[R-G] Francis Fukuyama: "Russia and a New Democratic Realism"

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/66ca01da-78fa-11dd-9d0c-000077b07658.html>
Russia and a new democratic realism

By Francis Fukuyama

Published: September 2 2008 19:34 | Last updated: September 2 2008 19:34

One idea that you will never hear expressed by either Barack Obama or
John McCain in this presidential race is the notion that a chief task
of US foreign policy in the next administration will be to gracefully
manage an adversely shifting global power balance and significantly
diminished US influence. This is not a hypothetical issue, but one
that stares us in the face today.

The failure to recognise this shift in power has been all too evident
in the events leading up to the Russian intervention in Georgia. Since
the Yeltsin years, the US has had a series of policy differences with
the Russians, including Nato expansion, the Balkans, missile defence,
policy towards Iran and human rights in Russia itself. Diplomacy, such
as it was, consisted of persuading Russia to accept all of the items
on our list and telling them their fears and concerns were groundless.
The US never regarded the relationship as a bargaining situation in
which it would give up things it wanted in return for things the
Russians wanted. Like the proverbial Englishman speaking to a
foreigner, we thought we could make them understand us by repeating
ourselves in a louder voice.

This posture by the Bush administration reflected the balance of power
that existed in the 1990s, when Russia was weak and had few cards to
play. But that has changed. The contrast between Moscow's intervention
in Chechnya in 1994 and Georgia in 2008 is dramatic: much as the US
did not like Russian behaviour in crushing Chechen separatism, the
Russian military operation was so incompetent that it seemed to set
few ominous precedents. Today, all thoughts are on where Russian power
will be used next.

If we could roll the clock back to before February when Kosovo
declared independence with US support, the elements of a bargain were
there. Of the desiderata on the American list, the most expendable
were anti-ballistic missile defence and support for Kosovo
independence. The former was a pointless irritant to the Russians who
never believed the US story that it was a response to a threat from
Iran. Kosovo independence does not improve the security of Kosovars,
but sets an unhappy precedent of legitimising separatism, which
explains why Nato members such as Spain did not back it.

A more difficult choice was Nato membership for Georgia and Ukraine.
These democratic countries deserve strong US support. But Angela
Merkel, German chancellor, is right in believing that the core of the
Nato alliance is its Article V guarantee that an attack on one member
should be regarded as an attack on all. This means that the US should
be prepared to station forces on a permanent basis to defend any
alliance member under threat, as it did on the inter-German border
during the cold war. Nato membership is not a talisman that magically
confers protection. It requires operational planning and expensive
defence commitments.

The Bush administration was not and could not have been serious about
Nato membership for Georgia and Ukraine to the extent that it meant
providing not just arms and advisers, but real security guarantees of
US forces. To the extent that that was so, leading the Georgians on to
believe that we would get them into the club soon was a big mistake.

An understanding that may have been possible a year ago is not
workable now. The Bush administration has turned Kosovo independence
and ABM defence in Poland into faits accomplis, making them unusable
as bargaining chips. And rushing to accommodate Moscow while Russian
troops are still occupying parts of Georgia proper is unthinkable. In
saying this, I do not want to be seen as apologising for Moscow's
behaviour. Russia is not justified in holding on to Georgian territory
or trying to overturn a democratically elected regime. Mr Putin's talk
about Georgian "genocide" and US conspiracies is unsettlingly
reminiscent of the "big lie" of Soviet times. The fact that Russian
feelings of resentment are understandable does not make them morally
right.

As Kishore Mahbubani of the National University of Singapore pointed
out on this page (August 21), one of the chief ways that US power has
been diminished in this decade is in its moral credibility. After the
Russian intervention, US officials asserted that "21st century powers
don't violate the sovereignty of other countries to overturn regimes".
Adding the qualifier "in Europe" reduced the snickering only
marginally. Democracy promotion – a good thing – has been deeply
tainted by its association with the Iraq war and US security
interests.

The past two US administrations could assume American hegemony in both
economics and security. The next administration cannot, and a critical
task will be for it to better balance what we want with what we can
realistically achieve.

This does not mean giving up on idealistic goals such as promoting
democracy. But the next president will have to "detoxify" (in the
phrase of Tom Carothers from the Carnegie Endowment) the very concept
of democracy promotion. We will have to think of ways of supporting
Georgia and Ukraine other than by new alliance commitments. And we
need to plan in concrete terms how to defend existing Nato members –
particularly Poland and the Baltic states – from an angry and
resurgent Russia.

The writer is professor of international political economy at the
Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and, most
recently, author of 'After the Neocons' (Profile, 2006)