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Moscow Times
April 19, 2004
Foreign Policy: U.S. First or Russia First
By Caroline McGregor
Staff Writer

LESNIYE DALI, Moscow Region -- Russia's loyal cooperation with the West and Western interests makes it the naive wife to the West's unfettered husband, or so goes the colorful analogy proposed Saturday during a characteristically dry discussion of foreign policy priorities.

It sparked lively debate among the more than 100 members of the political and business elite gathered at the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy annual weekend retreat. Not everyone agreed, though many acknowledged the psychological difficulty for Moscow in feeling it has clung to a relationship that it values more than Europe and the United States.

Among the chirping birds and wooded walks of Lesniye Dali, a resort west of Moscow owned by the presidential administration, retired ambassadors and company executives mixed with professors, media commentators and lawmakers. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also attended some of the sessions.

Speakers -- whose remarks were barred from attribution under rules laid down by council chairman Sergei Karaganov -- said that with the entire international community in a state of flux with an unprecedented war on terrorism and the crisis in Iraq, the role Russia should play in the world remains murky.

Although Russia lacks a long-term vision and policy goals, so do most countries, one prominent member observed. "I don't think any country truly knows what role they should be playing," he said, giving a view echoed many times.

Yet few disputed that Russia's future lies in integration with -- not isolation from -- the West.

Alongside that, one pro-Western speaker noted, there will be stiff competition between the United States and Russia for influence in the former Soviet space, where the United States has parlayed its military presence in countries like Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia and Ukraine into economic ties. Meanwhile, for Moscow, cooperation and free-trade zones with the CIS have rarely been more than a lukewarm priority.

Russia should assert its position in the CIS, since it has too few allies to carelessly allow relations with the states in its backyard to deteriorate -- not least because those nations are a key export market for Russian goods, several attendees said.

One council member observed that Moscow has remained silent for the past two weeks on Armenia, where opposition to President Robert Kocharyan has swelled, prompting talk of a regime change similar to Georgia's. "The United States, in our position, would not be on the sidelines," the member said, criticizing the policy void.

In the absence of other guiding factors, Russia's foreign policy should be an extension of its internal economic priorities, some speakers proposed.

Some participants questioned why Russia should compromise its interests -- for example, possibly abandoning a lucrative contract to build a nuclear power station in Iran that Washington suspects of harboring a nuclear weapons program -- when the West "would never do the same for us."

"It's like a woman in a civil union who says, 'I'm married,' while the man thinks, 'I'm not married.' America is free to act as it wishes, and we think we're married," one participant said. "We're playing the role of the naive wife."

"The policy we need is not 'America first,' but 'Russia first,'" he said, switching to English -- the lingua franca of contemporary diplomacy -- to pronounce the two phrases.

So did another, who agreed that there had been too much "wishful thinking." Still others spoke of "policy shifts."

As members seated around a giant horseshoe table in the colonnaded meeting hall traded comments, State Duma International Affairs Committee chairman Konstantin Kosachyov at one point whispered in animated conversation with fellow Deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov. A few seats away, liberal politician Irina Khakamada and Renaissance Capital managing director Yury Kobaladze did the same.

Andrei Fyodorov, the council's head of political programs, said during a coffee break that Russia's foreign policy has been too dependent on President Vladimir Putin's personal relationships with other heads of state. "We're living summit to summit. We're not speaking of strategic partnerships anymore," he said.

More and more, he said, Russia's affairs with Europe will need to be conducted through Brussels, rather than Paris or Berlin. He proposed that the EU appoint a special commissioner for Russia to keep the lines of communication permanently open.

Russia has also lacked a high-level channel with the United States, ever since the mid-1990s Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission dissolved. Fyodorov said institutionalizing a dialog between Security Council Chairman Igor Ivanov and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice would be ideal.

Much of the discussion centered on the United Nations, with overwhelming agreement that the UN could bring order and stability to Iraq, where the United States has failed to do so.

Yury Dubinin, a former ambassador to Washington, compared the UN to Winston Churchill's view on democracy. "It may be a bad system, but we have found nothing better," he said.

The inability of NATO troops deployed in Kosovo to prevent outbreaks in ethnic violence was also roundly criticized.

Two reports were on the table for discussion Saturday: one of the foreign policy agenda, one on military construction.

Alexei Salmin, president of the Russian Public Policy Center, said he had been attending the annual retreats since the council was founded 12 years ago. "Usually there's more consensus, but usually the discussion themes are more concrete," he said.

This time, rather than debating the ins and outs of a given treaty, there were broader, deeper questions of Russia's approach to the world.

While members lunched Saturday with colleagues and family members who joined them at the resort, Karaganov told reporters of preliminary plans to create something parallel to the Alliance Francaise or British Council as a way to promote better understanding of Russia and support Russians living abroad.

"It would be a special agency, supervised and funded by the Foreign Ministry," he said.

On Sunday, the forum was to discuss a report on strategic development for the 21st century, submitted by the "New Generation" youth arm of the council. That report painted a stark picture of Russia's current diplomatic position: Russia now is experiencing "a profound management crisis," the authors wrote, and Russia's global position has been weakened by its "failed attempts to play off the opposition between the Western great powers, both across the Atlantic and within the European Union."

The council's reports are to be released on its web site, www.svop.ru, after being updated to reflect members' final consensus.