Should We Fear Russia?

Introduction

The Ukraine crisis of 2014 drew a line under the quarter century of virtually unprecedented Russian–Western cooperation, which began with the end of the Cold War and Russia’s shaking off communism. After events in Ukraine, in the view of a number of serious and seasoned observers, the Cold War has staged a comeback. These observers point to the new political front lines being drawn in Europe, this time in its eastern part rather than in the center of the continent. They see this new divide solidifying into a zone of military confrontation. They add that the values gap between the West and Russia is as real as the old ideological confrontation between liberal democracy and communism. Finally, with Russia aligning itself with China and Iran, as well as with authoritarian regimes from Belarus to Syria to Venezuela to Zimbabwe, there is an element of globalism in the new stand-off.

I, on the contrary, do not find the Cold War analogy very useful. Not so much because of the obvious differences between then and now – the absence of an iron curtain; the off-center rather than pivotal global importance of US–Russian relations compared to US–Soviet ones; or the much reduced salience of the ideological factor. As someone who vividly remembers the Cold War, I am concerned that analogies which are too close to that period in history can create patterns of thought that would be misleading and result in preventable mistakes. People would be preparing for things which would not happen, while missing those that would. The situation in Western–Russian relations now may be as bad, and as dangerous, as at any time during the Cold War, but it is bad and dangerous in its own new way.

The absence of an iron curtain makes information space a prime battlefield in the new competition between the Russian state-run propaganda and the Western mainstream media. The still largely open space makes this 24/7 battle extremely dynamic and particularly ruthless, with virtually no holds barred. Information is no longer suppressed, but it is difficult or sometimes impossible to tell truth from falsehood.

Geo-economics, alongside information space, has become a key area of Russian–Western confrontation. Contrary to liberal expectations, interdependence – i.e., between Russia and the EU – has neither prevented nor dampened the conflict over Ukraine. If anything, interdependence made the rupture more painful than during the Cold War. Russia’s integration into the global economy allows for a more effective use of Western economic sanctions in an effort to make the Kremlin change its course.

The obvious asymmetry in power and status between Russia and the United States leads Moscow to elect the field which it finds more comfortable – military action – and to put a premium on the swiftness and boldness of its own steps. The absence of a balance turns the rivalry into a competition of wills, where the Kremlin also capitalizes on the absolute dominance of the Russian president in the national decision-making process. And the values gap, unlike the ideological divide of the past, makes it virtually impossible for the United States, occupying in its own thinking the moral high ground, to reach a compromise with so unworthy an adversary. These are elements which make the current rivalry more fluid and less predictable than the Cold War stand-off.

Whether one prefers to refer to the Cold War or not, one has to admit that mutual adversity between the West and Russia is the new normal, which is likely to last. Trust was not really achieved even in the period of cooperation, but deep distrust comes now with the utter lack of respect, not even of the kind sometimes accorded to an enemy. There is no element of balance either. The Soviet–Western competition is long over, with the West having declared itself the victor. To treat Russia as an equal would not only be wrong as a matter of fact; it would be wrong in moral terms and, whoever might do so, compromises the values of the West. Among the dangers facing the civilized world, US President Barack Obama famously put Russia somewhere between a contagious disease and a terrorist grouping.

This adversity is likely to continue beyond the lifetime of the Obama administration. The forty-fifth US president could actually be tougher on Russia than the forty-fourth one. One hears in Washington that pressure on Moscow will last at least as long as Vladimir Putin’s reign in Russia – which may be a long wait. It is an interesting question what might happen if Russia, as some people hope, cracks under Western pressure and capitulates. If it does not, however, it is hard to imagine that Putin or a successor will roll back the Kremlin’s policies enough to win a “normalization” of relations with the United States. There can be some provisional “fix” in Donbass, but there will be no return to the halcyon days of Russia’s attempted integration into the West in the 1990s, or its equally unfulfilled ambition of forging alliances with the United States and NATO in the 2000s.

