What 21st-century Russia
is in itself, to its neighbors, and to America flows from the fact it is no
longer the Soviet Union. As the red
flag came down from the Kremlin on Christmas Day 1991, Russian president Boris
Yeltsin, when asked what he thought of Communism, nearly wept as he replied: “I
wish it had been tried somewhere else.” Vladimir Putin, who
famously said that the USSR’s collapse had been a tragedy, nevertheless shares
the Russian people’s consensus that their country was Communism’s first and
foremost victim, and that no one knows how long it may take to live down its
dysfunctions. To its neighbors, this Russia is a rebudding tsarist empire. To
Americans, it is a major adversary despite the lack of clashing geopolitical
interests.
After Communism
The Revolution of 1917 was
possible because socialists, in Russia and throughout the Western world,
believed that “present-day society,” as Karl Marx put it, is a jumble of
“contradictions,” which could be resolved only by tearing down the pillars of
the house. Once that was done, history would end: man and woman, farmer and
industrial worker, producer and consumer, intellectual and mechanic—heretofore
at odds—would live harmoniously, freely, and prosperously ever after.
Because
they really believed in this utopian dream, the socialists gave absolute power
to Lenin and Stalin’s Communist Party to wreck and reorganize—to break eggs in
order to make a delicious omelette. But Communism, while retaining some of
Marxism’s antinomian features (e.g., war on the family and on religion), became
in practice almost exclusively a justification for the party’s absolute rule.
For example, the economic system adopted by the Soviet Union and by other
Communist regimes owed precisely zero to Marx, but was a finely tuned
instrument for keeping the party in control of wealth.
The Leninist party is gone forever in Russia because, decades
after its leaders stopped believing in Marxism, and after Leonid Brezhnev had
freed them from the Stalinist incubus that had kept them loyal to the center, they
had learned to make the party into a racket. That, and the residual antinomian
features, made Russia into a kakotopia. Russian men learned to intrigue and
drink on the job rather than work. Shunning responsibility for women and
children, they turned Russian society into a matriarchy, held together by
grandmothers. In a thoroughly bureaucratized system, each holder of a bit of
authority used it to inconvenience the others. Forcing people to tell each
other things that both knew not to be true—recall that “politically correct” is
a Communist expression—engendered cynicism and disrespect for truth. The
endless anti-religion campaigns cut the people off from one moral system and
failed to inculcate another. Alcohol drowned unhappiness, life expectancies declined,
and fewer Russians were born.
The Russian people rejected
Communism in the only ways that powerless people can—by passivity, by turning
to anything foreign to authority, and by cynicism. Nothing being more foreign
to Communism than Christianity, Russians started wearing crosses, knowing that
the regime frowned on this feature of the Russia that had pre-existed
Communism, and would survive it.
No
sooner had the USSR died than Russia restored the name Saint Petersburg to
Peter the Great’s “window on the West.” Even under Soviet rule, Russians had
gone out of their way to outdo the West in Western cultural matters—“nekulturny”
(uncultured!) was, and remains, a heavy insult in Russia. Moscow let countless
priorities languish as it rebuilt in record time its massive Christ the Savior
cathedral to original specifications. As the Russian Orthodox church resumed
its place as a pillar of the Russia that had been Christianity’s bastion
against the Mongol horde as well as against the Muslim Ottomans, golden domes
soon shone throughout the land. Whatever anyone might think of the Russian
Orthodox church, it anchors the country to its Christian roots.
Few Americans understood
Vladimir Putin’s rise to power at the close of the 20th century as the
reassertion of a bankrupt, humiliated, resentful people looking to make Russia
great again. Since then, Putin has rebuilt the Russian state into a major
European power with worldwide influence. Poverty and a resource-based economy
notwithstanding, it is on a sounder financial basis than any Western country.
Corruption is within historical limits. The leadership is appreciated by the
vast majority, whose national pride and solidarity dwarf those of Western
publics. Nearly all Russians approve strongly of its absorption of Crimea.
Russia effectively controls Ukraine’s eastern end, and has exposed the West’s
incapacity to interfere militarily in the former Soviet empire. In the Middle
East, Russia is now the dominant force.
In sum, the Russian bear
licks its deep wounds as it growls behind fearsome defenses.
The
Neighborhood
Russia’s Westernism is neither imitation nor love of the West. It
is the assertion that Russia is an indispensable part of it. The Russians saved
Europe from Napoleon, and from Hitler, too. That they did the latter
tyrannically, as Soviets, does not, in their minds, disqualify them from their
rightful place in Europe, or justify Europeans, much less Americans, trying to
limit Russia’s rightful stature. Today’s Russian rulers are not gentler or
nicer than the emperor who shook off the Mongol yoke—who wasn’t known as Ivan
the Nice Guy. Like their forebears they are calculating Russia’s stature in
terms of the limits—primarily in Europe—set by their own present power as well
as by that of their immediate neighbors.
