A Realistic Reset with Russia

Meeting for the first time in London on April 1, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and U.S. President Barack Obama declared in their joint statement they were “ready to move beyond Cold War mentalities and chart a fresh start in relations between [the] two countries.”

It is rather startling that 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the leaders of the two nations believe they need to stress their readiness to overcome Cold War mentalities. But is it really Cold War mentalities that have been the problem? The dashing of expectations that has occurred often in the past two decades should lead us to be somewhat sober about the prospects going forward, despite the Obama administration’s worthy goal of pushing the “reset button” and its early achievements. Looking back through the history of the intervening years can help us understand why we have made such little progress in forging a strong U.S.-Russian relationship since the hopeful days after the collapse of communism. Doing so reveals that the problems in the relationship have been caused not by lingering Cold War mentalities, but rather by two very different visions of the post-Cold War world, as well as by the sharp asymmetries in power that emerged when the Soviet Union imploded. While Medvedev and Obama followed their April meeting with a productive summit in Moscow in July, we should be realistic about what we can expect given the underlying differences in both worldview and power that will continue to exist.

A false start

The rush of events that occurred as the Soviet Union unraveled seems rather surreal in retrospect: Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank in August 1991, staring down a drunken band of coup plotters. The Baltic countries and then Ukraine declaring their independence. Yeltsin meeting with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus in the Beloveschaya forest in early December 1991 to effectively declare the end of the Soviet Union, followed by Mikhail Gorbachev’s formal admission a few weeks later that the state built by Lenin and Stalin was no more.

In early 1992, a triumphant Yeltsin visited Camp David to meet with George H.W. Bush. Yeltsin was enthusiastic about the prospects for U.S.-Russian friendship. Gorbachev had been the darling of the West for his programs of perestroika and glasnost, opening up the Soviet system, and creating opportunities for both democracy and the stirrings of a market economy. To outmaneuver his Soviet rival in 1991, Yeltsin had decided to be more pro-democracy, more pro-market, and more pro-Western than Gorbachev, hoping to garner American support to ensure his defeat of the communists.

Meeting at Camp David in February 1992, Yeltsin pressed Bush to declare that America and Russia were now allies rather than using the more ambiguous phrase “friendship and partnership.” Bush demurred, saying “We are using this transitional language because we don’t want to act like all our problems are solved.”¹ While Bush missed an opportunity to draw closer to Yeltsin (toward whom the American president never had the warm feelings he displayed toward Gorbachev), “Cold War” mentalities did not linger too long into the 1990s (outside of certain Republican circles on Capitol Hill or old-school communists in Russia), and certainly not in the relationship between Bill Clinton and Yeltsin. A new American Cold War policy would have focused on containment, which was not a policy that Clinton or his top Russia adviser, Strobe Talbott, were going to pursue. Meanwhile, for the Russians, a truly Cold War mentality would have emphasized undermining the American-led order by trying to rebuild a network of proxy states to balance the West; Yeltsin instead was a prime cause of the independence achieved by the post-Soviet states, and he did not stand in their way as they (and he) pursued closer ties to America and the West.

The American policy in those years had conceptual flaws, but not due to a desire to continue the Cold War. Rather, the policy reflected a misguided belief that the Russian elite would accommodate itself to the dramatic geopolitical changes that were occurring in Europe and come to see the value of creating a large zone of stability and security in a part of the globe that gave rise to two world wars and the Cold War.

The American approach

As america began to develop a policy toward the former communist world, it worked within a framework first enunciated by Bush in May 1989, when the president called for an effort to foster a “Europe Whole and Free.” At the time, there was no detailed strategy for accomplishing this task, but over the course of the 1990s, the policy consisted of three main components: integrating Central and Eastern Europe into Western institutions, stopping genocide in the Balkans, and reaching out to Russia.

nato’s first post-Cold War enlargement occurred in 1990, when the territory of the German Democratic Republic became folded into the West German state. Although negotiations had been tense at times, and many misunderstandings would result later from those conversations, the unified Germany remained a full member of nato.

