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International Affairs:
A Russian Journal
Vol. 44, No. 4/August 1998
Russia – U.S.: Politics of Selective Resistance
By A. Bogaturov *
Foreign commentaries on post-1996 changes in Russia’s external policy might be structured in two groups as “confidently cautioning” and “sympathetically examining” ones.
An example of the former is provided by the circles oriented to Zbiegnev Brzezinski, a devotee of “the geopolitical dismantling” of Russia, who is making a new arrangement of the theme of “Russian neo-imperialism,” which is not a fresh one but is still sweet to his ear. Though the latter type of reactions cannot be called exactly pro-Russian either, they are more free from simplifications.
Without entering into a polemic with America, West European countries and Japan display a wish to reveal the pragmatic meaning of changes in Moscow’s policy rather than the desire to forestall these changes, one typical of Washington.
The international political context of relations between Russia and the U.S. is changing in its West European and Japanese dimensions. Does that mean that “the less equal” partners of the United States are in the process of sizing up Russia, not as a still probable rival, but as a situation ally, for example, in tackling such an important (for everyone) problem as moderating the ambitions of the excessively self-confident overseas leader?
Though not incontestable, this assumption is useful in the sense that it compels former global opponents, Russia and America, to waive what remains of their surprise at the very fact of cooperation between them and undertake a comparison, not always a pleasant one and yet intellectually mobilizing by this virtue, of the Russian–American interaction and the record of allied relations between Washington and its traditional partners.
I
In the late 1990’s, it is hard to overlook the fact that allied relations as an international political phenomenon is prone to innovation to a smaller extent than it was accepted in the liberal theory: the concepts and forms of allied relations are changed, but the role of alliances has failed to decline. Practice gave the lie to a popular claim, one current in the years which saw the dismantling of the Warsaw Pact, that “ally hunting,” a thing typical of the epoch of confrontation, would give way, after the end of the stand-off, to a gradual merging of most world countries into a homogeneous mass of states cooperating on the basis of rationally understood common values (as declared by liberal dreamers) and/or a balance of forces (as followed from a reserved semi-objection raised by realists).
The desire to gain allies proved a more fundamental thing. Seven years after the disintegration of the USSR, the U.S. policy displays no smaller interest in expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or in promoting military-political cooperation with minor and medium East Asian countries within the framework of the ASEAN regional forum on security. It is quite important to understand that, because for all the irritating nature of U.S. political and diplomatic pressure brought to bear on Russia, relations with her are also firmly inscribed in the context of efforts to build up new American–Russian partnership (not actually existing so far but potential), though partnership interpreted in the sense that the U.S. has habitually attached to it for decades. And it remains characteristic of other countries, Russia included, to seek the establishment of bilateral and multi-lateral sets of preferential relations capable of assisting in the emergence of predominant influence zones or in the forging of favorable positions vis-à-vis major international problems.
What was said does not deny new trends. First, two different types of relations—conventionally speaking, old and new modes of allied relationship—have been formed following the disintegration of the bipolar world and the appearance of a number of “misfits,” countries enjoying no allied guarantees at all. The former type applies to relations existing inside blocs which have managed to survive the confrontation (NATO, WEU, certain sets of bilateral relations). The latter, to “new generation” allied relations (Poland–NATO, Hungary–NATO, Russia–Armenia, Turkey–Azerbaijan). Conditions of cooperation inside the former group reveal a tendency towards softening, and inside the latter one, towards toughening in the sense that the new allies are faced with increased demands of economic, military, technological, political, ideological and humanitarian nature.
Inequality of terms is most clearly expressed in relations between stronger and weaker countries and is in a sharp contrast with the bipolarity years, when a refusal by one of the superpowers to gain a new ally could most certainly mean its defection to the zone of influence of the other and therefore potential senior partners kept, as far as possible, from antagonizing potential junior ones. Today, a possibility of being allied with the strong is the stuff of competition; special relations with the United States are eagerly sought by East European countries from Czechia to Ukraine, Asian Pacific countries (Vietnam, Laos), African countries (from Egypt to South Africa and Namibia). Russia’s support is contested by Byelorussia, Azerbaijan and Armenia; it is vigorously sought by Tajikistan and Georgia, the latter, regrettably, with quite little success.
