No subject

internal affairs and the abiding notion that Russia has no autonomous
rights at home or abroad.

Clinton's other unwise decision was to break the Bush Administration's
promise to Soviet Russia in 1990-91 not to expand NATO "one inch to the
east" and instead begin its expansion to Russia's borders. From that
profound act of bad faith, followed by others, came the dangerously
provocative military encirclement of Russia and growing Russian
suspicions of US intentions. Thus, while American journalists and even
scholars insist that "the cold war has indeed vanished" and that
concerns about a new one are "silly", Russians across the political
spectrum now believe that in Washington "the cold war did not end" and,
still more, that "the US is imposing a new cold war on Russia".

That ominous view is being greatly exacerbated by Washington's
ever-growing "anti-Russian fatwa", as a former Reagan appointee terms
it. This year it includes a torrent of official and media statements
denouncing Russia's domestic and foreign policies, vowing to bring more
of its neighbors into NATO and urging Bush to boycott the G-8 summit to
be chaired by Putin in Saint Petersburg in July; a call by would-be
Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain for "very harsh"
measures against Moscow; Congress's pointed refusal to repeal a
Soviet-era restriction on trade with Russia; the Pentagon's revival of
old rumors that Russian intelligence gave Saddam Hussein information
endangering US troops; and comments by Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice, echoing the regime-changers, urging Russians, "if necessary, to
change their government".

For its part, the White House deleted from its 2006 National Security
Strategy the long-professed US-Russian partnership, backtracked on
agreements to help Moscow join the World Trade Organization and adopted
sanctions against Belarus, the Slav former republic most culturally akin
to Russia and with whom the Kremlin is negotiating a new union state.
Most significant, in May it dispatched Vice President Cheney to an
anti-Russian conference in former Soviet Lithuania, now a NATO member,
to denounce the Kremlin and make clear it is not "a strategic partner
and a trusted friend", thereby ending fifteen years of official pretense.

More astonishing is a Council on Foreign Relations "task force report"
on Russia, co-chaired by Democratic presidential aspirant John Edwards,
issued in March. The "nonpartisan" council's reputed moderation and
balance are nowhere in evidence. An unrelenting exercise in double
standards, the report blames all the "disappointments" in US-Russian
relations solely on "Russia's wrong direction" under Putin - from
meddling in the former Soviet republics and backing Iran to conflicts
over NATO, energy politics and the "rollback of Russian democracy".

Strongly implying that Bush has been too soft on Putin, the council
report flatly rejects partnership with Moscow as "not a realistic
prospect". It calls instead for "selective cooperation" and "selective
opposition", depending on which suits US interests, and, in effect,
Soviet-era containment. Urging more Western intervention in Moscow's
political affairs, the report even reserves for Washington the right to
reject Russia's future elections and leaders as "illegitimate". An
article in the council's influential journal Foreign Affairs menacingly
adds that the United States is quickly "attaining nuclear primacy" and
the ability "to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or
China with a first strike".

Every consequence of this bipartisan American cold war against
post-Communist Russia has exacerbated the dangers inherent in the Soviet
breakup mentioned above. The crusade to transform Russia during the
1990s, with its disastrous "shock therapy" economic measures and
resulting antidemocratic acts, further destabilized the country,
fostering an oligarchical system that plundered the state's wealth,
deprived essential infrastructures of investment, impoverished the
people and nurtured dangerous corruption. In the process, it discredited
Western-style reform, generated mass anti-Americanism where there had
been almost none - only five percent of Russians surveyed in May thought
the United States was a "friend" - and eviscerated the once-influential
pro-American faction in Kremlin and electoral politics.

Military encirclement, the Bush Administration's striving for nuclear
supremacy and today's renewed US intrusions into Russian politics are
having even worse consequences. They have provoked the Kremlin into
undertaking its own conventional and nuclear buildup, relying more
rather than less on compromised mechanisms of control and maintenance,
while continuing to invest miserly sums in the country's decaying
economic base and human resources. The same American policies have also
caused Moscow to cooperate less rather than more in existing US-funded
programs to reduce the multiple risks represented by Russia's materials
of mass destruction and to prevent accidental nuclear war. More
generally, they have inspired a new Kremlin ideology of "emphasizing our
sovereignty" that is increasingly nationalistic, intolerant of
foreign-funded NGOs as "fifth columns" and reliant on anti-Western views
of the "patriotic" Russian intelligentsia and the Orthodox Church.