Little more was done on nato’s outreach to the East until the Clinton administration entered office in 1993, but the alliance soon stepped up its efforts to build ties to the Central and Eastern Europeans. At his first nato summit in Brussels in January 1994, Clinton and his fellow heads of state and government announced the Partnership for Peace program, which would be open to all East European and former Soviet nations, including Russia. PfP, as it became known, was designed to build strong military-to-military ties in the belief that the military was the institution most capable of blocking reform in these societies in transition.

When Yeltsin was first told about this program, at a meeting he held at his dacha with U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher in October 1993, the Russian leader asked for reassurance that partnership did not mean nato membership for the former Soviet satellites. Christopher replied, “Yes, that is the case, there would not be even an associate status.” Yeltsin excitedly told his American guest, “This is a brilliant idea, it is a stroke of genius.” He presumably did not worry too much when Christopher added that “we will in due course be looking at the question of membership as a longer term eventuality. . . . Those who wish to can pursue the idea over time, but that will come later.”²

It was therefore a shock to Yeltsin that by fall 1994, the United States began to move ahead on an enlargement strategy, although Clinton was clear that he would not do anything that would harm his Russian counterpart before the latter’s reelection in July 1996. Once Yeltsin was safely reelected, the policy sped up. In 1997, nato issued invitations to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic; those three nations joined the alliance at its 50th anniversary summit two years later. In 2004, seven more countries joined nato, to be followed at the 60th anniversary summit in 2009 by the formal welcome to the newest members, Albania and Croatia. As it developed these ties across Europe, nato had assisted former communist countries with their reform programs, made respect for human rights an essential condition of membership, and paved the way for the European Union to expand across the continent by providing the necessary security and stability.

Bush’s “Europe whole and free” mantra gave way to Clinton’s similar refrain of a peaceful, undivided, and democratic Europe, which finally in 1995 led to the second part of the overall strategy: the effort to bring peace to the Balkans. The Bush administration tried to leave the war in Bosnia for the Europeans to solve, but to no avail. Clinton promised in the 1992 campaign to do more, but in his first couple of years in office did little in the face of the horrific violence that continued to unfold. Finally, in November 1995, thanks to a combination of nato airstrikes, a resurgent Croat military offensive, and tenacious negotiating by American envoy Richard Holbrooke, the Dayton Accords brought an end to the war.

Three years later, the Clinton administration began preparing for another conflict with Slobodan Milosevic, this time to deter genocide in Kosovo. After negotiations failed to produce agreement, nato in March 1999 went to war for the first time in its history, and 78 days later, succeeded in coercing the Serb leader to surrender. A year later, Milosevic was toppled from power.

nato has continued its outreach into southeastern Europe in the decade since the Kosovo war. Macedonia will join Croatia and Albania as a new nato member as soon as it can resolve a dispute with Greece over the name of the country. And Bosnia, Serbia, and Montenegro all joined the Partnership for Peace in 2006.

The twin efforts of nato enlargement and the effort to pacify the Balkans have been remarkably effective. While the peace in Kosovo is tenuous, and even the members of the alliance are divided over recognizing the independence of that tiny nation, the United States and its European partners have used nato quite effectively as part of the strategy to achieve the vision of a continent whole and free. But that effort has had tremendous repercussions on the third component of the strategy — the effort to reach out to Russia and include it in the West.

Reaching out to Russia

Whereas george h.w. Bush did seem rather ambivalent about his relationship with Yeltsin even after Russian independence, Clinton was not. In his initial months as president, Clinton devoted little time to foreign policy, but what time he did devote was largely toward Russia. He announced a large American assistance package at his first meeting with Yeltsin in April 1993 in Vancouver. When Yeltsin carried out a military assault against extremist forces in the Russian parliament later that year, Clinton supported him wholeheartedly. For Clinton, Russian reform was not just a national security priority; it was a means of ensuring a decline of the American Cold War defense budget to enable the president to fund cherished domestic programs (the so-called “peace dividend”). For Clinton, Boris Yeltsin was the embodiment of a new democratic Russia that would work closely with the West, as occurred, for example, with the withdrawal of the Red Army from the Baltic states.