Second, allied relations as a whole came to be characterized by an increased diversity: “classical” types of bilateral relations marked by a clearly expressed individual subjectivity of the sides (the Philippines–U.S.A., Australia–New Zealand, India–Bangladesh, U.S.A.–Saudi Arabia, Japan–U.S.A., Russia–Byelorussia) coexist with integrated multilateral allied relations within the framework of NATO and WEU, with the allied relations between Russia and the CIS countries, ones based on a combination of soft and rigid intersecting bilateral and multilateral obligations, etc.
Third, there is a shift underway inside multilateral sets of allied relations towards an increased collective subjectivity of participants, one understood as an erosion of the individual state principle in the course of decision- making on and implementation of decisions regarding the principal issues of relations inside a group or at the outside of general group relations, this by virtue of each country delegating part of its responsibility and powers to some collective body or forum. The latter in this context is formally or informally confirmed in the function of reconciling differences between countries and/or bringing collective pressure to bear on the outside international environment or its individual components. This primarily relates to what is happening inside the EU, Euro–Atlantic relations, as well as ASEAN.
The growth of collective subjectivity in sets of multilateral allied relations is the most important tendency from the point of view of intercourse between Russia and the United States. Its development, given the ability of the Russian diplomacy to work successfully with the United States’ West European allies and Japan, may give Moscow more favorable positions in the matter of defending its specific interests in relations with Washington, while not crossing out the results which Russia managed to achieve in the 1990’s in the course of her efforts to build up a partnership with America at the cost of huge and often unjustified losses.
Truth to tell, it would be an imprudent illusion to regard the growing collective subjectivity just as a sign of progressing U.S. weakness and a signal for its allies, tired as they are of American tutelage, to launch a “counter-offensive” against the increasingly immoderate leader. For the foreseeable future, the United States is going to remain the only “complex” leader in the world, one tending, precisely for this reason, to decide at will what is the right combination of unilateral and multilateral principles in world politics.
If multilateral action promised an economy of resources, the American diplomacy would press for it to be recognized as the fundamental principle of international relations. In other cases, however, it would invariably reserve the maximum scope for unilateral action. For example, while attempting, in spring of 1998, to get others share the burden of responsibility for the U.S.-proposed use of force against Iraq, the United States unceremoniously gave it to understand to its allies that it would not refrain from unilateral action against Baghdad should it prove impossible to reach a UN-mediated compromise with the latter.
The growing collective subjectivity is in many respects consequential on Washington’s increased tolerance for difference of opinion in the camp of its allies. This tolerance is based on the confidence that there is a powerful, stabilizing layer of common interests linking the United States and its chief partners as well as that there is no threat to U.S. domination comparable to the one, which existed during the years of Soviet might.
An interplay of these factors gave the United States a more complex idea about non-threatening combinations of solidarity and independence inside the group of its allies. Of much aid in this sense was “the second Iraqi crisis,” which demonstrated that “the pluralism of opinion” within the group could grow to considerable dimensions without endangering the allies’ basic consensus about the need to preserve what united them. The key to estimating prospects for Russian–American relations and sources of future frictions may lie in this stand-off between the concept of group solidarity as imposed “from on high” by the leader and the energetic wish displayed by other group members to introduce in it elements of their own vision of both group and national interest.
II
The logical growth of U.S.–Russian relations, as it seems, is linked to a substantial extent with the fact that the United States, being serious about partnership with Russia, structures it in strict conformity with its own vision of allied relations as, first, those between a more experienced (the leader) and a less experienced (the led) partners, and, second, those even theoretically incapable of calling into question its leadership. What is in view in the light of U.S. political psychology is, strictly speaking, not an allied relationship as such but an allied relationship in the name of U.S. leadership as a guarantee of general well-being as the latter is understood in the U.S. political culture.