Moscow's responses abroad have also been the opposite of what Washington
policy-makers should want. Interpreting US-backed "color revolutions" as
a quest for military outposts on Russia's borders, the Kremlin now
opposes pro-democracy movements in former Soviet republics more than
ever, while supporting the most authoritarian regimes in the region,
from Belarus to Uzbekistan. Meanwhile, Moscow is forming a political,
economic and military "strategic partnership" with China, lending
support to Iran and other anti-American governments in the Middle East
and already putting surface-to-air missiles back in Belarus, in effect
Russia's western border with NATO.

If American policy and Russia's predictable countermeasures continue to
develop into a full-scale cold war, several new factors could make it
even more dangerous than was its predecessor. Above all, the growing
presence of Western bases and US-backed governments in the former Soviet
republics has moved the "front lines" of the conflict, in the alarmed
words of a Moscow newspaper, from Germany to Russia's "near abroad". As
a "hostile ring tightens around the Motherland", in the view of former
Prime Minister Evgeny Primakov, many different Russians see a mortal
threat. Putin's chief political deputy, Vladislav Surkov, for example,
sees the "enemy ... at the gates", and the novelist and Soviet-era
dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn sees the "complete encirclement of
Russia and then the loss of its sovereignty". The risks of direct
military conflict could therefore be greater than ever. Protesting
overflights by NATO aircraft, a Russian general has already warned, "If
they violate our borders, they should be shot down".

Worsening the geopolitical factor are radically different American and
Russian self-perceptions. By the mid-1960s the US-Soviet cold war
relationship had acquired a significant degree of stability because the
two superpowers, perceiving a stalemate, began to settle for political
and military "parity". Today, however, the United States, the
self-proclaimed "only superpower", has a far more expansive view of its
international entitlements and possibilities. Moscow, on the other hand,
feels weaker and more vulnerable than it did before 1991. And in that
asymmetry lies the potential for a less predictable cold war
relationship between the two still fully armed nuclear states.

There is also a new psychological factor. Because the unfolding cold war
is undeclared, it is already laden with feelings of betrayal and
mistrust on both sides. Having welcomed Putin as Yeltsin's chosen
successor and offered him its conception of "partnership and
friendship", Washington now feels deceived by Putin's policies.
According to two characteristic commentaries in the Washington Post,
Bush had a "well-intentioned Russian policy", but "a Russian autocrat
... betrayed the American's faith". Putin's Kremlin, however, has been
reacting largely to a decade of broken US promises and Yeltsin's boozy
compliance. Thus Putin's declaration four years ago, paraphrased on
Russian radio: "The era of Russian geopolitical concessions [is] coming
to an end". (Looking back, he remarked bitterly that Russia has been
"constantly deceived".)

Still worse, the emerging cold war lacks the substantive negotiations
and cooperation, known as detente, that constrained the previous one.
Behind the lingering facade, a well-informed Russian tells us, "dialogue
is almost nonexistent". It is especially true in regard to nuclear
weapons. The Bush Administration's abandonment of the ABM treaty and
real reductions, its decision to build an antimissile shield, and talk
of pre-emptive war and nuclear strikes have all but abolished
long-established US-Soviet agreements that have kept the nuclear peace
for nearly fifty years. Indeed, according to a report, Bush's National
Security Council is contemptuous of arms control as "baggage from the
cold war". In short, as dangers posed by nuclear weapons have grown and
a new arms race unfolds, efforts to curtail or even discuss them have
ended.

Finally, anti-cold war forces that once played an important role in the
United States no longer exist. Cold war lobbies, old and new ones,
therefore operate virtually unopposed, some of them funded by
anti-Kremlin Russian oligarchs in exile. At high political levels, the
new American cold war has been, and remains, fully bipartisan, from
Clinton to Bush, Madeleine Albright to Rice, Edwards to McCain. At lower
levels, once robust pro-detente public groups, particularly
anti-arms-race movements, have been largely demobilized by official,
media and academic myths that "the cold war is over" and we have been
"liberated" from nuclear and other dangers in Russia.

Also absent (or silent) are the kinds of American scholars who protested
cold war excesses in the past. Meanwhile, a legion of new intellectual
cold warriors has emerged, particularly in Washington, media favorites
whose crusading anti-Putin zeal goes largely unchallenged. (Typically,
one inveterate missionary constantly charges Moscow with "not
delivering" on US interests, while another now calls for a surreal
crusade, "backed by international donors", to correct young Russians'
thinking about Stalin.) There are a few notable exceptions - also
bipartisan, from former Reaganites to Nation contributors - but
"anathematizing Russia", as Gorbachev recently put it, is so consensual
that even an outspoken critic of US policy inexplicably ends an article,
"Of course, Russia has been largely to blame".