When Clinton spoke of a Europe peaceful, undivided, and democratic, he meant one that included Russia. In January 1994, after his visit to Brussels for the nato summit and a stop in Prague to show support for the leaders of Central Europe (where disappointment was rampant that nato membership was not going to be fast-tracked for the leading aspirants), he went to Moscow to demonstrate that his policies were designed not to leave Russia out. In a televised “town hall” meeting geared to reach the younger generation, the president urged the Russian people to find a “new definition of Russian greatness” (i.e., one that did not involve intimidating and dominating neighboring countries) and said that as Russians did so, “I hope that my nation and I can make a positive contribution, in the spirit of genuine and equal partnership.”³

Unfortunately, as time went on, it became clear that the different elements of the American policy toward Europe worked at cross purposes. Clinton knew that nato enlargement was a bitter pill for Yeltsin; that’s not only why the process was slowed down until after the Russian presidential election in July 1996 but also why the United States invited Russia to become a member of what became the g8. (Clinton thought giving Yeltsin a platform alongside other major world leaders could help soften the blow of enlargement.) He also understood that the Russians were angry about American policy in the Balkans, and thus supported U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry’s dogged effort to find a way for Russia to participate in the nato-led Implementation Force (ifor) that was set up to keep the peace after the Dayton Accords were signed in November 1995.

Clinton tried to convince Yeltsin that neither his nato enlargement policy nor his Balkans policy was directed against Russia. He even told Yeltsin that nato might be open someday to a democratic Russia. (Yeltsin once said to Al Gore after the vice president made a similar statement, “Nyet, nyet, that doesn’t make sense. Russia is very, very big, and nato is quite small.”⁴) He and his team created the Permanent Joint Council (the precursor to the nato-Russia Council), announced with great fanfare in Paris in May 1997 — before nato formally invited Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to join the alliance — to show that Russia’s sensitivities were being taken into account.

Regardless of whether Yeltsin himself accepted that nato was not a threat to Russia, no matter what Clinton said about the policy, enlargement had a corrosive impact on the relationship. The Russians argued it was because they had been betrayed. After all, in February 1990, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker had told Gorbachev that “there would be no extension of nato’s jurisdiction for forces of nato one inch to the east.”⁵ But that conversation was a preliminary discussion about Germany, not the rest of Europe, and Gorbachev was not ready to make a deal at that time. Although the final agreement on German unification did limit nato deployments in the former East German territory until Soviet troops had departed, the sides had not discussed nato’s future in places such as Poland and Hungary.⁶

Harder for Yeltsin to take, in fact, was probably the memory of his discussion with Warren Christopher in October 1993, when the secretary of state had led Yeltsin to believe that Russia had truly been able to kill the idea of nato enlargement. But whether the Russians felt betrayed or not was less important than the most obvious fact of the enlargement process: The United States was too powerful vis-à-vis Russia not to proceed with an enlargement strategy. For the Americans, it would have been politically and morally damaging not to include Central Europe into an alliance that is the symbol of transatlantic unity, and since they could do so, they did.

For the United States, the policies were designed to create greater stability, and American officials argued to their Russian counterparts that this stability was good for Russia. But it did not look that way from Moscow’s vantage point. The areas that were becoming part of the West had formerly been within Moscow’s sphere of influence. The breakup of the Soviet Union moved Russia’s borders farther from the center of Europe than they had been in centuries. Now these lands were becoming integrated into Western institutions. And the bombing of the Serbs in March 1999 was the last straw. It may not have raised the specter of “World War III,” as Yeltsin declared, but the air campaign largely wiped away whatever pro-American sentiment still existed in Russia. As former Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar told Strobe Talbott at the time, “Oh Strobe, if only you knew what a disaster this war is for those of us in Russia who want for our country what you want.”⁷ From a traditional geostrategic perspective, Russia had suffered enormous blows in the first post-Cold War decade, leading Yelstin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, to conclude that the collapse of the Soviet Union “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”⁸

Cooperation elsewhere stalls

During the 1990s, hope for cooperation on two major strategic issues — arms control and the Iranian nuclear program — foundered. It is impossible to know whether progress on either issue would have been possible had the United States forgone the opportunity to expand nato, but there is little doubt that nato enlargement made efforts to cooperate in these other strategic areas more difficult. At precisely the moment that the enlargement process began to move forward in 1995, so did the Russian effort to assist Iran in building a nuclear reactor in Bushehr.

