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CIAO DATE: 09/02
International Affairs:
A Russian Journal
Quo vadis? Scenarios for Russia
A. Pushkov *
The Russian-American summit in late May could not have been other than a success: Both presidents needed it for many political reasons.
The very tradition of Russian-American summits, which has its origin in the meetings between Khrushchev and Eisenhower, confirms the uniqueness of the Moscow-Washington tandem. Now that Russia is not as influential internationally as it used to be, preserving this tandem makes for maintaining Russia’s special role in the world and showing what trump cards it holds and what strong points we have. When they speak about Russia’s weakness we should remember that this weakness is relative, in comparison with the Soviet Union. If we look at all of its potentials — territory, military potential, position on the map, etc. — Russia is still a mighty power. It is for this reason that the Americans pay such close attention to us. America knows perfectly well Russia’s real potential.
In addition to the nuclear factor, Russia is strong in that it is the keystone country of Eurasia where the main resources are concentrated. Eurasia is ablaze with dangerous conflicts occurring in places from the Middle East to the Korean Peninsula. It is where all the leading players of the world are concentrated: the European countries, China, India, and Iran. The United States also maintains an active presence in Eurasia. Therefore, the United States will not be able to reliably protect its interests in Eurasia.
Finally, there are some other factors of strength — our energy resources. The Middle East is unreliable, and the Americans should create alternative sources of energy resources. This also makes us very important to them.
We can think of many such plusses. Let’s take the Afghan operation, which has showed the United States can manage in Asia without NATO, but it can hardly manage there without Russia. And who will be settling the conflict between India and Pakistan? By the way, this is a conflict of utmost danger for mankind should it deteriorate into a nuclear clash. I am not sure that it can take the United States, without Russia, to settle this conflict. The Middle East has shown that the United States is not always able to resolve major international crises. The United States’ Middle East strategy has actually failed, and there is a search now under way for some new mechanism to resolve that issue.
So, aware of its trump cards and potentials, Russia could confidently conduct talks and Vladimir Putin did precisely that.
Apart from everything else, it was necessary for him to show people in Russia, including its elite, the correctness of his decision to back America in the wake of Sep. 11. Of no less importance for the Russian president is to have privileged relations with the head of the world’s leading power. He has succeeded in this and more.
The summit was very important for President Bush either. The ability to build relations with Moscow preferably on American terms has always been regarded in America as a major US foreign policy priority. President Nixon once said that Russia is of great importance to the United States because this is the world’s only power with 20,000 nuclear warheads that can obliterate America.
At the same time, the summit does not veil the differences between American and Russian foreign policy interests. Whereas in Russia this interest is billed as a diplomatic achievement for Vladimir Putin, the United States and the West regard the results of the summit as a major success for the Bush administration. The Western press says sometimes that the three-page treaty on reducing strategic offensive potentials hardly places on the United States any substantial obligations, but it leaves its hands free in seeking military superiority, and that Moscow will have no right of veto in the projected NATO “twenty” with regard to decisions taken by the alliance. The Bush administration is trying to get Russia concede on NMD, Iraq, Iran and other key problems of world politics and security. At bottom, the United States would like Russia back a new world order based on the priority of American interests.
What about Russia? Are we ready to become part of a new world order without specifying first its main parameters, with a long-term political strategy, clear goals and guidelines? Or does Moscow intend instead to actively influence the shaping of a new world order so as to take a dignified place in it that would make it possible for Russia to remain a great power with its own role in world affairs and its own vision of its own national interests? Russia has to make a choice under strong pressure from America and being relatively weak.
There seem to be several possible answers to these questions at the present time.
First, Russia turns into a part of the Euro-Atlantic alliance and complies with the logic of American leadership. As a result there emerges an official or unofficial Northern Hemisphere Organization to address major global issues. This is a dream of Russia’s “Westernizers,” an answer they think is the most optimistic of all but which is also the least realistic. This sort of evolution would be extremely difficult for Russia: As a central nation of Eurasia, it has a number of its own interests along the perimeter of its borders different than American interests. Surrendering these interests (for example, an alliance with Belarus or being the center of gravity for Ukraine and Kazakhstan) would not simply mean a geographical “shrinking” of Russia, but also a growing self-imposed isolation from the world and Eurasian politics.
In the meantime, Russia’s weakness should not be overestimated. It is weak in comparison with the Soviet Union. As regards the sum total of its political, military and resources-related parameters, it remains one of the strongest nations in today’s world. It is precisely for this reason that the United States is not interested in seeing Russia in NATO as an alternative center of influence. Involving Russia in NATO’s activities, the United States is trying at the same time to limit its potential influence on the alliance’s policy. The United States would prefer Russia being a partner outside NATO.
The emergence of Russia inside NATO would mean for leading European countries many headaches, the most important of which is reduction of their own importance within the alliance. The geopolitical and geostrategic importance of Russia located in the center of Eurasia — the key continent of the modern world — is immeasurably higher than the importance of any other European state or even of the entire European Union. The United States with its global strategic thinking realizes this very well. Therefore, it is so important for the Bush administration to politically neutralize Russia, take away its will to conduct independent policy in Eurasia and impose on it its own political agenda. Europe expresses fears that closer relations between Russia and America may result in renewed dialogue between Moscow and Washington over the head of the Europeans. In the event of Russia’s joining NATO, reduction in Europe’s influence in it would be inevitable.
Finally, Russia’s inclusion in NATO would cause many additional problems between the West and China because in this event the sphere of the alliance’s activities would expand up to the Russian border with China. This is something NATO countries are unlikely to be ready for in the foreseeable future.
