Should the West Engage Putin's Russia?

POST-DEBATE COMMENTARY BY EDWARD GREENSPON

Russia has long perplexed the North Atlantic alliance, not to mention its neighbours. To hear Vladimir Pozner tell it, the current angst in the West over whether and how to isolate Vladimir Putin’s Russia for its Ukrainian transgressions is not only wrong-headed but part of a continuum of wrong-headedness dating back to at least the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, which was followed by failed Western military expeditions against the newborn communist state.

The issue of whether the West has been too antagonistic toward Russia, or too accommodating, was one of several lively debates within the greater Munk Debate on Friday, April 10, at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall. The question put to the debaters — Cold War–era commentator Pozner and U.S. academic Stephen F. Cohen for the pro side and journalist Anne Applebaum and dissident chess great Garry Kasparov on the con — was “Be it resolved the West should engage not isolate Russia.” The fact that the live audience of 3,000 ended the evening split 48 percent to 52 percent speaks to the complexity of the riddle of what to do about Russia.

The debates-within-the-debate variously touched upon who, if anyone, should be isolated: Putin or Russia? If the West is actually doing more to harm its own national security interests by treating Russia as a pariah rather than a partner in bigger struggles, such as against Islamic extremists; did the West bring this upon itself through aggressive NATO expansion; and should it have been guided, as it was, by the security wishes of the sovereign nations of the former East bloc or the traditional sphere of influence claimed by Russia.

For Cohen and Pozner, the issue very much boiled down to “Who lost Russia” — their answer being successive U.S. administrations. By disrespecting its former Cold War adversary in the years following the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, the U.S., in particular, created the conditions for Putinism. The trick for them is to stop making the same mistake. They argued that a) Russia cannot be isolated in today’s globalized world, and b) it would be folly to turn against a front-line partner in the fight against greater threats. “The demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy,” Cohen declared, quoting Kissinger before taking it one step further and suggesting that “the demonization of Putin is an excuse to abandon analysis.”

Kasparov and Applebaum thoroughly rejected the assertion that the West humiliated and excluded 1990s Russia, observing it invited its former nemesis into such elite councils as the G8, WTO, and Council of Europe. For the cons, the issue at hand is very much Putin, who they characterized as a mafia-like figure operating a corrupt kleptocracy that leans on anti-American propaganda to shore up its domestic political position. (Bertolt Brecht’s anti-Nazi satire, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, comes to mind.) Kasparov argued Putin has no policy other than maintaining power. “In chess we have fixed rules and unpredictable results,” he said. “Putin’s Russia is the exact opposite.”

The Ukrainian crisis was nothing more than a reaction against a movement that, in the words of Applebaum, was “fighting oligarchs, corruption, and Putinism.” It was not, as Cohen and Pozner contended, the natural by-product of a Russia that felt threatened by NATO expansion and is now basking in its re-emergence as a power to reckon with.

Both sides agreed the issues at hand have splintered the Western alliance. Cohen excoriated Western policy for fixating on Putin rather than pursuing its own broader interests. Applebaum blamed the divisions on the corrupting effect of Putin being allowed to pour his ill-gotten financial gains into European politics.

Kasparov, famous for an aggressive, freewheeling approach to chess, set himself up for the greatest comeuppance of the evening, demanding of Pozner: “When was the last time you were in Kiev?” Pozner looked up and curtly replied he’d been there two years ago to accept an award as Ukraine’s Man of the Year. In case anyone missed it, Cohen stuck the knife in further. “I hope you noticed that the chess master just got checkmated.”

Kasparov seemed to withdraw from the field of combat for a short period. Perhaps he needed time to examine the board and contemplate the moves open to him. Soon enough, though, he was back in the mix, retorting belatedly but effectively that two years previously, the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych had presided over the Ukraine that made Pozner its Man of the Year.

As the debate went into its late innings, Cohen kept returning to the themes that the U.S. had misjudged Putin (he was on his knees pleading to be part of the West) and that U.S. policy shouldn’t be about punishing Putin but serving its own national interest. Striking the pose of the classic realist, he mocked Applebaum for her fairy tales. The U.S. and its allies, he said, had created a situation today more dangerous than during the Cold War, when there were at least protocols about how the superpowers interacted, including the famed hotline between the Kremlin and the White House.

