#1
The Sunday Times (UK)
November 18, 2001
Buddy, it’s the money that talks
For all the smiles, the US-Russian friendship is all about business, says
Stephen Kotkin
Stephen Kotkin is the author of Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse,
1970-2000 (Oxford) and professor of history at Princeton University
‘There’s no doubt the United States and Russia won’t agree on every issue,” President Bush said to a pupil in his home town of Crawford last week. “But you probably don’t agree with your mother on every issue. You still love her, though, don’t you?” President Vladimir Putin’s friendly sojourn at George Bush’s Texan ranch last week was greeted with near-hysterical claims of a “new relationship”, “partnership” and even a “strategic alliance”. The giddy talk, encouraged by the American administration’s band of Russia sceptics, was unthinkable not long ago. It is also untrue. Schizophrenia has been the dominant, unmedicated mood in US-Russian relations for the past decade. In the Washington of the roaring Nineties, Russia simply did not matter very much because its post-Soviet GDP was pathetically small. And yet Russia commanded attention because it inherited the Soviet doomsday complex, unique in the world outside America — whatever weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein actually possessed, they could only be trivial compared with Russia’s inventory.
In a parallel contradiction, Russia was seen by American policy-makers as the key to stability across northern Eurasia and thus as a friend to be supported, and at the same time as a neo-imperialist threat whose expansionism needed to be aggressively contained.
Thus Washington championed economic “aid” to Russia in the form of International Monetary Fund loans (even though Moscow continually failed to meet “compulsory” criteria), while also energetically expanding Nato eastward toward Russia’s borders. As Russia seesawed in American eyes between impoverished irrelevance and threatening significance, Washington also pursued programmes to secure or eliminate leftover weapons of mass destruction.
Moscow showed its own schizophrenia. Often the Kremlin publicly identified its interests with “the West”, particularly America; just as often, Russian officials and commentators extolled a “multipolar world”, meaning a loose Eurasian coalition to counter US power. Similarly, influential Russians persisted in advocating a militarily and territorially defined great power status for their country long after it had been lost; others sought to cast Russia’s claim to greatness as a matter of economic advance, that is, GDP. Russian policies emerged confused, if they emerged at all.
After September 11, perceptions in Washington shifted and Russia suddenly became more important than ever. That new-found weight derives partly from the long-standing fact of the damage that Russia’s stockpiles and capabilities could do in the wrong hands.
It also stems from actions that Putin’s administration took on its own initiative — decisively siding with America in the war on terrorism, sharing intelligence on Afghanistan and Al-Qaeda, facilitating an unprecedented US military presence in former Soviet Central Asia, and pledging overall allegiance to the West. But how much has changed? Upon coming to office, the Bush team had pointedly announced that it would review all joint programmes for protecting and eliminating Russia’s weapons of mass destruction, strongly implying that American efforts would be curtailed or discontinued.
Bush has altered US policy on Chechnya, ending criticism of Russia’s conduct of the war, a mostly rhetorical change since the criticism had always lacked teeth such as sanctions. Bush has also just announced that he would reduce the American nuclear force to between 1,700 and 2,200 operationally deployed warheads over the next 10 years, a period in which he will not always be the president.
Conspicuously, the US administration has refused to fix arms reductions in a mutually binding treaty. Bush’s insistence on a handshake, rather than a legal instrument, is being blamed for the apparent failure of the two countries to agree on steps for abrogating or modifying the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which stands in the way of the Americans’ pursuit of a chimerical missile defence.
Elite circles in Moscow continue to vacillate between a foreign policy built upon advancing prosperity or upon declining military power. The Russian president, who has reiterated Russia’s desire for a place in the West without relinquishing its interests in Korea, Iran, Iraq, India and China, is the one who has proven to be profoundly pragmatic. By and large the Russian agenda, irony of ironies, has become economic-driven.
Most immediately, Russia seeks greater access, à la China, to the United States domestic market for its manufacturing. Above all, Moscow wants America to stop trying to block Russia’s mutually advantageous participation in the Caspian oil and gas bonanza.
Energy development, then, like trade and non-proliferation co-operation, could create the kind of stable relationship for which heavily orchestrated atmospherics become a silly memory.
Next Article