From the point of view of American interests, Russia may ideally become not so much an equal partner of the United States in regulating the global system (as we would like it to be) as an important aide (over time, perhaps, the most important one along with West Europe, but aide all the same) in the matter of transforming the structure of strategic and politico-economic interconnections in Eurasia in conformity with how the U.S. sees the ways of strengthening its own positions (and those of the West as a whole) in the continent vis-à-vis rival, if considerably weaker, centers like China and the radical portion of the Islamic world.
Given this understanding, it is obvious that allied relations do not necessarily imply (or do not imply at all) an automatic support for an ally’s every attempt to build up its influence in the world. What Washington sees as important is not the strengthening of the positions of its allies but the strengthening of their ability to give support to U.S. policy in coordination with the United States itself. In the 1950’s, not pursuing, in effect, the aim of weakening Britain, France or the Netherlands, the United States did not hesitate, following this logic, to assist in the destruction of the British, French and Dutch empires, while providing the respective countries with the fraternally democratic (and familially constrictive) embrace of its strategic guarantees within NATO.
Mutually hostile Greece and Turkey were built in into the rigid framework of multilateral partnership under the aegis of U.S. leadership (and unadvertised U.S. arbitration) with no less skill. This notwithstanding, Turkey’s membership of NATO failed to rid it of a consistent U.S. pressure over its vitally important Kurdish problem or (if to a considerably smaller extent) over the problem of Karabakh, so painful for its Transcaucasian policy.
So, one should not be surprised, in view of such allied practices, to see the kind of policies which the U.S. pursues in the zone of the former USSR (though one has no incentive to rejoice in them either), in some of whose parts (Ukraine, Azerbaijan, the Baltic states) the U.S. diplomacy works efficiently to build a support platform. The platform is unlikely to assist in the creation of a U.S. sphere of influence in the near future but will certainly be instrumental in reducing the role of Moscow and, in this sense, serve as an additional means of pressure, compelling Russia to take the place reserved for her in the new pattern of relations in Eurasia, one hinging on the U.S. leadership. The two pillars of this platform in the first half of the next century may prove to be America’s alliances with the European Union and with Russia in her present or, not unlikely, more narrow borders.
The last sad remark seems to require a commentary. One has to state that the U.S. administration obviously has failed to get over its radicalism in interpreting the principle of national self-determination and does not set itself the goal of understanding the practical context of this most difficult Old World problem. The U.S. elite and the West as a whole were left unimpressed by the collapse of Yugoslavia, an absurdity by the modern standards, which involved much blood-letting and a forced relocation of huge population masses (it was nothing else than a UN-sanctioned “orderly ethnic cleansing”). Quite the contrary, Washington came to regard the military intervention in Bosnia as an effective expedient for protecting its lead in the settlement of international relations. A mounting pressure brought to bear on Serbia, since spring of 1998, over Albanian separatism in Kosovo is another confirmation of the fact that the United States is unafraid of a break-up of the state pattern in Europe.
One has the impression that the Washington geopoliticians are more disturbed by the existence of big countries if, of course, they are not, like Canada, actually the extensions of the U.S. economic and strategic, though not political, territory. Providing a ready theoretical foundation for this vision is the globalization concept that has become the political science hit of the 1990’s. In the academic sense, it merits a detailed analysis, but as we proceed with our theme we will only remark in brief that the following three planks of this theory are more important for the understanding of the U.S. diplomatic practices than the rest:
Today, globalization forms the ideological framework for a postulate about the obsolescence of the former interstate structure of relations in the world, because in Europe, for example, the disintegration of this structure proceeds against the background of integration inside the European Union and so the break-up of relatively big states into entities as small as Macedonia or Bosnia (and prospectively, perhaps, Scotland, Basconia, and Corsica) will not necessarily lead to chaos and wars and may on the contrary even stimulate some countries’ wish to unite, forming a sort of a broad suprastate community.