Bill Clinton himself feared that enlargement might hinder his effort to scale back the Russian-Iranian relationship. Conservatives were urging the president not to attend a ceremony in Moscow in May 1995 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany. Clinton colorfully told his staff, “I’m going to Russia because of the dogs we have in this hunt, but we’ve got to do something on Iran. Joe Lunchbucket out there in Ames, Iowa, doesn’t care about nato enlargement. He cares about whether this ol’ boy is going over there to Russia and let those people give the new ayatollah an a-bomb.”⁹

nato enlargement also appeared to have an impact on arms control. In January 1996, the U.S. Senate ratified start II (signed by George H.W. Bush and Yeltsin in 1992), but Congress prohibited the administration from unilaterally reducing the U.S. arsenal below start I levels until the Russian Duma ratified start II. Alexei Arbatov, deputy chairman of the Duma’s Defense Committee, explained why that wasn’t going to happen: “First there is no money for it. Secondly, the treaty is considered to be unfair on technical grounds. And thirdly, the general background — the determination of nato to expand to the East — is very unfavorable to the treaty.”¹⁰ (Duma ratification finally occurred 4 years later, but in 2002, Russia reacted angrily to the American abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty by announcing it was not bound by start II any longer.)

Looking back, looking forward

Rather than merely seeing the U.S.-Russian relationship in the George W. Bush years as one that failed to live up to the promise of the Bush-Putin friendship of 2001, it is important, when thinking about the prospects for a “reset,” to understand the trajectory we have been on since the end of the Cold War. The emergence of the United States as the global hegemon in 1991, accompanied by the swift descent of Russia from Cold War superpower to failed state, created an imbalance of power that made a true partnership (much less the “alliance” Yeltsin called for in 1992) extremely difficult. The United States defined its interests in a peaceful and prosperous Europe in ways that Russia found objectionable, and there was not much that Moscow could do to change the evolving dynamic.

Putin understood this trend when he assumed the presidency in 2000, and he vowed to rebuild Russia economically and thus politically. He also came into office with a different worldview than that of Yeltsin. Yeltsin, particularly in the early years, showed genuine interest in Russia being seen as part of the West. Putin showed no such desire. What the latter has demonstrated is a fixation on control over the foreign policies of the countries in his neighborhood, an attitude that reflects a 19th-century spheres of influence approach (and one that President Obama sought to counter in his public address in July in Moscow when he argued that zero-sum thinking belonged to the past).

With the benefit of high energy prices, Russia built huge foreign currency reserves, no longer needing to come hat in hand to the g7 and imf for support. And as the United States became bogged down in Iraq, and then suffered its worst financial crisis since the 1930s, the world’s leading power no longer seemed so dominant. For Russia, the rise of Moscow’s power and what seemed to be a decline of Washington’s was what made the notion of a reset so appealing, since perhaps it could lead to a relationship built on a more equal basis, and one that accepted Russian domination of the former Soviet space.

When the Obama administration entered office earlier this year promising to reset relations, the Russians jumped at the chance to recreate an aura of 1972–73, when the United States, weakened by war and recession, recognized Moscow’s emergence as a major power and pursued détente, with arms control as the defining issue on the agenda. Strategic arms control is the one global issue on which America and Russia are on a relatively equal footing, and the Russians are delighted that the Americans want to go back to the era of big, formal treaties, which George W. Bush had refused to go along with in his first term. (The Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty agreed to by Bush and Putin was three pages, and was only called a treaty as a sop to the Russians for not making more of a fuss about the American abrogation of the abm Treaty.) The United States is hoping that an agreement in late 2009 on arms control before the expiration of the start Treaty can help form the foundation of a relationship in which other cooperative endeavors — on counterterrorism, counterproliferation, Afghanistan, Iran, and North Korea, for example — can be built.