The current predicament in Russian–Western relations is anything but fortuitous. European history proves, rather convincingly, that a post-conflict failure to integrate a former enemy, particularly if it is a major power, or at least to make it feel secure and at ease, results in a new conflict roughly a generation away. The way World War I ended made World War II very likely. By contrast, post-World War II integration of West Germany into the US-led system of alliances and the European Common Market essentially resolved the “German Question” that had plagued Europe since the second half of the nineteenth century. With the Cold War being a conflict of a scale, intensity and duration – but not casualties, of course – comparable to a world war, the failure of Russia’s Western integration, which was evident from the mid-2000s, bode ill. People were warned and should have been alarmed.

Things are never so simple, though, and any historical analogies need to be taken with a huge grain of salt. One cardinal difference between post-World War II West Germany and post-Cold War Russia is that the Germans fully accepted US leadership and eagerly fitted into the US-led “free world” as model pupils, as the phrase went then. The Russians, on the contrary, after a very brief period of demonstrating their willingness to embrace US values and interests as their own, began to clamor for a co-equal position in the post-Cold War order, or at minimum for full recognition of their special security interests the way they themselves defined them. In other words, they demanded power-sharing at the top of the system, or at least special privileges within it.

Neither was, or could have been, on offer. Russia of the 1990s, as the prime successor to the Soviet Union, was, in realist terms, a defeated power in all but name; it was also exceedingly weak and seemingly growing weaker; and it was much nearer to the bottom than to the top of the post-communist democracy/market class. The more insightful Americans and Europeans soon concluded that Russia would not make a good – i.e., reliable – ally, in the image of Germany. If allowed into NATO, Russia would probably have undermined the American leadership by its outsize demands and its mischievous propensity to build coalitions against the US – with Germany, France and others. A keen sense of great-power sovereignty was still in the DNA of the Russian political class; the absence of a military defeat at the close of the Cold War – and, instead of post-conflict “re-education,” the liberal talk of a “victory for all” – clouded and confused popular perceptions; and the enormity of the task of Russian modernization made Russia not only a hopeless but also an undesirable ally.

While Russia was turning out to be “beyond the pale,” the West proceeded to build a “Europe whole and free” without Russia by expanding its principal institutions in the area, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union. To the Clinton administration and liberal internationalists across the West, extending NATO and the EU east of the Cold War divide made a lot of sense, as the countries in the region were eager to accede to the West and, while in the process of accession, to adopt Western ways of doing things. Such integration was also the best way of preventing conflicts among the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

As a result, by the late 2000s, virtually all of Europe outside the former Soviet Union had evolved into a single economic, political, security and humanitarian space. The oft-asked but never clearly answered question about the borders of Europe was being solved on the ground, not in the discussion fora. Russia’s designated role was that of a partner of, not a party to, the expanded West.

To the Russian foreign and security policy community, such treatment was nothing less than insult added to injury. Some bemoaned the “Versailles-like” conditions allegedly imposed on Russia. Nearly all fulminated at the “perfidious” Western scheme of bringing NATO all the way to Russia’s doorstep, supposedly in contravention of promises made by US and Western European leaders to Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev at the time of Germany’s reunification in 1990.

These Russian claims, however, rested on shaky foundations. Rather than being castigated and turned into a pariah à la post-Versailles Germany, Russia inherited the Soviet seat at the UN Security Council and all of the USSR’s nuclear arsenal, joined the G7 (which thus became G8), the Council of Europe, and the World Trade Organization, and acquired privileged status as a partner of both NATO and the EU – all with the West’s assistance. True, the Soviet Union’s $100 billion debt to the West was not forgiven, unlike Poland’s, but Russia was not saddled with reparations and retributions. Moreover, having had – and been able – to pay its debt eventually saved Russia’s pride.