True enough, this community will more likely than not prove to be internally disunited and prone to conflicts. “But then,” it will need a powerful leader and protector. With Germany and Russia unable to aspire to this role (on account of their bad historic reputation), its burden “naturally” will have to be borne by the United States. In this (not exactly intellectually refined) manner, the rationale is given for U.S. leadership in Eurasia at least until the middle of the next century.
In itself, this leadership does not appear to the present writer as being the worse of all possible evils or a thing a priori hostile to Russia in the current circumstances. It is necessary, however, that it be contained within a reasonable framework and that this framework be asserted with regard for the interests of Russia. And it seems of key importance from this point of view what position the leader will adopt with regard to the fate of big states.
The different parts of Eurasia develop against a different institutional background: there are strong integration networks and tendencies in the west of Europe and none of these in the east. The West European states (with the exception, perhaps, of Germany) feel certain of their state “ego” and can afford the luxury of limiting their sovereignty by delegating some of their power functions to the EU governing bodies. A case in point is the growing “sovereignty” of Scotland within the U.K., a process which came under way during Anthony Blair’s Labor government.
In the east of Europe, typologically similar outward processes are instinct with an entirely different political meaning. Separatism is on the rise against the background of the total lack of even the most abstract hopes that supranational integration is going to start in near future. Self-determination of provinces in this context is inevitably fraught with the danger of state disintegration. For example, the radicalism of the Albanians inhabiting the Kosovo area not only threatens territorial integrity of Serbia but also increases dramatically the danger of emerging in the Balkans a belligerent, irredentist “Great Albanian” Islamic state (yet another one after Bosnia). This prospect affects the interests of not only Yugoslavia but also Macedonia which, like Serbia, has a numerous Albanian minority, as well as Bulgaria and even Greece, considering her morbid interest in the twists and turns of the Macedonian plot.
Similarly, in the U.S. perspective on theoretical problems, separatism in Chechnya or the centrifugal tendencies in Tataria, the Abkhazian separatism in Georgia and the Armenian one in Karabakh may appear as “progressive” processes of natural historic adaptation of political realities to the ethnic ones. But in real-life political context, they are and will continue to be the acutest security problems plaguing the respective states and the stuff of a pointed political struggle, armed struggle included.
In view of the strictness of the U.S. administration’s theoretical ideas and the traditionally strong ideological flair of the U.S. foreign policy, it appears that relations in the zone of Russia’s new perimeter represent the most important source of potential differences between Moscow and Washington. True enough, contrary to the opinion of traditionally-minded U.S. experts, it is not the Baltic area but Ukraine and Transcaucasia that may become in future the most painful issues in relations between Moscow and Washington.
What is likely to cause a serious Russian–U.S. alienation and—subject to electoral changes in Russia—the dismantling of what is on the whole a partner model of Russian–American relations, which has taken shape by the present time, is not Moscow’s plans to restore its political positions in Lithuania and Estonia, plans that U.S. experts seem to visualize, nor its periodic conflicts with Latvia over her discrimination of Russians, which are programmed for many years ahead (frictions that occurred in the spring of 1998 were just the beginning of a long string of such conflicts), but a wish, one clearly articulated by the Clinton administration, to work towards turning Azerbaijan into a zone of U.S. vital interests as well as active U.S. diplomatic efforts to entrench Ukraine in consistently anti-Russian positions.
It is appropriate, as it seems, to consider the NATO issue in the same context. Given the U.S. and NATO military and political hegemony in Europe, the interests of Russia are threatened directly not so much by the unmotivated expansion of the Alliance as by the multiple signals which Washington sends (irresponsibly, as the optimists hold; with a well-calculated aim, as more sober-minded people believe) to the Baltic countries and Ukraine, hinting at the U.S. preparedness to extend to them the sphere of military-political guarantees at its first opportunity. Thereby, the United States is ready to give them a huge political, moral and diplomatic advantage in their new relations with Russia. But the difficulties involved in the structuring of these relations are totally incommensurate with the vigorousness of U.S. promises to support these countries or with the rates of rapprochement in the military-political sphere between them and the United States.
