russia's growing weaknesses and inability to firmly protect its interests in the world or even along its borders to secure its own interests. In doing this the United States was progressing from cautious to an openly impudent behavior.
As the first Clinton Administration was drawing to an end it had become abundantly clear that the vague "doctrine of democratic solidarity" which Foreign Minister Kozyrev had borrowed from the "new political thinking" tool-kit proved inadequate. The Smolenskaya Square team was replaced. Early in 1996 Yevgenii Primakov was appointed Foreign Minister of Russia. He brought a new foreign political conception: Russia started using the language of national interests when talking to the West. Igor Ivanov who replaced Primakov in 1998 is going in the same direction.
Foreign political milestones were temporarily lost in a storm of ideological novelties and ideas of democratic solidarity but this was not all. The correlation between the two sides and their possibilities had also altered due to objective reasons. It took time to grasp the new situation and adjust policy accordingly. As the strong side the United States had found it easier to do: in the latter half of its first term the Clinton Administration started talking about its role of the only world political leader which is too delicate to openly call itself this. It was much harder for Russia: it had not only to resign itself (which even Kozyrev's defeatist diplomacy could do). Russia needed new tactics to protect its interests in the conditions of contracted resources. It needed a tactics of "sophisticated diplomacy" to exploit weaknesses to play a strong game. This alone could produce the desired effect in an absence of unmentioned, yet obvious to all, possibilities the Soviet Union had enjoyed which justified its all, even rash, foreign political steps.
It would be wrong, though, to talk about a changed vector of the relations between Russia and the US. Inside it, however, the tendency to oppose American hegemony-tinged leadership fitted well into the general trend to moving away from the United States.
Formally, the Russian Federation is supporting the idea of multi-polarity; it was first officially formulated in the Russian-Chinese declaration in spring 1997. On many foreign political issues, the multi-polar world being one of them, Russia is a milder critic of the United States than China yet its criticism is much more energetic than that coming from the West European capitals. This is well justified yet we have to tread cautiously both where the medium term and the exploitation of the anti-American sentiments elsewhere are concerned.
Today, the main danger is not created by the hegemony United States is trying to impose on the world. The hegemonically organized world has many chances to remain stable and manageable. The system as a whole rather than individual countries will profit from this. The main danger is created by the fact that Washington is unable to achieve its hegemony outside the use of the NATO mechanisms by-passing the UN. We have to bear in mind that multi-polarity or new bi-polarity can exclude Russia (for example a world with the US and China as two poles). More often than not political scientists are irritated by the possibility and are negative about it. Unable to ignore the US domination they like to identify a counter-trend leading (they believe) to a multi-polar world. They describe it as a more just and much more stable structure.
The question is: What does Russia have on its plate? Should it promote further decentralization or should it work towards the world system's further manageability? The latter can be achieved through mutual understanding with Washington's weaker allies (Western Europe and Japan) to contain American pressure together rather than by supporting American ambitions.
We should not dupe ourselves: neither the Europeans nor the Japanese are prepared to distance themselves from the United States. They simply cannot afford this. Their highest aspiration is to be allowed to speak louder within the alliance with Washington, not outside it. From this it follows that having assumed similar tactics Russia will find itself, actually and psychologically, inside the global network of the American partnerships. Russia is inside it: it is struggling to preserve its autonomy and independence without trying to get out. One is free to be indignant about this, to be delighted with this or have mixed feelings: the fact remains the same.
Throughout eight years of Yeltsin's presidency American diplomacy elaborated and realized, amid the Russian leaders' silence, the formula of a quasi-alliance between the two countries. Its main conceptual components are:
The relations between Russia and the United States began with idealistic statements about a possible democratic union. They were proceeding along the more realistic lines of a conflict-free cooperation. Today, they resemble the USSR-US cooperation of the perestroika years, though Russia is not as powerful as the Soviet Union was at that time. Having passed through a stage of self-destruction under Yeltsin Russian diplomacy under Putin may return to a more or less natural road of "detached" and confrontation-free cooperation with Washington. This would have been the choice of Soviet diplomacy of perestroika had not the ignominious Belovezhskie agreements were signed in 1991.
Both sides are fully aware that the dialogue proved much more difficult and less conflict-free than it had been believed eight years ago. This is disappointing and yet should inspire both countries to consistently work towards concerted practical efforts. Political declarations, which dominate specific economic steps, weaken the bilateral relations.
One the whole one can say that the relations between the two capitals have been adjusted to prevent conflicts rather than encourage closer relations. This is what makes them different from standard allied relationships. Both sides are more concerned with avoiding quarrels than with strengthening friendship. The eight-year period came to an end with a stabilizing structure erected around the Russian-American cooperation in the form of Russia's involvement into an "asymmetrical interdependence" with the US and the West. There is no powerful economic and other potential of common material interests. Who can say whether this is less than we wanted or more than we could expect?
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Contrary to the worldwide harmony the romantically minded democrats expected we are watching how, on the eve of a new century, a new super powerful military closed or semi-closed political alliance is being shaped on the basis of extended NATO and the latter's tighter bond with G-7. It is looming as a force without alternative, a source of international conflicts and destabilization. Russia is facing the hardest of choices: what next? The best answer demands cautious relations with the United States.
Note: * Aleksei Bogaturov is Director, International Relations Research and Educational Forum, Doctor of Sciences (Political Sciences), and professor. Back