Essentially, Russian grievances against its Western partners fall into two categories. The first one is mostly to do with the West’s refusal to appreciate what Russia did to end the Cold War – from allowing Eastern Europe to “go its own way” to shaking off communism and dismantling the Soviet Union at home – together with its failure to integrate Russia into its midst and to give it an elevated status there. The other one reproaches the West for its refusal to treat Russia as a great power in its own right, complete with a sphere of interests around its borders, and immune from Western interference in its own affairs. Both sets of grievances misread the nature of international relations.

The Russian complainers ignore the hard fact that the Soviet Union utterly lost the economic, ideological and political competition with the West and that, instead of the “convergence” of the two systems, as Andrei Sakharov and many other intellectuals had hoped, and a sort of “bi-hegemony” of Moscow and Washington, as Gorbachev’s advisers anticipated, the West celebrated a complete and total victory and the United States entered a period of global dominance unprecedented in history. In the final stages of the Cold War, Moscow gave in to Washington’s demands not only in the issues of arms control and geopolitics but also in human rights, economic freedoms and the treatment of the Baltic republics. Russians demanded recognition for their seemingly graceful but actually painful exit from communism and the empire and claimed a status no longer supported by the realities at hand, but these things could not have been had for the asking.

The United States and its allies were fully triumphant. Robert Gates, then CIA director, called his drive into the Kremlin in 1992 for talks a “victory lap.” He later reflected that

The end of the Cold War, however, signaled more the defeat of the Soviet system, which had become unsustainable in a number of key areas, starting from economics, than a victory for the West. The defeat of the system was mainly the work of the Russian elites and people, who, alongside others – Armenians, Balts, Georgians, Ukrainians – opened a new beginning for themselves, although at a high price. The fact that the metropolitan territory of an empire led the way out of it is a rare occurrence in world history.

To blame the West for the downfall of the USSR is factually wrong. US President George H. W. Bush’s July 1991 speech in Kiev, in which he urged the Ukrainians to remain in the Soviet Union, revealed the keen understanding in Washington of the dangers inherent in a collapse of a nuclear superpower. The utterly false claims of US responsibility for the disintegration of the USSR put Russians into the position of fake victims, while diminishing their twin historical accomplishments – or responsibility, depending on where one stands on these issues – for a peaceful end to the seven decades of communist dictatorship and a voluntary dissolution of the 300-year-old empire.

As for the NATO argument, the West’s mistake was not that its leaders had broken any formal commitments – which were non-existent – or informal promises – which were exceedingly vague and widely open to interpretation – to their Soviet counterpart, but that it lacked a credible strategy toward a major power left outside of its expanding alliances and feeling the discomfort of it, to say the least. This discomfort could be papered over, managed and minimized, but eventually it led to a sudden pushback.

With hindsight, some senior Western statesmen concede that, in the words of Robert Gates, “moving so quickly after the collapse of the Soviet Union to incorporate so many of its formerly subjugated states into NATO was a mistake.” To Gates, “NATO expansion was a political act, not a carefully considered military commitment, thus undermining the purpose of the alliance and recklessly ignoring what the Russian considered their own vital national interests.”[2] However, this realist assessment was a minority view at the time of making decisions about NATO’s enlargement.

Essentially, the failure to understand the consequences of expanding the NATO security area while leaving Russia outside it was rooted in the widely held belief that the “end of history” had arrived: that classical geopolitics no longer applied in the globalized world, that, in the post-Cold War environment, compromising with authoritarian regimes, especially about third parties, meant compromising one’s own core principles, and that anyway Russia was on a declining path. Conventional wisdom suggested that Russia had no option but to take the world as it is, and adjust to it, by bandwagoning on the West.