Russian writing on
international affairs focuses exclusively on the country’s role as a member of
the European system. By the 2030s, if not sooner, the Russian government will
have filled such territory, and established such influence, as befit its own
people’s and its neighbors’ realities, and will be occupied with keeping it.
More than most, Putin is painfully aware of Russia’s limits. Its declining
population is less than half of America’s and a tenth of China’s. Despite
efforts to boost natality, its demography is likely to recover only slowly. Nor
is its culture friendly to the sort of entrepreneurship, trust, and cooperation
that produces widespread wealth. What, then, are Putin’s—or any Russian
leader’s—national and international objectives?
As always, Ukraine is of
prime interest to Russia because it is the crux of internal and external
affairs. With Ukraine, Russia is potentially a world power. Without it, it is
less, at best. But Putin’s pressures, disruptions, and meddlings have shown him
how limited Russia’s reach into Ukraine is, and is sure to remain. Hence,
Russia’s conquest of Ukraine east of the Don River signifies much less the
acquisition of a base for further conquest than the achievement of modern
Russia’s natural territorial limit in Europe. The 20th century’s events forever
severed Ukraine and the Baltic states from Russia; even Belarus has become less
compatible with it. Modern Russia is recognizing its independence, even as the
Soviet Union at the height of its power effectively recognized Finland’s. As
the Russian Federation’s demographic weight shifts southeastward—and Islamism
continues to gain favor there—the Russian government will have to consider
whether to shift its efforts from keeping the Muslim regions within the
federation to expelling and building fences against them.
As the decades pass,
post-Soviet Russia will have to work harder and harder to cut the sort of
figure in Europe that it did under the tsars. That figure’s size is the issue.
The Russian empire’s size has varied over the centuries according to the ratios
between its and its neighbors’ national vigor and power. In the past, Poland,
Sweden, Turkey, the Hanseatic powers, Germany, all have shrunken or swollen
Russia. Borders and spheres of influence have varied. There is no reason why
this should not be so in the future. Russia will neither invade Europe nor
dominate it politically because its people lack the political will, and its
state the capacity, to do either. During Soviet times, this will and this
capacity were the product of the national and international Communist Party
apparatus, now gone forever.
A
glance back at this gargantuan human structure reminds us of how grateful we
should be that it now belongs to history. The Communist faction that resulted
from the 1918 split in the international socialist movement—like the rump
socialist faction that ended up governing Europe after 1945, but unlike the
fascist one—already intended to conquer the world. (Fascism, Mussolini’s
invention, recalled some of ancient Rome’s peculiar institutions and symbols—the fasces was the
bundle of punishing rods carried by the consuls’ lictors—and added governing
Italy through business-labor-government councils. It was not for export.)
Communists worldwide came under the firm control of the Soviet Party’s
international division run by formidable persons like Andrei Zhdanov and Boris
Ponomarev, disposing of virtually unlimited budgets and, after 1929, of the
services of countless “front organizations.” These, the party’s hands and feet
and its pride and joy, reached out to every imaginable category of persons:
union members, lawyers, teachers, journalists, housewives, professional women,
students, non-students. Each front organization had an ostensible purpose:
peace, through opposition or support of any number of causes. But supporting
the “Soviet line” was the proximate purpose of all. Through tens of thousands
of “witting” Communists, these fronts marshaled millions of unwitting
supporters, helping to reshape Western societies. Soviet political control of
Europe was eminently possible, with or without an invasion, because the Soviet
domestic apparatus had marshaled Soviet society, and because its international
department and front organizations had convinced sectors of European societies
to welcome the prospect.
The tools that today’s Russia
wields vis-à-vis Europe are limited to commerce in natural gas, and to the
opportunities for bribery that this creates—witness Russian Gazprom’s
employment of former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Not only do European
governments not fear being invaded by Russia, they refuse to diversify their
sources of natural gas, and generally oppose American sanctions imposed on
Russia because of its actions in Ukraine. The notion among European ruling
parties that the voters who are in the process of rejecting them for various
“populist” and nationalist options, are pining for Russian-style governance or
tricked by Russian wiles is a baseless attempt to sidestep the ruling parties’
own failures.