Making these political factors worse has been the "pluralist" US
mainstream media. In the past, opinion page editors and television
producers regularly solicited voices to challenge cold war zealots, but
today such dissenters, and thus the vigorous public debate of the past,
are almost entirely missing. Instead, influential editorial pages are
dominated by resurgent cold war orthodoxies, led by the Post, whose
incessant demonization of Putin's "autocracy" and "crude neoimperialism"
reads like a bygone Pravda on the Potomac. On the conservative New York
Sun's front page, US-Russian relations today are presented as "a duel to
the death - perhaps literally".

The Kremlin's strong preference "not to return to the cold war era", as
Putin stated May 13 in response to Cheney's inflammatory charges, has
been mainly responsible for preventing such fantasies from becoming
reality. "Someone is still fighting the cold war", a British academic
recently wrote, "but it isn't Russia". A fateful struggle over this
issue, however, is now under way in Moscow, with the "pro-Western" Putin
resisting demands for a "more hard line" course and, closely related,
favoring larger FDR-style investments in the people (and the country's
stability). Unless US policy, which is abetting the hard-liners in that
struggle, changes fundamentally, the symbiotic axis between American and
Russian cold warriors that drove the last conflict will re-emerge. If
so, the Kremlin, whether under Putin or a successor, will fight the new
one - with all the unprecedented dangers that would entail.

Given different principles and determined leadership, it is still not
too late for a new US policy toward post-Soviet Russia. Its components
would include full cooperation in securing Moscow's materials of mass
destruction; radically reducing nuclear weapons on both sides while
banning the development of new ones and taking all warheads off
hair-trigger alert; dissuading other states from acquiring those
weapons; countering terrorist activities and drug-trafficking near
Russia; and augmenting energy supplies to the West.

None of those programs are possible without abandoning the warped
priorities and fallacies that have shaped US policy since 1991. National
security requires identifying and pursuing essential priorities, but US
policy-makers have done neither consistently. The only truly vital
American interest in Russia today is preventing its stockpiles of mass
destruction from endangering the world, whether through Russia's
destabilization or hostility to the West.

All of the dangerous fallacies underlying US policy are expressions of
unbridled triumphalism. The decision to treat post-Soviet Russia as a
vanquished nation, analogous to postwar Germany and Japan (but without
the funding), squandered a historic opportunity for a real partnership
and established the bipartisan premise that Moscow's "direction" at home
and abroad should be determined by the United States. Applied to a
country with Russia's size and long history as a world power, and that
had not been militarily defeated, the premise was inherently
self-defeating and certain to provoke a resentful backlash.

That folly produced two others. One was the assumption that the United
States had the right, wisdom and power to remake post-Communist Russia
into a political and economic replica of America. A conceit as vast as
its ignorance of Russia's historical traditions and contemporary
realities, it led to the counterproductive crusade of the 1990s, which
continues in various ways today. The other was the presumption that
Russia should be America's junior partner in foreign policy with no
interests except those of the United States. By disregarding Russia's
history, different geopolitical realities and vital interests, this
presumption has also been senseless.

As a Eurasian state with 20-25 million Muslim citizens of its own and
with Iran one of its few neighbors not being recruited by NATO, for
example, Russia can ill afford to be drawn into Washington's expanding
conflict with the Islamic world, whether in Iran or Iraq. Similarly, by
demanding that Moscow vacate its traditional political and military
positions in former Soviet republics so the United States and NATO can
occupy them - and even subsidize Ukraine's defection with cheap gas -
Washington is saying that Russia not only has no Monroe Doctrine-like
rights in its own neighborhood but no legitimate security rights at all.
Not surprisingly, such flagrant double standards have convinced the
Kremlin that Washington has become more belligerent since Yeltsin's
departure simply "because Russian policy has become more pro-Russian".

Nor was American triumphalism a fleeting reaction to 1991. A decade
later, the tragedy of September 11 gave Washington a second chance for a
real partnership with Russia. At a meeting on June 16 2001, President
Bush sensed in Putin's "soul" a partner for America. And so it seemed
after September 11, when Putin's Kremlin did more than any NATO
government to assist the US war effort in Afghanistan, giving it
valuable intelligence, a Moscow-trained Afghan combat force and easy
access to crucial air bases in former Soviet Central Asia.