Thus, Russia’s integration into NATO seems unlikely. What is possible is a functional interchange where Russia will get a voice in discussing only some, but not all problems of NATO policies.
Another option is for Russia to become part of Europe — politically and economically. President Putin brought up this scenario more than once as he defined Russia first of all as a European country. Indeed, politically and culturally Russia has always been part of Europe. Europe for its part runs the risk of failing, without Russia, to become a powerful and influential factor of world politics. This scenario seems the most logical, but it has substantial limitations.
The most important limitations are objective: neither Europe nor Russia is ready for Russia’s joining the EU, but absent this Russia’s integration with Europe would remain incomplete. There are still rifts between the Russian economy, social practices legislation, cultural and political traditions on the one hand and the principal institutes, mechanisms and parameters of today’s Europe. Even the entry into the EU by small European countries like Estonia or Cyprus creates serious problems for Europe to say nothing about the accession of such countries as Poland or the Czech Republic. Russia is a qualitatively different value. Therefore discussion of Russia joining the EU is premature.
The United States for its part is not interested in Russia becoming a normal part of Europe because this would make Europe stronger in the military-strategic area which the United States regards as the most sensitive. Nor has Europe decided where it stands on Russia. With the exception of Italian Premier Berlusconi, Europe has no other enthusiasts of Russia’s becoming a full member of the EU or NATO. More importantly, Europe has not decided yet whether it wants to be an increasingly independent center of strength in strategic cooperation with America or to bow to American leadership and be satisfied with building up its economic might without seeking independence in foreign and defense policy.
Finally, Russia itself is not completely clear on its own long-term guidelines. Russia’s integration with Europe is currently limited to political declarations and Vladimir Putin’s personal interchange with European leaders and the EC-Russia summits with very limited agendas. Europe cannot so far find the golden mean between its aspiration for greater independence and partially voluntary and partially forced strategic dependence on the United States, which confuses Russian diplomacy. There is no unity inside Europe on many key issues of world politics. There still remains hidden rivalry between the leaders of the FRG, France, and Great Britain. Henry Kissinger was fond of asking the rhetorical question: “When I want to phone Europe, whose number do I dial?” As a result, the possibility of joining Europe is for Russia a strong temptation and a great uncertainty.
Here is yet another scenario. Under it, Russia develops, mostly of necessity, as an independent center of strength inside a world that goes through globalization. It develops as a center of strength like China, that is to say, a center which in not equal in might to the United States and even less to the Euro-Atlantic alliance, but it has its own influence and a role of its own and it does not get dissolved in other centers of strength.
In historical terms, this is the most natural scenario for Russia because it has been such a center since the times of Ivan the Terrible. Besides, Russia is too big to be integrated into the existing European institutions without running the risk of blowing them up or at least qualitatively altering them, something the West has not been interested to date.
From the point of view of world politics, this version of Russia’s development would be welcomed by many of the world players — China, India, big countries in the Arab world, Latin America, and Africa. What is more, it would offer some positive things for Europe that is trying to be one provided Russia were drawn to it as the most natural and logical partner. Many countries and political forces perceive a unipolar world run from the United States as unacceptable.
Russia’s functioning as an independent center would help to maintain a sensible world balance and bring about a multipolar world based on reciprocity and cooperation that most countries around the world are working for. If on the contrary Russia plays no such role, these states would become increasingly dependant on the US policy and in critical situations may end up as hostages to decisions made in Washington.
Under this scenario, Russia as an independent center of strength could be partner of Europe, America, and China and conduct a multidirectional foreign policy reflecting its special geographic position and national interests.
This scenario is very hard to implement, however. Its main weak point is the absence of an effective economic strategy to revive the country. Another negative factors are the lack of cohesion among Russia’s political elite and the national identity crisis that began when the Soviet Union collapsed and is still continuing.
Which road will Russia take? It will have to take an independent stance on a number of issues like Abkhazia, Belarus, relationship with Iran, India, China, and nuclear disarmament. In a sense Russia, even despite its own will, is condemned to playing an independent role because it cannot easily join the other centers of strength and even less become dissolved in them. Hence, the most probable is a combination of all the scenarios. The only thing is to hit on the optimal combination.
At the same time, greatly mistaken or deliberately misrepresenting the point are those who maintain that Russia is trying to act as a great power — this is chimera, “phantom limb pain” hailing from the Soviet past, a former-superpower complex. In point of fact, this is the only possible and the only rational road for the country to take.
Eurasia is the hub of the world and its main continent where the most intense international crises play out and where the planet’s most important natural resources are found. It is where the world’s leading players — the United States, Germany, Great Britain, France, the European Union, China, India, Japan, Iran, major Arab countries, and Israel – operate. The current rivalry is essentially for who and to which extent will determine the beating of this geopolitical, economic and resources heart of mankind. None of the powers drawn into this rivalry can evade it without losing not so much their prestige or token greatness as specific, practical and tangible interests measured in dollars, barrels and cubic meters and, in the final analysis, their national well-being.
This may sound too abstract to some people. In fact, there can be nothing more concrete. Situated on the northern rim of Eurasia, Russia has no chance at all to evade this rivalry. Withdrawing from Eurasia’s main regions would not mean for Russia integrating into the Western system but rather being squeezed out to the periphery of Eurasian and world politics, resulting in sharply reduced opportunities to assert itself in the 21st century as one of the leading and prospering states in the modern world.
This prospect is not for us. The latest important events — the Russian-American summit, decisions taken in Rome by NATO leaders with Russia taking part, the Russia-EU meeting and other stirrings in world politics — give optimism in preparing the answer to the old question: Whither to go?
Endnotes
Note *: Alexei Pushkov, creator and anchor of the analytical P.S. program (TVC). Back.