US hardens attitude to defiant Moscow – FTimes
by on July 6, 2006 10:01 AM in Politics

By Chrystia Freeland

Published: July 4 2006 19:50 | Last updated: July 4 2006 20:05

On the eve of the second world war, Winston Churchill famously captured the perceived inscrutability of Russia under Soviet rule, characterising it as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”. With the collapse of communism, Russia became less impenetrable. All the same, a favourite trope of the country’s analysts remained its complexity.

The glass was usually half-full – some reform had just been pushed through, some economic milestone achieved. But it was also half-empty: corruption found some new way to flourish or a political freedom was repealed.

This ambivalent backdrop makes America’s current, clear attitude towards Russia all the more striking. The US has reached a bipartisan consensus that Russia is going quite badly wrong and that America has a duty to say so. This view was expressed most boldly by Vice-President Dick Cheney, who in May warned that “in Russia today, opponents of reform are seeking to reverse the gains of the last decade”.

Mr Cheney is a tough messenger and his choice of venue made a bitter pill even harder to swallow. He reprimanded Russia in the Baltic city of Vilnius, before an audience that included the presidents of Ukraine and Georgia, whose very election was in defiance of the Kremlin’s work and wishes.

But the vice-president’s message had been agreed and approved by the wider administration of President George W. Bush. It echoed the report of a bipartisan Council on Foreign Relations task force – co-chaired by former Democratic vice-presidential candidate John Edwards and former Republican Congressman and cabinet secretary Jack Kemp – whose title, Russia’s Wrong Direction*, faithfully captures its hawkish content. The perceived front-runners in the 2008 presidential race for both parties, most notably Republican Senator John McCain, are all strongly critical of Russia.

“I think there is an emerging, bipartisan perspective that Russia is veering away from any commitment to democracy,” says Zbigniew Brzezinski of the Center for Strategic & International Studies. “The consensus antedates the speech,” the Democratic former national security adviser adds.

Russian observers had no doubts about the significance of Mr Cheney’s speech. In the Moscow press it was instantly interpreted as the opening volley in a new cold war, drawing comparisons with Churchill’s warning in 1946 that an “Iron Curtain” was descending across Europe.

That is clearly an exaggeration, not least because of Russia’s considerably diminished significance 60 years on. But, just 15 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union prompted declarations of the end of history and global American ideological victory, the return to cold-war comparisons was remarkable. What had turned America so sour, so quickly?

The most powerful driver is disillusionment. In the heat of the Iraq war, it is easy to forget that the first big target of America’s global democracy-building campaign was the Warsaw Pact, with the Soviet Union itself the bulls-eye. And, for the first few years, the mission really did seem close to being accomplished. The former vassal nations of eastern Europe were set free and quickly became democratic. The same was soon true in the Baltic states, with at least some progress in a few of the other former Soviet republics, notably Ukraine. Russia itself, for all the chaos, corruption and macroeconomic instability, did seem steadily to be becoming more democratic and capitalist. And all of this was accomplished relatively peacefully, in a region bristling with nuclear and conventional weapons.

Even when Boris Yeltsin, with his frequent fecklessness but genuinely democratic spirit, was replaced as president by a hand-picked, previously unknown former KGB colonel named Vladimir Putin, American optimists could make the case that Russia was moving in the right direction. Mr Putin, after all, promised to restore order, and that was something post-Soviet Russia clearly needed.

One of the most powerful symbolic endorsements of this view came from Mr Bush who, after his first meeting with the new Russian leader in June 2001, announced that he had “looked the man in the eye . . . and was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and to the best interests of his country.” Over the next five years, the glass half-full interpretation of Russia found plenty of evidence to justify this glowing verdict, most notably effective macroeconomic policy, including a flat tax and aggressive paying-off of Russia’s debt, a re-invigoration of what had sometimes seemed to be a collapsing Russian federal government, and support for America’s self-proclaimed “war on terror”.