The Kremlin understandably believed that in return Washington would give
it an equitable relationship. Instead, it got US withdrawal from the ABM
treaty, Washington's claim to permanent bases in Central Asia (as well
as Georgia) and independent access to Caspian oil and gas, a second
round of NATO expansion taking in several former Soviet republics and
bloc members, and a still-growing indictment of its domestic and foreign
conduct. Astonishingly, not even September 11 was enough to end
Washington's winner-take-all principles.

Why have Democratic and Republican administrations believed they could
act in such relentlessly anti-Russian ways without endangering US
national security? The answer is another fallacy - the belief that
Russia, diminished and weakened by its loss of the Soviet Union, had no
choice but to bend to America's will. Even apart from the continued
presence of Soviet-era weapons in Russia, it was a grave misconception.
Because of its extraordinary material and human attributes, Russia, as
its intellectuals say, has always been "destined to be a great power".
This was still true after 1991.

Even before world energy prices refilled its coffers, the Kremlin had
ready alternatives to the humiliating role scripted by Washington. Above
all, Russia could forge strategic alliances with eager anti-US and
non-NATO governments in the East and elsewhere, becoming an arsenal of
conventional weapons and nuclear knowledge for states from China and
India to Iran and Venezuela. Moscow has already begun that turning away
from the West, and it could move much further in that direction.

Still more, even today's diminished Russia can fight, perhaps win, a
cold war on its new front lines across the vast former Soviet
territories. It has the advantages of geographic proximity, essential
markets, energy pipelines and corporate ownership, along with kinship
and language and common experiences. They give Moscow an array of soft
and hard power to use, if it chooses, against neighboring governments
considering a new patron in faraway Washington.

Economically, the Kremlin could cripple nearly destitute Georgia and
Moldova by banning their products and otherwise unemployed migrant
workers from Russia and by charging Georgia and Ukraine full
"free-market" prices for essential energy. Politically, Moscow could
truncate tiny Georgia and Moldova, and big Ukraine, by welcoming their
large, pro-Russian territories into the Russian Federation or supporting
their demands for independent statehood (as the West has been doing for
Kosovo and Montenegro in Serbia). Militarily, Moscow could take further
steps toward turning the Shanghai Cooperation Organization - now
composed of Russia, China and four Central Asian states, with Iran and
India possible members - into an anti-NATO defensive alliance, an "OPEC
with nuclear weapons", a Western analyst warned.

That is not all. In the US-Russian struggle in Central Asia over Caspian
oil and gas, Washington, as even the triumphalist Thomas Friedman
admits, "is at a severe disadvantage". The United States has already
lost its military base in Uzbekistan and may soon lose the only
remaining one in the region, in Kyrgyzstan; the new pipeline it backed
to bypass Russia runs through Georgia, whose stability depends
considerably on Moscow; Washington's new friend in oil-rich Azerbaijan
is an anachronistic dynastic ruler; and Kazakhstan, whose enormous
energy reserves make it a particular US target, has its own large
Russian population and is moving back toward Moscow.

Nor is the Kremlin powerless in direct dealings with the West. It can
mount more than enough warheads to defeat any missile shield and
illusion of "nuclear primacy". It can shut US businesses out of
multibillion-dollar deals in Russia and, as it recently reminded the
European Union, which gets 25 percent of its gas from Russia, "redirect
supplies" to hungry markets in the East. And Moscow could deploy its
resources, connections and UN Security Council veto against US interests
involving, for instance, nuclear proliferation, Iran, Afghanistan and
possibly even Iraq.

Contrary to exaggerated US accusations, the Kremlin has not yet resorted
to such retaliatory measures in any significant way. But unless
Washington stops abasing and encroaching on Russia, there is no
"sovereign" reason why it should not do so. Certainly, nothing Moscow
has gotten from Washington since 1992, a Western security specialist
emphasizes, "compensates for the geopolitical harm the United States is
doing to Russia".