Europe’s rulers know that
Russian military forces are not built to conquer the continent, because these
forces lack the wherewithal for large-scale projection of power. Instead, they
possess formidable capacity for what soldiers call “area denial.” This fits
Russian leaders’ strategic goals, the people’s sentiments, and material
constraints. The wars that today’s Russian military are built to fight are in
areas that today’s Russian military sees most threatened by the U.S. and NATO,
on its borders with Poland and Lithuania (where Russia crushed the Wehrmacht in
1944-45), and in Ukraine, north of Crimea. Russia’s military posture has ever
been, and gives every sign of remaining, strategically defensive but
operationally offensive. Now as before, when war seems imminent Russia’s
operational doctrine calls for taking the initiative in a preemptive manner.
Although Russian strategy
would be to surround and seal off foreign troops by air and ground, for the
first time in Russia’s history, military manpower is scarce and precious.
Economizing manpower is one reason why the country has fully integrated nuclear
weapons in ordinary military operations, recalling nothing so much as President
Dwight Eisenhower’s doctrine in the 1950s of “more bang for the buck.” To seal
off the airspace, and to provide an umbrella for their ground forces, the
Russians would use the S-400 air-missile defense system—the world’s best, which
is now deployed around some 300 high-value locations. Strikes (or the threat
thereof) by the unique Iskander short-range missile would preclude the foreign
forces’ escape, as Russian troops moved in with Armata tanks, which carry the
world’s best reactive armor.
Possession of perhaps the
world’s best offensive and defensive strategic forces—comparable to America’s
and far superior to China’s—is why Russia is confident that it can contain
within limited areas the wars that it needs to fight. Because Russia has
nothing to gain by military action against America or China, this arsenal is
militarily useful only as insurance against anyone’s escalation of border
disputes, and as the basis for Russia’s claim to be a major world player.
Priorities
and Collusion
Russia loomed small in U.S.
foreign policy from the time of the founding until the 1917 Bolshevik coup,
because the interactions between America’s and Russia’s geopolitical and
economic interests were few and mostly compatible. Given that these
fundamentals have not changed, it would be best for both countries if their
policies gradually returned to that long normal.
But for both countries,
transcending the past century’s habits is not easy. The essential problem is
that neither side’s desires, nor its calculus of ends and means, is clear to
the other, or perhaps to itself. It seems that the main thing Putin or any
other Russian leader might want from America is no interference as Russia tries
to recreate the tsars’ empire. Thus Russia’s continuing relations with
anti-U.S. regimes in Latin America can only be understood as Cold War
inertia—the almost instinctive sense that what is bad for America must somehow
be good for Russia. The U.S. government, for its part, while largely neglecting
Russia’s involvement in the Western hemisphere, tries to limit its influence in
Europe while at the same time reaching agreements concerning strategic
weapons—a largely Cold War agenda. The soundness of these priorities on both
sides is doubtful.
Both Russia and the U.S. fear
China, and with good reason. The crushing size of contemporary China’s
population and economy frightens the Russians. The fact that some Russian women
marry Chinese men (disdaining Russian ones) embarrasses them and has made them
more racially prejudiced than ever against the Chinese. Yet Russia aligns with
China internationally and sells it advanced weapons, paid for with American
money—money that China earns by trading its people’s cheap labor for America’s
expensive technology. With these weapons as well as its own, China has
established de facto sovereignty over the South China Sea and is pushing
America out of the western Pacific. Nonetheless, the U.S. treats Russia as a
major threat, including “to our democracy.” For Russia and America to work
against one another to their common principal adversary’s advantage makes no
geopolitical sense. But internal dynamics drive countries more than
geopolitics.
Nowhere is this clearer than
with the notion that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election—a charge which
has roiled American public life for the past two years and counting.
Interference in American life? That is what the Soviet Union was all about. By
contrast, current concerns about Russia are a tempest, albeit a violent one, in
a domestic American teapot.
In America, the Soviets
worked less through the Communist Party than they did in Europe. Here, they
simply seduced and influenced people at the top of our society. Even in America
prominent persons in the Democratic Party, academia, media, and intelligence
services (or who would become prominent, e.g., future Democratic presidential
candidate Bernie Sanders and CIA Director John Brennan), were Communists more
or less openly. Far more important to the Soviets were persons convinced that
Soviet and American interests were identical. Harry Hopkins, for example, who
ran the U.S. government on President Franklin Roosevelt’s behalf, considered
Stalin’s objectives to be so indistinguishable from America’s that the KGB
considered him to be effectively Stalin’s agent. By contrast, Alger Hiss, an
important State Department official, was one of many controlled Soviet agents
within the U.S. government. But the compatibility between Hiss’s views and
those of many in the U.S. ruling class was striking. For example, even after
Soviet archives confirmed Hiss’s status as a Soviet agent, Robert McNamara,
secretary of defense under Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, like
many of his class, angrily insisted on Hiss’s innocence.