But there was a lot of grist for the half-empty mill, too: re-nationalisation of strategic assets, most visibly Yukos; continued, or even increased, corruption; a harsh suppression of insurgency in the breakaway province of Chechnya. Most important, the freedoms in whose name communism had been defeated were steadily eroded. The media, particularly television, was brought back under state control and independent journalists were silenced; civil society organisations, both foreign and domestic, came under increasing pressure or were closed altogether; political structural checks and balances were abolished. The Kremlin soul with which Mr Bush felt such an instant affinity was turning out to be that of an autocrat. As the Council on Foreign Relations task force report put it, “taken as a whole, the political balance sheet for the past five years is extremely negative”.

For a US administration explicitly shaping its foreign policy around the goal of spreading democracy around the world, this shift from shambolic democratisation to an orderly return to authoritarianism was a profound setback. The fact that it was occurring in Russia, the former cold-war rival whose ideological transformation was the great victory and the great catalyst of the pro-democratisers, only made the switch more significant and more bitter. As Michael McFaul, Stanford University professor and an occasional adviser to the administration on Russia, says: “Russia is the only major country on Bush’s watch that has gone from partly free to not free.”

It is this perceived deterioration, rather than some absolute measure of the openness of the Russian polity, that is at the heart of America’s current frustration with Moscow. This focus on the direction of political change helps explain one aspect of Mr Cheney’s speech that was especially infuriating for Russians. The day after speaking in Vilnius, the vice-president travelled to Kazakhstan, where he was notably silent on that country’s even more egregious violations of human rights and basic democratic principles.

To Russians, this smacked of double-standards. But, as one foreign policy analyst close to the White House puts it, “Kazakh­stan is not held to the same standards because it doesn’t aspire to the same standards.” In other words, having never tried to build democracy, Kazakhstan is not expected to do so now.

A second important influence on America’s tougher stance is a clashing approach to the former Soviet republics, particularly those with strong democratic movements and pro-western inclinations such as Ukraine, Georgia and, to some extent, Moldova. From the American perspective, the “colour” revolutions rippling through this arc of nations are a welcome sign of the onward march of democracy throughout the world; Russians see creeping American influence in contiguous regions that were, until 15 years ago, not merely imperial possessions but a part of their own country.

As the CFR report observes: “Russian leaders have increasingly found subversive and anti-Russian purposes in US democracy-promotion programs.”

This sense of growing antagonism had been tempered by Russia’s role in ridding Afghanistan of the Taliban regime and its continued co-operation on  counter-terrorism. Joint work on disarmament and decommissioning of nuclear material remains an important factor in the relationship. More recently, however, tensions have surfaced – in particular over Russia’s reluctance to back a tough international sanctions regime aimed at stopping Iran’s nuclear programme and its support for separatist enclaves in the Caucasus.
Most crucially of all, the US and Russia are not economically interdependent. Much is made of the new power of energy resources in geopolitics. But while $70-a-barrel oil has certainly filled Mr Putin’s coffers and inspired the Russian state to be more assertive, it has given Moscow remarkably little leverage over Washington and vice-versa. Unlike Europe, with its umbilical gas pipeline to Russia, the US is not directly dependent on Moscow for its energy. Nor, for all the fortunes reaped by portfolio investors, have American businesses taken a sufficiently big gamble on Russia to become a vocal domestic lobby for warm bilateral relations, as they have done with China.

“There are no big US businesses with really big interests in Russia,” one of the most successful western fund managers in Russia says. “There is nothing Russia can do to hurt the US.”

The lack of a significant business connection between Russia and the US hints at what, from the Russian perspective, is the deeper problem in its relationship with America. Mr Cheney’s tough talk infuriated Russians but it also excited them. Here, at long last, Washington was again paying Moscow the compliment of serious intellectual attention.

That sense of renewed importance will probably be fanned by the G8 summit that Russia is hosting in St Petersburg at the end of next week. Odds are, though, that that attention will be inconsistent. As Prof McFaul says: “I think the Vilnius speech is the end of their policy, not the beginning. I don’t think they have a new grand strategy.” Russia should not fear America’s cold-war warriors as much as it should worry about being forgotten by them.
* Russia’s Wrong Direction: What the United States Can and Should Do. Council on Foreign Relations, March 2006



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