Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2008
From: "Vladislav Krasnov" <president92@gmail.com>
Subject: Obama's Perestroika Challenge article
Obama's Perestroika Challenge and US-Russia
Relations
By W. George Krasnow
Dr. W. George Krasnow is the founder and president of Russia & America Goodwill Associates (www.raga.org). A former professor at Monterey Institute of International Studies, he is now an intercultural communications consultant, residing in the Washington D.C. area.
It is hard to overstate the significance of Barack Obama's election to the Presidency of the United States. Not just because he is the first Afro-American president-elect, but also because he takes over at "one of those defining moments…when our nation is at war, our economy is in turmoil, and the American promise has been threatened once more," as he put it in his acceptance speech. Obama's enormous challenge is being compared with that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the 1931 depression and of Abraham Lincoln at the start of the civil war. An analogy with Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika in the USSR also suggests itself.
Then, in 1985, the USSR was at war, its economy in stagnation, and the promise of the Communist dream sounded increasingly hollow. Now the U.S. is fighting two wars, one raging in the same forbidding terrain of Afghanistan, which saw the undoing of Soviet efforts at ideological expansion, the other goes on in Iraq. Started under false pretext in defiance of our key allies, it is just as ideological. Aimed at democratizing Iraq, it spurred religious and ethnic violence with no end in sight.
The crisis of U.S. financial system made it clear we can no longer afford to police the world. Now it's America's turn to embark on not just overhauling its financial system, but also re-structuring its economy, re-inventing a more equitable government, re-examining its foreign strategy and re-thinking its basic assumptions about the world. It's time for perestroika, American style. Call it transformation, as Obama does, but it must be done much better than Gorbachev's perestroika lest the U.S.A. goes the way of the USSR. It can hardly be done better without freeing U.S. Treasury of the burden of George W. Bush's military adventures.
For the purpose of this article, let me focus on the need to transform U.S. policy toward Russia. First of all, we should abandon the fantasy of unipolar world domination foisted on the Bush administration by the neocons. Scaling down our military involvement abroad, we should rely instead on skilled diplomacy and leadership by example, not by brute force or economic blackmail. We need to recognize that even though the U.S. is the only superpower, it is far from omnipotent. We need allies and partners. We need Russia as a friend.
Many of our current problems with Russia are of our own making. Our failure to do good on the promise to disband NATO is just one example. Our expansion of NATO to Russian borders caused more tensions. We made mistakes even while helping post-Communist Russia in its economic reform. We adopted an approach, espoused by the likes of Jeffrey Sachs, Andrei Shleifer, and Lawrence Summers, which amounted to clumsy efforts to impose on Russia free-market fundamentalism. Under the false name of "Washington consensus" this dogmatic approach dominated the Clinton administration. It was false because even in the World Bank there were prominent critics whose advice was largely ignored.[1]
In lecturing Russia, we forgot what Thomas Jefferson said in 1802: "I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations…will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." Jefferson made it clear that in a democracy the people, through its government, should have regulatory power over irresponsible bankers.
Not only did we fail to control our own banks, but we exported our dogmas to Russia. We promoted there a scheme of reforms that resulted in the establishment of the Seven Banks Misrule (Semibankirshchina) that in the mid 1990s vied for the power with the Russian state. It also resulted in untold suffering for the Russian people and the rise of super-rich "unregulated" oligarchs. The notions of privatization, democratization, and globalization, which the Russians came to associate with the "tricky" America, thus became largely discredited. Proposed by the Harvard Institute of International Development, this scheme was rewarded by an exclusive federal grant given allegedly for foreign policy consideration.[2]
No wonder that during the 1990s the reputation of the United States in Russia plummeted so steeply, of which I was a personal witness. In our struggle for the hearts and minds, we have suffered in Russia a defeat comparable to that caused by the war in Iraq. The bitter irony is: not only was that grant for reforming Russia given without open biddingcontrary to the free-market's rulesbut, in its execution, there were serious violations of U.S. law, so that Harvard was forced to repay the government the largest penalty in its history.[3]
As the founder of Russia & America Goodwill Association, an organization of Americans for friendship with Russia, I wrote then An Open Letter to President Bill Clinton demanding cessation of the meddling in Russian affairs. With assistance of JRL, the Letter was signed by more than one hundred scholars and in March of 1999 posted on RAGA website.[4] In the years that followed, Vladimir Putin's government has indeed tried to undo the most flagrant aspects of the misbegotten reforms by curbing the power of the oligarchs and restoring the Russian state's sovereignty and prestige domestically and overseas. [5]
According to Alfred Kokh, a deputy prime minister in Boris Yeltsin's government, U.S. officials were so heavy-handed in dealing with Yeltsin that he "was perceived (by the Russian people) as a puppet of the West, his policies dictated by the US."[6] No wonder that in the years that followed, the Putin government's efforts to assert Russian national interests vis-à-vis the United States have invariably met with the overwhelming approval of the Russian people. The question "Who lost Russia?"says Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor of Russia in Global Affairs, --in reference to a recent debate among American scholars--misses the point. We better ask, "Who lost everything?" The key to solving many global problems, Lukyanov suggests, is for Washington to demonstrate a willingness to make a compromise. [7]
These Russian observations are echoed by a number of Americans. The two former Secretaries of State, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, argue against the hard-line policy of isolating Russia, which such neocons, as John Bolton,[8] have advocated in retaliation for its "misbehavior" in the Caucasus. "It is neither feasible nor desirable to isolate a country spanning one-eighth of the earth's surface, adjoining Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and possessing a stockpile of nuclear weapons comparable to that of the United States."[9]
On the eve of the election, James Carroll, an outstanding American novelist and playwright, in his Boston Globe column entitled "Our Future with Russia," enjoined his readers to vote for Obama because he is more likely to steer the country toward a closer cooperation and true partnership with Russia.[10] Carroll did not ask for a charity toward Russia. Rather, he stressed the necessity for both countries to put their resources together to provide an anchor of peace and stability for a rapidly changing world.
To sum it up, the transformation toward a more efficient, fair, and vibrant society that Obama envisions at home requires a less confrontational, less expensive, but more prudent and cooperative U.S. policy abroad. In regard to Russia, it must include, but not be limited to:
· Abandon the fantasy of U.S. unipolar world domination and recognize Russia's legitimate national security concerns;
· Abide by international law and work within framework of established organizations such as the U.N., WTO, World Bank and IMF until they can be reformed to be more responsive to the new reality;
· Return to negotiations with Russia on all Cold War legacy issues, such as America's abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and Russia's repudiation of START II;
· Cease NATO expansion into Georgia and Ukraine or, at least, provide a ten years moratorium on such expansion;
· Cooperate with Russia in halting proliferation of nuclear weapons;
· Coordinate efforts against international piracy and terrorism, as well as against global warming and to protect the Earth's biosphere.
The New York Times described the election of Obama as a return to the American dream that was destroyed -- politically, economically and socially -- under Bush. Obama knows that the climb is steep. As Gorbachev's perestroika showed, any attempt at radical transformation is risky. It's better to have the Russians among our cheer leaders and friends, not as our opponents or detractors.