The comradeship of American
liberals and Soviet Communists lasted to the Soviet Union’s end. In May 1983,
for example, in an incident widely reported at the time and confirmed by Soviet
archives, former U.S. senator John Tunney visited Moscow and, on behalf of his
friend and classmate—and prospective Democratic presidential candidate—Senator
Edward Kennedy, proposed to KGB director Viktor Chebrikov that Kennedy work
with Soviet dictator Yuri Andropov to “arm Soviet officials with explanations
regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and
more convincing during appearances in the USA” because “[t]he only real
potential threats to Reagan [in the 1984 election] are problems of war and
peace and Soviet-American relations.” Kennedy promised “to have representatives
of the largest television companies in the USA contact Y.V. Andropov for an
invitation to Moscow for the interviews.” Collusion, anyone? Today, with the
Soviet Union gone, its moral-intellectual imprint on our ruling class remains.
The contemporary notion of
Russian interference, however, owes nothing to Russia. It began when, in June
2016, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) tried to explain how a trove of e-mails
showing its partiality for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders got into the
public domain, alleging that they had been hacked from its server by Russian
agents. To this day, there is zero evidence for this, the DNC not having
allowed access to that server by any law enforcement agency or independent
party.
Throughout the rest of the
2016 campaign, this narrative merged with one from CIA Director John Brennan
and other leaders of U.S. intelligence, who were circulating a scurrilous
dossier, paid for by the Clinton campaign, that alleged Trump’s connections
with Russia. The Obama Administration used the dossier as the basis for
electronic and human surveillance of the Trump campaign. Together, these
narratives prompted a two-year investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller,
which found no basis for the dossier, or for a relationship between Russia and
the Trump campaign. Nevertheless, the assertion of Trump’s indebtedness to
Russia became the pretext for #TheResistance to the 2016 election’s result, led
by the Democratic Party, most of the judiciary, the bureaucracy, and the media.
In
Europe as well as in America, the establishment’s protagonists have pointed to
Russia to allege that their rejection by the voters is somehow “undemocratic.”
Larry Diamond in the Wall
Street Journal, following Robert Kagan in the Washington Post,
wrote that “in one country after another, elected leaders have gradually
attacked the deep tissues of democracy—the independence [from sovereign voters]
of the courts, the business community, the media, civil society, universities
and sensitive state institutions like the civil service, the intelligence
agencies and the police.” Voting against the establishment, you see, is
undemocratic!
What
Are Our Interests?
Making impossible a rational public discussion of U.S. policy toward
Russia is the very least of the damage this partisan war has wrought. American
liberals believed the Soviet Union’s dissolution was impossible; conservatives
flattered themselves that they caused it. Few paid attention to what happened
and how. Once the Soviet Union was gone, the West in general and Americans in
particular presumed to teach Russians how to live, while helping their
oligarchs loot the country. Russians soon got the impression that
they were being disrespected. At least as Soviets, they had been feared. The
Clinton Administration was confident that Russia would become a liberal partner
in the rules-based international order. At the same time Clinton tried to load
onto Russia the hopes that the U.S. establishment had long entertained about
global co-dominion with the Soviets. In the same moment they pushed NATO to
Russia’s borders—a mess of appeasement, provocation, and insult. Long-suffering
Russians, who had idolized the West during the Soviet era, came to dislike us.
As the George W. Bush
Administration fumbled at the new reality, it tried to appease Russia by
continuing to limit U.S. missile defenses in fact, while publicly disavowing
the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; it formally objected to Russia’s
dismemberment of Georgia, while effectively condoning it. The incoming Barack
Obama Administration tried to go further along the same self-contradictory line
by withdrawing anti-missile support from eastern Europe, and quietly promising
even more restraint. But when, in 2014, Putin seized Crimea, Obama imposed
serious economic sanctions and agreed to place NATO and American troops in
Poland and the Baltic States. Then, for the most tactical of domestic political
considerations, the Obama Administration, and hence the U.S. establishment,
decided to try explaining the course and results of the 2016 U.S. election
campaign as “Russia’s attack on our democracy.”
What are the American
people’s interests in Eurasia, and how big are these interests? Although
today’s Russia poses none of the ideological threats that the Soviet Union
did—and despite the absence of geopolitical or any other clashing
interests—Russia is clearly a major adversary in Europe and the Middle East.