American crusaders insist it is worth the risk in order to democratize
Russia and other former Soviet republics. In reality, their campaigns
since 1992 have only discredited that cause in Russia. Praising the
despised Yeltsin and endorsing other unpopular figures as Russia's
"democrats", while denouncing the popular Putin, has associated
democracy with the social pain, chaos and humiliation of the 1990s.
Ostracizing Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko while embracing
tyrants in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan has related it to the thirst for
oil. Linking "democratic revolutions" in Ukraine and Georgia to NATO
membership has equated them with US expansionism. Focusing on the
victimization of billionaire Mikhail Khodorkhovsky and not on Russian
poverty or ongoing mass protests against social injustices has suggested
democracy is only for oligarchs. And by insisting on their indispensable
role, US crusaders have all but said (wrongly) that Russians are
incapable of democracy or resisting abuses of power on their own.

The result is dark Russian suspicions of American intentions ignored by
US policy-makers and media alike. They include the belief that
Washington's real purpose is to take control of the country's energy
resources and nuclear weapons and use encircling NATO satellite states
to "de-sovereignize" Russia, turning it into a "vassal of the West".
More generally, US policy has fostered the belief that the American cold
war was never really aimed at Soviet Communism but always at Russia, a
suspicion given credence by Post and Times columnists who characterize
Russia even after Communism as an inherently "autocratic state" with
"brutish instincts".

To overcome those towering obstacles to a new relationship, Washington
has to abandon the triumphalist conceits primarily responsible for the
revived cold war and its growing dangers. It means respecting Russia's
sovereign right to determine its course at home (including disposal of
its energy resources). As the record plainly shows, interfering in
Moscow's internal affairs, whether on-site or from afar, only harms the
chances for political liberties and economic prosperity that still exist
in that tormented nation.

It also means acknowledging Russia's legitimate security interests,
especially in its own "near abroad". In particular, the planned third
expansion of NATO, intended to include Ukraine, must not take place.
Extending NATO to Russia's doorsteps has already brought relations near
the breaking point (without actually benefiting any nation's security);
absorbing Ukraine, which Moscow regards as essential to its Slavic
identity and its military defense, may be the point of no return, as
even pro-US Russians anxiously warn. Nor would it be democratic, since
nearly two-thirds of Ukrainians are opposed. The explosive possibilities
were adumbrated in late May and early June when local citizens in ethnic
Russian Crimea blockaded a port and roads where a US naval ship and
contingent of Marines suddenly appeared, provoking resolutions declaring
the region "anti-NATO territory" and threats of "a new Vietnam".

Time for a new US policy is running out, but there is no hint of one in
official or unofficial circles. Denouncing the Kremlin in May, Cheney
spoke "like a triumphant cold warrior", a Times correspondent reported.
A top State Department official has already announced the "next great
mission" in and around Russia. In the same unreconstructed spirit, Rice
has demanded Russians "recognize that we have legitimate interests ...
in their neighborhood", without a word about Moscow's interests; and a
former Clinton official has held the Kremlin "accountable for the
ominous security threats ... developing between NATO's eastern border
and Russia". Meanwhile, the Bush Administration is playing Russian
roulette with Moscow's control of its nuclear weapons. Its missile
shield project having already provoked a destabilizing Russian buildup,
the Administration now proposes to further confuse Moscow's
early-warning system, risking an accidental launch, by putting
conventional warheads on long-range missiles for the first time.

In a democracy we might expect alternative policy proposals from
would-be leaders. But there are none in either party, only demands for a
more anti-Russian course, or silence. We should not be surprised.
Acquiescence in Bush's monstrous war in Iraq has amply demonstrated the
political elite's limited capacity for introspection, independent
thought and civic courage. (It prefers to falsely blame the American
people, as the managing editor of Foreign Affairs recently did, for
craving "ideological red meat".) It may also be intimidated by another
revived cold war practice - personal defamation. The Post and The New
Yorker have already labeled critics of their Russia policy "Putin
apologists" and charged them with "appeasement" and "again taking the
Russian side of the Cold War".

The vision and courage of heresy will therefore be needed to escape
today's new cold war orthodoxies and dangers, but it is hard to imagine
a US politician answering the call. There is, however, a not-too-distant
precedent. Twenty years ago, when the world faced exceedingly grave cold
war perils, Gorbachev unexpectedly emerged from the orthodox and
repressive Soviet political class to offer a heretical way out. Is there
an American leader today ready to retrieve that missed opportunity?

_____

Stephen F Cohen, professor of Russian studies at New York University, is
the author (with Katrina vanden Heuvel) of Voices of Glasnost:
Conversations With Gorbachev's Reformers (1990) and, most recently,
Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia (2001).

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060710/cohen


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