This, however, was not the way things looked from the Kremlin. In his 2007 speech to the Munich Security Conference, President Putin strongly denounced US post-Cold War global dominance and vowed to resist it. The five-day war between Russia and Georgia in 2008 sent a chilling message that the safe limits of NATO’s enlargement to the east had been reached. The reset in US–Russian relations which followed in 2009–10 during Barack Obama’s first presidential term was useful, but shallow and non-strategic – thus reversible. At the same time, the power of Russian patriotism and nationalism, subdued and suppressed in the first post-Cold War decade, began to surge. Vladimir Putin became its standard bearer, seeking to consolidate both his hold on power and the unity of the country at large.

The relationship with the United States meanwhile stagnated, and then began rapidly to deteriorate. In 2014, push came to shove. A conflict broke out over Ukraine, which, in the words of Robert Gates, was a “monumental provocation” to Moscow. Historical connections between Russia and Ukraine, going back over a thousand years, were ignored; Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s warnings that US support for regime change in Kiev would destroy US–Russian relations were brushed off.[3] The US–Russian showdown could have happened in a different place and at a different moment, but the fact that it occurred over a country which was so important for Russia made it certain that it would be very serious, very painful, and last a very long time.

The Ukraine crisis was not the first war in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1999, NATO air forces bombed Yugoslavia, including Belgrade, for seventy-eight days to make the Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević back down in Kosovo, a majority-Albanian province which as a result proclaimed independence. The Kosovo crisis was preceded by three years of war in neighboring Bosnia, which claimed 200,000 lives, and which also saw NATO aerial engagements on behalf of the Croats and Muslims and against the Serbs. The Balkan conflicts, however, were safely insulated: they were fought by the locals, managed by the West, and – because of Russia’s material weakness and its still continuing effort at adjustment to the new realities – did not lead to a great-power stand-off. Europe was burning at the edges but felt basically safe, having had to cope only with the stream of refugees, which seems small and orderly by today’s standards.

Ukraine, fifteen years later, was different. Russia proceeded swiftly first to secure the Crimean peninsula, help stage a popular referendum there, and then to annex it. The success of the Russian military operation stunned outside observers. The enlargement of Russian territory evoked neighbors’ memories of the past. Using the techniques dubbed hybrid warfare by the Western media, Russia supported an armed rebellion in the Donbass region in the east of Ukraine and prevented Kiev from crushing it.

By sending its warplanes close to NATO countries’ borders, and allowing them to fly close to Western aircraft and ships, Russia sent a clear message to Western countries that, unlike in the Balkan wars, they would not be able to sit it out and watch Slavs kill one another. In the event of an escalation of the conflict, the Kremlin appeared to be saying, NATO countries too would be affected. To make the message even clearer, Putin publicly mentioned later that he had been considering putting Russia’s nuclear weapons on high alert. Russia and the West came closer to a head-on collision than had been the case in at least three decades: 2014 was the most dangerous year in Europe since the 1983 Able Archer exercise, if not since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

2015 put a freeze on the conflict in Donbass, which reduced the dangers of dangerous escalation but made the Russia–NATO stand-off permanent. Following the Wales summit of September 2014, NATO’s contingency planning was revised to take account of a Russia now seen as hostile. Western and Russian forces began to exercise close to each other’s territory, and NATO’s eastern members – Poland, the Baltic States and Romania – received token Western troop deployments and some heavy weapons. The NATO secretary general’s 2016 annual report referred to resurgent Russia as a major security challenge to the alliance. Senior US military commanders and defense officials began to refer to Russia as an adversary, which soon became routine. Ashton Carter, the US defense secretary, named Russia as the number one security issue to the United States, ahead of China, North Korea, Iran and ISIL.[4]

On the Russian side, there was no dispute as to who was the principal adversary. The National Security Concept adopted on New Year’s Eve 2016 referred to the US and NATO actions as a security threat. To the Russian General Staff, however, the “moment of truth” about the United States and other nominal Western partners had already taken place years ago, over Kosovo.