Its technical contributions to China’s military, and its general geopolitical
alignment with China, are most worrisome. What, other than Soviet inertia and
wounded pride, motivates the Russians? The U.S. maintains economic sanctions on
Russia. To achieve precisely what? From both sides’ perspective, it is difficult
to see what good can come from this continued enmity.
Today’s triangular
U.S.-Russia-China calculus is not comparable to the Soviet-Chinese military
confrontation of the 1970s and ’80s, when both the U.S. and China feared Soviet
missiles, and the U.S. best served its own interests by implicitly extending
its nuclear umbrella over China. Today, the problems between Russia and China
stem from basic disparities that U.S. policy obscures by treating Russia as, if
anything, more of a threat than China. The best that the U.S. can do for itself
is to say nothing, and do nothing, that obscures these disparities. Without
backhanded U.S. support for close Russo-Chinese relations, the two countries
would quickly become each other’s principal enemies.
Ongoing U.S. anxiety about
negotiations with Russia over weaponry is nothing but a legacy of the Cold War
and a refusal to pay attention to a century of experience, teaching that arms
control agreements limit only those who wish to limit themselves. Russia
violated the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty by developing the
Iskander missile; the U.S. was right to withdraw from the agreement, but
mistaken in ever expecting another country not to arm itself as it thinks best.
In that regard, Americans should not listen to, never mind accommodate in any
way, Russia’s (or any other country’s) objections to U.S. missile defenses.
These are in our clear and overriding interest. Defending America as best we
can—against missiles that might come to us from anywhere, for any reason—is
supremely our business.
What then are America’s
legitimate, realizable demands on Russia?
Putin’s Russia, by its
2015-18 intervention in Syria and its management of Turkey, achieved the tsars’
historic desire for a warm water port. Although the former conquest is firm,
keeping Turkey friendly to Russia must ever be troublesome. Absent a friendly
Turkey, Russia’s renewed control of Crimea and even the Syrian bases will be of
very limited worth for any but defensive purposes. Whatever else might be said
of its role in the Middle East, Russia has brought more stable balance to local
forces than ever in this young century. Only with difficulty will American
statesmen regret that our old adversary now deals with some of the problems
that bedeviled us for a half-century.
The U.S. would be more secure
geopolitically were Russia merely one of several European powers. But it has
always been an empire, whose size has varied with time. An independent Ukraine
has always been the greatest practical limitation on Russia’s imperial
ambitions. That is very much a U.S. interest, but is beyond our capacity to
secure.
U.S. relations with Russia
regarding Ukraine are analogous to U.S. relations with Europe 200 years ago.
Our overriding interest then was to prevent the Europeans from holding any
major part of the Western hemisphere. By stating America’s intention to guard
its hemispheric interests while forswearing meddling in European affairs, the
U.S. encouraged them to face that reality. Today’s Russia realizes it cannot
control Ukraine except for its Russian part, nor the Baltics, never mind the
Visegrád states. The U.S. could lead Russia to be comfortable with that reality
by reassuring it that we will not use our normal relations with Ukraine or with
any of Russia’s neighbors to try to define Russia’s limits in Europe. We should
realize that our setting such limits is beyond America’s capacity, and that it
undercuts the basis for fruitful relations.
The U.S. prefers the Baltic
States, and especially Ukraine, to be independent. But we know, and should
sincerely convey to Russia, that their independence depends on themselves, and
that we regard it as counterproductive to make them into American pawns or even
to give the impression that they could be. Ukraine’s independence—and hence
Russia’s acceptance of it as inevitable—depends on Ukraine retrenching into its
Western identity, rejecting the borders that Stalin and Khrushchev had fixed
for it, and standing firmly on its own feet—as, for example, by asserting its
Orthodox church’s independence from Russia’s.
Wise U.S. policy would remove
sanctions that previous administrations placed on Russia on behalf of Ukraine.
Fruitless strife has been these sanctions’ only result. For example, they
emboldened Ukraine to suppose it had U.S. support for presuming it had the same
right to navigation in the Sea of Azov, passing under a Russian bridge, as it
does in the Atlantic Ocean.
But in accord with the Monroe Doctrine, we should be willing to wage
economic war on Russia—outright and destructive—on America’s own behalf, were
the Russians to continue supporting anti-U.S. regimes in the Western
hemisphere. If you want economic peace with America, we would say, stop
interfering in our backyard. We Americans, for our part, are perfectly willing
to stop interfering in your backyard.
In sum, nothing should be geopolitically clearer than that the natural
policy for both America and Russia is not to go looking for opportunities to
get in each other’s way.
Reprinted
with the author’s permission.
Copyright © 2019 Claremont Institute, Angelo M. Codevilla