THE WEST MUST SET A STRATEGY FOR A RESURGENT RUSSIA

By Anatol Lieven

Every few months or even weeks, a new issue seems to arise to create new hostility to Russia in the US, and often Europe too. Sometimes this is based on real conflicts of views or interests; as for example the question of Russian and West European ownership of parts of each other’s energy networks. Often, however, the issues are essentially minor, and of no real significance to important Western interests.

And in the great majority of cases, alas, reporting and comment by much of the Western media, and statements by Western politicians, reflect a frightening degree of bias and ignorance – when not outright disinformation; a situation worsened by the tendency to select Russian commentators in US newspapers only from one narrow section of Russian liberal opinion.

This was true for example of much of the reporting of the opposition demonstrations in Moscow in April 2007, and their suppression by the police. It would have been very difficult from this reporting, and comments on the incidents, for even well-educated US audiences to have learned certain critical facts: for example, that the demonstrations had received police permission to be held elsewhere, which the organizers had chosen to reject precisely in order to provoke a confrontation with the police; that the marchers included numerous representatives of a notorious neo-fascist group with their banners; that these demonstrations did not include the leading liberal opposition in Russia, the union of Right Forces; and that far from being crushed by the state, this party did considerably better than most people expected in the local elections of March 2007.

This pattern unfortunately goes back a long way. Soon after I arrived in Moscow as a British correspondent at the start of 1993, the then Russian foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, made a speech warning that if the West continued to ignore Russia’s vital interests and publicly humiliate Russia, there would one day be a Russian reaction that would sweep away the new partnership with the West that he and other Russian liberals were trying to build. A Western colleague scrawled on a transcript of his remarks, “More of Kozyrev’s ravings”. Thus were dismissed out of hand the reasonable concerns of the most pro-Western foreign minister that Russia has ever had.

One thing that it is absolutely essential for Western policymakers to understand – and once again, that they will not necessarily learn from the Western media – is that present Russian foreign and security policy is not the transient approach of the Putin administration, that may be changed by a future Russian government. It reflects the basic attitudes and wishes of the vast majority of Russians; and the attitudes set out by President Vladimir Putin in his speech to the Wehrkunde conference in Munich will define Russian approaches to the West for the foreseeable future. The basic form of Russia’s ruling order now seems set for a long time to come; its key policies are supported by most of the Russian population, as impartial and respected opinion polls demonstrate; and because US power and prestige have recently suffered blows from which they will find it very hard to recover.

As soon as Russia recovered a measure of its economic strength, it was always going to seek to regain a measure of its international influence. However, this will remain vastly more limited than that of the Soviet Union, and Russia is also bound to the West by dependence on international investment and the international market economy. This should act as a deterrent to reckless moves by Moscow.

Nonetheless, it is obvious that we are now living in a world very different from that of the 1990s, when the West expanded NATO and launched the Kosovo War. Then, Westerners could argue, with superficial plausibility if not basic common sense, that Russia could be transformed into a free-market democracy that would be subservient to Washington in international affairs; and at the same time that Russia was so weak that even extremely hostile Western actions would bring no effective Russian response. Today, Western moves against what Russia sees as its vital interests will bring very severe retaliation indeed.

In these new geopolitical circumstances, the main guidelines of Western governments and organizations in formulating strategy towards Russia should be the following: to avoid clashes with Russia except where these are essential either to the vital interests of the West or of international law and morality; and on the territory of the former Soviet Union, to draw up common rules of behaviour with a view to maintaining peace and stability.

These principles require for example abandoning NATO enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia in favour of a set of mutually-agreed set of restraints on Western and Russian behaviour on the territory of the former Soviet Union. NATO membership for Ukraine is opposed by a large majority of ordinary Ukrainians. NATO membership for Georgia would commit the West to one side of unsolved, and probably insoluble ethnic conflicts, with Russia irrevocably committed to the other side. Both moves would ensure very damaging Russian attacks on vital Western interests elsewhere.

Instead, the West should seek to create with Russia the kind of relationship that the US has sought with some success to achieve with China: one based on a mixture of respect for both sides’ vital interests with a common commitment to the stability of the world economy, and to refraining from actions that would destabilize that economy: what John Hulsman and I have called “The Great Capitalist Peace”.

In the Far East, these mutually-agreed constraints and commitments have been developed in recent years to deal with potential crises over Taiwan and North Korea; but their foundations were laid down many years ago in agreements between Nixon and Mao Tse-tung. Surely, if the US could achieve a mutually beneficial set of international ground rules with the fanatical architects of China’s monstrous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution , it ought to be capable of doing so with a Russian administration as tough but also as pragmatic as that of Vladimir Putin in Russia?

Anatol Lieven is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington DC, and the co-author, with John Hulsman, of Ethical Realism: A Vision for America’s Role in the World (Pantheon, 2006). From 1990 to 1996 he was a correspondent for The Times (London) in the former Soviet Union and Russia, and is author of several books on the region.