One can see the conflict in the fact that even after receiving Moscow’ guarantees that it renounces in principle any attempts to spread its political control to the former Soviet republics, Washington continues its political offensive, seeking to become an effective participant in the work of forming a new model of relations in the post-Soviet space and to have these develop in accordance with its own vision of prospects for both a change in the situation in Central Eurasia and a role each country is to play in the pattern of relations taking shape in this part of the world.
III
It is not every contradiction, of course, that leads to a break. Under all circumstances, one still regards as improbable that Russia will revert to an all-out confrontation with the U.S.A. Therein lies the fundamental component of a consensus existing in the Federal Assembly and Russian society as a whole, the attainment of which is a major success of “Primakov’s diplomacy,” one looking particularly impressive against the background of the inept parliamentary policy that his predecessor used to conduct. It is appropriate therefore to limit this analysis to a consideration of non-confrontational scenarios of the Russian course.
In spite of their seeming variety, only two appear to be the most realistic ones: “the distancing” and “intractable partnership.” What is meant by the former is a line favored by the left (the Communists) and the right (the Liberal Democrats) opposition, who hold that Russia should “balance” between, be on “equal terms” with and “at an equal distance” from the United States, West Europe, China, the Arab world and/or, say, India. In so doing, she must not hesitate to oppose the United States and the West as a whole, should seek to avoid binding agreements with Western partners and secure a maximum free hand for herself. The boldness of this scenario consists in the fact that it does not exclude a possibility of Russia withdrawing from the vector of partnership with the U.S. and the G–7, although it does postulate renunciation of a steady East–West confrontation of the 1962–1986 vintage.
Being less resolute, the latter scenario is closer to the course which the Russian diplomacy has pursued after 1996. Yet it allows a stricter line in certain situations as well as a controlled widening of the range of issues, on which Russia starts to display firmness. The “intractable partnership” scenario is based on the idea of selective opposition to U.S. domination as an alternative to the “indiscriminate partnership” practiced between 1991 and 1995. Unlike the “distancing” option, however, it envisages self-limitations in Russian diplomatic actions, connected with the need to preserve and enlarge the gains achieved in the context of Russian–American partnership in the 1990’s as a whole.
The Russian diplomacy ought to dig its heels in on many issues, some of which, however, seem more important than others: creation of a sphere of influence in the zone of the new Russian perimeter; use of vigorous pressure measures to influence separatist movements inside the Federation; realistic rethinking of the national self-determination principle as applied to eastern Europe, restoration of the preeminence of inviolability of state borders and discontinuation of the practice of providing secret support to ethnic separatism; renunciation by the U.S. and NATO of their unprovoked disruption of the military-political status quo in Europe; stricter codification of the uses of force for the eventuality of actions being conducted in the territory of foreign states and introduction of special rules for the use of force in conflicts involving violation of territorial integrity.
One feels tempted to continue the list. But Russia is in a situation where it stands to reason to think about “putting her own house in order” and bid her time till the partner, its head spinning from easy successes, starts making mistakes which will provide Russia and other U.S. partners with new opportunities. So far, however, it is obvious that Moscow finds it hard to talk to Washington and that, faced with Russian disagreement, the U.S. side each time demonstrates readiness for unilateral actions, at best taking Russian objections into consideration but never heeding them: a case in point is the expansion of NATO.
Does that mean that it is useless to resist? Not at all. Rather it means that a possibly more exact estimate should be made of the available resistance potential and if resistance is offered after all it must last till the desired effect is achieved. It is yet to be decided where exactly a fiercer resistance ought to be put up and how best (with tact but firmly) to convey to the U.S. colleagues, who have long forgotten the sound of the word “no,” the understanding of matters, in which Moscow, if reduced to extremity, will act without regard for America’s pretensions to being the universal judge of “compatibility with democratic principles:” relations with Ukraine, Byelorussia and Transcaucasian countries; discrimination of Russians; separatism; terrorism, and some other things.