It does seem that despite all of the dashed hopes of the past two decades, there is a window of opportunity in 2009 to move forward in a relationship that hit its nadir at the end of the Bush presidency. The two American foreign policy issues that antagonized the Russians so intensely in 2008 — missile defense and the prospect of nato Membership Action Plans for Ukraine and Georgia — are no longer as pressing, and the United States and its West European allies seem determined not to let continued Russian unwillingness to abide by the terms of the cease-fire in Georgia (as well as Moscow’s decision to end the osce and un missions in that country) derail possible cooperation in other areas. The Obama administration is not trying to create the kind of “linkage” strategy that has at times characterized American policy in the past.

While there has been much talk of a missile defense “deal” under which the United States would abandon its pursuit of the deployments in Poland and the Czech Republic in exchange for Russian help in stopping the Iranian nuclear weapons program, President Obama has put the issue differently, stating that if the Russians (and others) can help ensure that Iran does not develop nuclear weapons, there will be no need for a missile defense system against Tehran. That’s a statement of logic, rather than a proposed deal, but nevertheless, the future of the proposed deployments in Poland and the Czech Republic is decidedly up in the air. Democrats have never been as keen to pursue missile defense as Republicans, for whom the issue has essentially become party theology ever since Ronald Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. Obama has made clear that he would deploy a system in response to an Iranian threat if missile defense were “cost-effective and proven.” Since missile defense is both expensive and unproven, he has easily given himself room to go slow on any deployment, thereby removing one irritant in the relationship. There are also good reasons for the United States and Russia (along with the Europeans) to collaborate on building a regional missile defense, and such cooperation would serve as a strong signal to the Iranian government. The July declaration by Obama and Medvedev that the two countries would engage in joint assessment of the Iranian threat was important, although it is worth keeping in mind that the United States has periodically tried to engage the Russians in cooperation on missile defense since 1992 to no avail.

The other irritant for Russia, nato Membership Action Plans for Ukraine and Georgia, was removed as a pressing problem even before Obama became president. At the nato foreign ministers meeting in December 2008, the alliance approved annual national review programs for both nations. These efforts will serve the same purpose as a map, but without use of the word “membership.” Since neither Georgia nor Ukraine has a prospect of membership within the next decade, the review programs have allowed for the nato relationships with both countries to continue without causing any immediate heartburn in Moscow.

President Obama has taken advantage of this breathing room to deftly change the atmosphere of the relationship. His call for a “reset” has been met with great approval from President Dmitry Medvedev, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and others, and his meeting with Prime Minister Putin in July was judged quite favorably. The joint statement issued by the two presidents in London in April listed numerous areas of potential cooperation, not only in the arms control sphere but on Afghanistan, North Korea, trade, and elsewhere. Obama and Medvedev followed that effort in July with a framework agreement on strategic arms control. And Russia agreed to allow American supplies to cross its territory into Afghanistan. Refreshingly, the April statement did not shy away from noting that differences between the two countries remain, not only on missile defense (on which they continued to express disagreement in July) but also on the implementation of the cease-fire in Georgia. In the London meeting with Medvedev, Obama even raised his concern about the beating of human rights activist Lev Ponomarev that occurred just prior to the summit, just as in an interview with a Russian newspaper prior to his July visit to Moscow he questioned the treatment of jailed businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Getting concrete results

As the july summit demonstrated, arms control is the centerpiece of cooperation on the U.S.-Russian agenda in 2009 largely because the sides clearly have a common interest in finalizing a new treaty and the stakes involved are relatively low compared to other big-ticket issues. Obama has linked U.S. and Russian nuclear reductions to his larger effort on nonproliferation; decreasing American and Russian arsenals is part of his comprehensive strategy in the nuclear sphere to promote the idea of a world ultimately free of nuclear weapons. Again, for Russia, the advantage of pursuing an arms control agreement with the United States is that it puts Moscow alone on the stage with the world’s leading power. Russia would be reducing its strategic nuclear weapons for financial reasons anyway, so for Moscow, arms control is an opportunity to ensure that the United States goes to lower levels as well.