Now it was time for Applebaum to turn the tables on the self-styled realists, accusing them of pining for the good old days of Cold War Russia, when they could simply divide up their bipolar world. Engagement with whom, she challenged, cutting to the crux of the dilemma embedded in the phrase “Putin’s Russia.” Is Western policy to isolate Putin? Or Russia? Can the two be separated, as sanctions, weak though they are, attempt to do? Can one be defeated without the other? Is Putin’s Russia a unique creature, as the cons would have it, or the natural extension of the czars’ Russia, Stalin’s Russia, Breshnev’s Russia?

The big elephant in the room was barely addressed by the debaters: How could Western leaders use statecraft to discourage Putin from further territorial incursions, and what to do if he were to take his Ukraine playbook to the Baltics, which are NATO members and therefore protected in law by the famous Article 5 that says an armed attack against one member is an attack against all. Answers were not readily forthcoming.

If you are on the side of using isolation as a lever, it is particularly incumbent upon you to identity policies that will be effective and can win support across a divided alliance. Perhaps that’s why the con side won the most audience applause by far but barely prevailed with 52 percent of the vote (up ten points from the pre-debate tally).

By the same token, if you favour engagement, what’s your strategy in the face of blatant and repeated assaults on sovereign nations?

I spent the years 1988 to 1991 covering the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the restoration of independence among its client states in central and eastern Europe. On my first visit to Russia with a university group in 1985, several of us met a couple of fellow students in Leningrad who invited us back to their place to listen to underground music and talk about our differing worlds. Gorbachev had recently been named general secretary and we had a Time magazine with his face on the cover. Our hosts initially could not believe the strawberry blotch on his forehead hadn’t been airbrushed in by Western propagandists rather than airbrushed out by their own.

It happened to be my birthday, and I can easily recall the poignancy of the night as one of the Russian students sadly explained how he wanted to be a graphic artist but the state had determined a different course for him. He was clearly also struggling with his sexual identity, and the conversation carried a subtext about the impossibility of being a gay man in Soviet Russia (a theme recurring in Putin’s Russia).

In my time covering political change in Poland, Romania, East Germany, Hungary, Ukraine, and Russia, I was reminded over and over of the universality of the urge for personal freedom.

With all that in mind, I was struck by a plaintive comment from Kasparov in the late stages of the debate. He was still in his twenties when the Soviet Union collapsed. He commented on how he remembered when he didn’t have freedom and the feeling when freedom arrived. Now freedom was slipping away again in Putin’s Russia. “I want to see my country free and strong,” he said.

Whatever the failures in policy, therein lies the real tragedy of the situation.

Edward Greenspon is a journalist who has reported from Russia and Ukraine during his career. He was most recently in Moscow in February.

POST-DEBATE COMMENTARY BY STEVE PAIKIN

It’s been almost a quarter century since the world watched in astonishment as the old hammer and sickle red flag of the Soviet Union descended from the Kremlin’s flagpole and was replaced by the Russian tricolour. For a while, it appeared as if the West and Russia might establish a new, unprecedented co-operative relationship.

Times, as they always do in international affairs, have changed dramatically. We seem to be in the midst of a new Cold War with Russia, all of which made for important fodder for the latest Munk Debate at Roy Thomson Hall last Friday night. It was the fifteenth such debate in a series that has brought together the brightest minds and sharpest thinkers. This evening’s participants were former Soviet broadcaster Vladimir Pozner and New York University Russian studies professor Stephen F. Cohen, who argued that more engagement with Russia will ensure a more secure West. Former chess champion Garry Kasparov and author/journalist Anne Applebaum urged more isolation and a tougher line against rogue dictator Vladimir Putin.

“Isolating any country is not only counter­productive but dangerous, especially if the country is as big, as wealthy, as powerful, and as unpredictable as Russia,” warned Pozner, who seemed to blame a lack of recognition and engagement by the West for the Soviet system developing as it did, and for the millions of starving Ukrainians and the Soviet occupation of eastern Europe. To the astonishment of his debate opponents, Pozner insisted that if the West’s policy hadn’t been aimed at humbling a nation of proud people, Russia would be a different country today.