In 2015, Russia made another step to challenge the US-led order by intervening militarily in Syria and hitting in the process some of the groups supported by the United States and its allies. The Russians not only broke the US monopoly on global military intervention. By inserting themselves in the midst of a war which had already involved a US-led coalition, they complicated the Western operations in Syria and Iraq, made common cause with Iran, raised the prospect of a war by proxy, briefly evoked the possibility of a quasi-alliance with France, caused a political collision with Ankara when Turkey downed a Russian bomber, and forced Washington to treat Moscow as an indispensable party to both the war and peace in Syria. Forcing his way to the high table, and making others deal with him out of necessity if not of choice, has become Vladimir Putin’s diplomatic trademark in his relations with US leaders.

This combative foreign policy is being waged against the background of an unmistakably authoritarian Russian domestic regime, which prides itself in following the conservative tradition and publicly rejects some of the latter-day European values, particularly on the issues of gay rights, family, religion, migration, and the role of the state. It is supported by a competent and effective information/propaganda apparatus that contributes to the massive approval of Putin’s ratings at home and reaches out beyond Russia’s borders. Even though Russia’s global popularity is low, which is hardly surprising given Western global information dominance, some of Moscow’s themes find an audible echo in many parts of the world, from China to Latin America to the Middle East to Europe.

So, a blunt and cheerful “no” to the question in the title of this book looks both naïve and irresponsible. Surely, adversarial relations with a major power always carry risks. If the country in question is a major military power, with a huge nuclear arsenal, the risks are so much higher. If it is an authoritarian country whose decision-making is ultra-centralized and secretive, whose policies are sometimes hard to read, and whose actions are designed to catch others off guard, anxieties can turn to fears. This is precisely Russia’s image in the public mind. Fear, however, is a poor guide to sound policies, or even to proper understanding. Fear could also be a problem in itself.

I begin this book with an analysis of existing Russia-related fears: their causes, their roots and their rationality. I will examine closely the things which make Westerners fear Russia and try to assess the proper dimensions of the factors behind the concerns, anxieties and worries. The conclusion from the opening chapter, I can tell even now, is that, while most fears need to be put to rest, the Russian challenge to the US-dominated/led world order is real, serious and long term.

The next stage will be to explore the nature of the Russian challenge. What is Russia really up to in its neighborhood and beyond – e.g., in the Middle East? What is it that its leader and elites want? To what extent is Russia’s foreign policy a mere tool of the Kremlin’s regime preservation, as some, including in Russia, claim? Other key questions include: How much does Russia’s challenge matter to the United States and Europe, in the global scheme of things? And can Russia sustain it? The author’s answer to the last question is probably “yes”, and that both Russia and the challenge it is posing to the current US-dominated global system should not be discounted.

This leads to the logical question of dealing with the challenge. There have been efforts at consolidating allies and partners, isolating and sanctioning Russia, helping Beijing keep a distance from Moscow, and countering the Kremlin propaganda. How effective have these been? What is the outlook for these essentially punitive policies? What chances of success does the hardline approach – keep the pressure on until Moscow’s will breaks – have? Compared to that, do the pragmatists stand a better chance of getting a satisfactory arrangement? Various scenarios will be offered.

Since the stand-off is serious, how can the risks be reduced? What confidence-building measures need to be taken? What channels of communication need to be used to send and receive messages without danger of a fateful misunderstanding? While accommodation with Russia will carry a cost that few in the West today, particularly the United States, are prepared to pay, is some modus vivendi with Russia possible? How to be able jointly to oppose Islamist extremism, terrorism, and WMD proliferation while continuing to live in the wider environment of confrontation?

Finally, what about the Russians themselves? How do they see their place and role in the twenty-first-century world? How genuine and how permanent is their shift to Asia? In the emerging Greater Eurasia, from the Pacific to the Atlantic, is Russia the east of the West, or is it becoming the west of the East, and does this matter at all? What would a future relationship with the United States and the European Union look like from a Russian perspective? How would that fit into the general universe of Moscow’s foreign policy? Should the Russians fear the West?