As nato and Russia continue to rebuild a relationship that was shattered by the Russia-Georgia war, they have shown an ability to begin pursuing concrete cooperation (e.g., on Afghanistan) even while continuing to disagree about Georgia. When a nato-Russia Charter was first discussed in the mid-1990s, U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry saw the conversation as “an academic discussion with no practical nature.”¹¹ In many respects, through its iterations as the Permanent Joint Council and now the nato-Russia Council, there has been little progress in producing practical results. Given the common challenge of combating terrorism and piracy, there are real opportunities for joint training and exercises. nato and Russia should work to build on the limited steps that have been taken to date, for example, in the few Russian deployments as part of nato’s Operation Active Endeavor in the Mediterranean.

Still, we should be cautious about how much we can expect overall in the U.S.-Russian (and by extension, the nato-Russian) relationship. While the United States, for example, is determined to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, Russia seems more concerned that Iran might one day achieve a rapprochement with the United States, thereby delivering yet another blow to Russia’s traditional geopolitical approach. Even on Afghanistan, where the two countries have a clear interest in preventing a resurgence of the Taliban, the Russians are ambivalent at best about an American victory.

The Russians have approached the reset believing that the United States is operating from a position of weakness given the two wars and the financial crisis, and certainly the mood in Washington is not as triumphant as it was in the 1990s. But while President Obama has been clear that there are limits to American power and that the United States needs other countries to solve common problems., the huge disparities in power between these two nations remain. The United States, despite all the problems of recent years, is still the world’s most powerful country. It possesses an unrivaled military, the globe’s leading economy, and a dominant diplomatic and cultural position. Europe is an economic heavyweight, and China is moving into the front ranks, but the United States maintains its leading position.

Russia, on the other hand, remains quite weak. It has rebounded dramatically from the 1998 economic crisis, but the hard currency reserves Putin built up during his presidency have been sorely tested in defense of the ruble. Investments in the energy sector are insufficient for Russia’s future economic development, and the demographic trends are devastating. Russia’s military inflicted damage on Georgia, but it is a shadow of its Soviet self.

This Russian weakness, the lack of global reach, is in fact the main reason that a new Cold War was never going to reemerge after 1991. The Cold War was a worldwide military, economic, diplomatic, and ideological competition. That is no longer possible. The more traditional Russian spheres-of-influence approach is far more troubling to American policymakers than any “Cold War” mentality, and it is particularly dangerous in Moscow’s continued efforts to intimidate Georgia. The Russian belief that it is only secure if it dominates its neighbors undermines the continued American push for a Europe whole and free.

As we ponder the prospects for a reset, we should recall that Bill Clinton came into office in 1993 talking about the importance of multilateralism, the United Nations, and partnership with Russia. But as the United States pursued its interests, its actions inevitably caused frictions with Moscow. As Clinton did, Obama, too, will grow frustrated with the limits of multilateralism in general and the United Nations in particular, and like all American presidents (and Russian ones, for that matter), he will pursue what he believes are the country’s interests, whether that involves missile defense or continuing to keep an open door to nato membership for all countries in Europe. When it comes to European security, the United States and Russia still define their interests quite differently. Russia will continue to push back against the American approach as it defines its own view of its security needs in Europe, but for all its renewal in the Putin years, its leverage remains quite limited.

For the reset to be successful over the long run, the United States and Russia, as well as nato and Russia, will need to do what has already been signaled in the interactions early in Obama’s presidency: acknowledge the differences but seek areas of cooperation where possible. Perhaps most important is to keep expectations in check so that we are not disappointed once again as we have been so often since the end of the Cold War. Achievements are possible, but the two nations will continue to define their interests differently on many of the major issues in the relationship.