Russia’s current leaders own the nation, countered Applebaum. They control everything through “theft, graft, and money laundering.” She explained that 110 people control 35 percent of the country’s wealth, essentially making it a mafia state. We must make Putin pay a high price so he doesn’t invade another neighbour, she declared.

Stephen F. Cohen admonished his opponents by quoting former New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “You’re entitled to your own opinions, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” “These are the facts,” Cohen proceeded. “In this globalized world, it is impossible to isolate Russia. Russia is too big, too rich, too interconnected.”

Cohen noted that even with the West’s deteriorating relationship with Russia, Putin has signed more economic, political, and military agreements with the rest of the world than America has. Isolating Russia hasn’t made them more compliant, it’s made them turn elsewhere, he said. A further destabilized Russia will be worse.

Kasparov, who lives “in exile” in Manhattan, spoke of his “dream” coming true in 1991, when the Soviet Union died without any of the bloodshed seen in the Balkans with the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. The West invested billions of dollars in Russia. And then Putin came in, restored the old Soviet national anthem, and turned the country into a one-man dictatorship, he said. Kasparov tried his hand at politics but found the deck completely stacked against his opposition forces, who were denied access to media and fundraising. “In chess we have fixed rules and an unpredictable result,” he said. “In Putin’s Russia, it’s the exact opposite.”

Henry Kissinger wrote that the demonizing of Putin is not a policy, argued Cohen.

Applebaum countered that the West tried engagement and it hasn’t worked. “Presidents Clinton and Bush invited Russia to join the G8,” she said, noting that we did engage and invite Russia into our institutions and their response was to invade Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine.

Kasparov wanted to come back to an earlier point. “This is the first time I’ve heard someone suggest that a policy of engagement in the 1920s could have prevented Stalinist terror,” he said incredulously. “Lenin said, ‘We’ll treat the West as useful idiots who’ll sell us the very rope that we’ll use to hang them.’”

As in most Munk Debates, there were also moments of comedy, even though the topic was deadly serious. As Kasparov’s temperature rose and he became more and more animated, Pozner asked, “Why are you yelling at me?”

“That’s how he always talks,” said Applebaum.

“Because I am also Russian,” replied Kasparov.

Comic relief aside, Applebaum went on to describe Russia as a virulently anti-American country, thanks to a non-stop bombardment of anti-American propaganda in the Russian media.

Cohen wasn’t buying: “I read ten Russian newspapers every day,” he said, conceding that what Applebaum said was true for three of them, but not for the other seven.

“How many Ukrainian newspapers do you read?” Applebaum shot back.

“I read ten Russian newspapers every day,” was all Cohen could muster before turning to another point.

We expanded NATO toward their borders, Cohen continued. “We were continuously warned by liberal Russians — people we liked in Russia — that we were pushing too far.”

Central Europeans wanted to be in NATO, said Applebaum. “The United States very reluctantly agreed to expand the security zone so that the people — all 100 million of them — would be able to transition to democracy and begin economic development and growth without fear of invasion. And it worked. It’s been unbelievably successful.”

But Cohen insisted those moves to include central or eastern European countries in NATO violated an agreement America made with the former Soviet Union.

“James Baker, the then U.S. secretary of state, expressed to [Gorbachev] that if they agreed to the unification of Germany and took down the Berlin Wall, NATO would not move one inch to the east.” Cohen went on to say that the wall did indeed come down — and then America abrogated the agreement by admitting Poland and the Czech Republic into NATO, claiming that the agreement had been with the Soviet Union, not Russia.

Pozner concluded the night with a David Letterman–style Top Ten list of reasons not to isolate Russia, including that it would only embolden the chauvinists, turn Russia toward the East (including China), make Russia more unpredictable, and lead to a new generation of Russians who are hostile to the West.

As with all Munk Debates, the audience of 3,000 was invited to vote twice: once at the beginning of the night, then again after hearing the competing arguments. When the night began, 58 percent agreed that more engagement and less isolation of Russia was the way to go, while 42 percent disagreed. After a spirited debate, only 48 percent wanted more engagement, while 52 percent urged for more isolation. The con side moved more votes, and thus carried another fascinating night at Roy Thomson Hall.

Steve Paikin is anchor of The Agenda with Steve Paikin on TVO.