Thinking about the present state of Russian–U.S. relations does not make one feel better either. Hence the explainable tendency current among a part of the Russian elite to interpret the situation in reductionist terms by playing down the role of unpleasant realities and “stepping over” the present stage in the development of the world system and into a relatively distant future, when the world structure will be different and Russia will occupy in it a more honorable place.
For all the usefulness of this type of reasoning in the face of moral and psychological dejection moods reigning in society, it is necessary to remember about the need to keep the ability for realistic perception of reality, to interpret the international political situation surrounding Russia at a level other than the psychotherapeutic one. The modern world can be understood as being a multipolar one only “in the prospect;” its present-day cross-section, however, is centered round the U.S.A. and the G–7. This is the sort of concrete reality which Russian diplomacy has to react to.
In the1990’s, Russian foreign policy passed through two stages. In the conceptual sense, the first stage (1991–1995) was based on a romantic “democratic solidarity doctrine,” which in fact represented a superficial modification, one performed by the then Foreign Minister of Russia, A.V. Kozyrev, of M.S. Gorbachev’s “new political thinking” concept with its emphasis on international solidarity and elements of world politics common to all mankind.
1996 saw the beginning of a new stage in Russia’s foreign policy, which in the theoretical respect was characterized by a shift of emphasis to the state (“national”) interest. This new (unwritten as is usual in Russia) “Primakov doctrine” determines Moscow’s policy towards the U.S.A. and underlies the platform, on which the basic social and political consensus has been shaped in this country and which permits to achieve gradually some greater efficiency of Russian diplomacy.
The all-out solidarity with the Western partners over the entire range of international issues, as observed between 1991 and 1995, is not tantamount to the “quiet stubbornness,” with which the Russian diplomacy is upholding today its own vision of conflict settlement options in the Balkans and the Gulf, prospects for relations with such important but hard-to-deal-with countries as India, Iran and Japan, or the mechanics of stability in East Europe, including the European zone of the former USSR. But the national interest policy is a logical stage corresponding to the internal evolution of the modern-day Russian society and state. In the past, the current partners of the U.S.A. went through similar transformations, each in its own time and under different historical and national circumstances: France under Charles de Gaulle is just the simplest of all possible examples.
The Russian foreign policy is pursued on two parallel planes—one declarative, the other real. On the declarative plane, Moscow feigns a policy that might be conducted by a global opponent of and “a non-menacing counter-balance” of sorts to the United States. In reality, however, even after 1996 it performs as a U.S. partner, a peculiar sort of partner to be sure (for reason of geopolitical parameters and cultural-historical specifics), more stubborn, touchy and demanding than it is characteristic, say, of Canada or Britain, but partner all the same. Is it a spontaneous but historically natural resurgence of “a Russian Gaullism?” Not daring to claim anything of the kind, one simply ought to point to the logical parallels existing between the new Russian foreign policy and the policy which France pursued in the 1960’s.
While standing on the platform of partnership with the U.S.A., Russia keeps open the chances for protecting her own interests. By recognizing this fact, she will make it easier for herself to use the experience of other U.S. allies and be able to diversify her actions in such a way as to “haggle” with the new partners as skillfully and as doggedly as the Soviet diplomacy with its huge negotiating experience amassed in the 1960’s through 1980’s did, while not losing the undoubted gains from the forced, if dubiously motivated, concessions made in 1991 through 1995. Or, let it be observed in passing, as the French diplomacy learned to do in relations with the U.S.A. since the 1940’s; the Japanese diplomacy, since the 1970’s; and the new “post-unification” German diplomacy is learning to do now.
Endnotes
*: Aleksei Bogaturov is an analyst at the Institute of Social Systems, Moscow State University and a doctor of political sciences. Back.