REGARDING RUSSIA
In spite of its current confusion and debility, Russia will be one of the handful of nations that will determine the course of the 21st century. Those who doubt its continuing centrality should remember that Russia seemed even feebler than it is today in the teens and twenties, yet determined much of the world's course in the twentieth century.
For centuries, Russia has been torn between a desire for splendid, brooding, and sometimes dangerous isolation and a desire to play a major role in, even become a part, of Europe and the broader West. Paradoxically, Marxism-Leninism, imported from the West as a tool for its instant Westernization, became a tool for its subsequent isolation and distancing from the West.
Today, Russians struggle to redefine their political system, economy, and, most important, their place in the world. The verdict is not yet in: neither we nor they can expect to know the answer in this decade.
Yet so far, we have both been fortunate. An anachronism as the leader of the world's last empire as late as 1990, today's Russia has renounced its imperial boundaries and overseen the transformation of the USSR into a series of successor states. This has been managed with surprisingly little violence, and has produced a marked growth in democratic freedom and market economies in both Russia and the smaller successor states.
The United States and its European allies have played a major part in this transformation. Without their aid, the outcome could have been very different. Yet for many Russians, this aid is as hard a burden to bear as the poverty and violence that it has minimized. We must never forget that few recipients of what looks like charity can accept it thankfully-the pain is all the greater when the recipients have seen themselves as major players on the world stage.
What the United States and its allies do in the next decade to further the democratic transformation, modernization, even "Westernization", of Russia will depend in large part on how policy makers, opinion makers, and Western publics understand the process that is now underway. Two different understandings have developed in the last few years. Each has led and will lead to different policy initiatives, and each to different atmospherics-important in a situation in which what is said is almost as important as what is done. It will critical for all of us which understanding predominates.
Let me define these understandings as the "exclusionary" and the "inclusionary". To sharpen the argument, we will describe them in relatively extreme terms, realizing that most opinion and policy makers will fall somewhere between these poles.
The exclusionary understanding emphasizes that "we won the cold war". Russia is a defeated country and should understand itself as such. It is essentially powerless in today's world: as such, it has little right to demand an important role in world affairs. It is attempting to set up a democratic system and a free economy, but old ways die hard. It will be many years before it can be accepted into the community of free nations. In fact, it may never be accepted, because there are forces of darkness in Russia that continue to threaten to turn the clock back. The exclusionary judges what goes on in Russia against the standard of an idealized, thoroughly modern, Western democracy. Our media are filled with reports of the way in which Russian elections are controlled by the government's control of the media or by the conscienceless distribution of favors to voters. Western publics have been treated to a barrage of stories about the brutal repression of Chechnya by Russian soldiers intent on denying the right of the people of Chechnya to self-determination.
Because of the ever-present danger posed by Russian instability and the continued strength of authoritarian and communist elements, we must maintain strong forces ready to rapidly respond to new threats from the major military machine Russia still commands. We must take advantage of this present period of relative Russian weakness to restrict as far as possible its ability to ever again threaten the "free world". This means especially that we should strive to expand NATO to the east so that "our military frontier" protects our new friends in the Baltic States and Eastern Europe against any chance that a revived Russia will again threaten them. However, NATO should not be expanded to include Russia itself. Two main arguments are advanced. First, as Chechnya illustrates, Russia remains and will remain too undemocratic and authoritarian to take its place within a community of the enlightened West.
Second, the fundamental interests of Russia are and will remain so different from those of other states in NATO that its incorporation would fatally impair the ability of NATO to function effectively.
The inclusionary understanding judges Russia against the standard of its recent history and the record of modern democracies as they developed over time toward the liberal, stabilized democracy they enjoy today. Inclusionaries are interested less in deviations of Russian political and economic behavior from the modern ideal than with the far-reaching changes that have occurred, and the extent to which Russians high and Iow have abandoned old ways and striven to accept new ones, both in their thinking and behavior. They understand Chechnya to be a tragedy, and unfortunately a tragedy that may be repeated as Russia struggles toward a modern national identity. They remember that abandoning empire and retiring to new borders is always a painful process. They remember the tragedy of a surely democratic France as it attempted to bloodily maintain its control over Algeria. They also remember that major democratic states such as the United States and the United Kingdom violently oppressed minority peoples in minority enclaves (Irish, Sioux, Cherokee, Hawaiians) before and during the process of stabilizing their national borders. They remember that India, however democratic in its heartland, has felt driven by the requirements of its internal democratic politics to violently struggle against several of the minority peoples situated along the national perimeter. They also note that Turkey, long accepted as a member of NATO, resolved one minority problem earlier in the century by driving out the Armenians, and still devotes much of its military force to an unending war with the Kurds of its eastern highlands. They understand that it ill behooves peoples who have worked through such problems to a peaceful present to condemn unduly peoples who have not yet had this opportunity.
With this understanding of events in Russia, inclusionaries advocate a policy of steady and positive engagement in the process of Russian democratic development and modernization. While they believe we must criticize shortcomings at times, we should place what we now abhor in a comparative perspective that avoids condemnation wherever possible. We should work with the other successor states of the Russian empire and the newly independent Eastern Europeans, but our policy should be even-handed, never appearing to favor these states over Russia, or to ally with them against Russia. Since the inclusionary remembers that NATO was established as a league of states opposed to the USSR (and thus to Russia, its former leader), inclusionary policy cannot accept proposals to expand NATO up to the Russian border but no further.
Militarily, the inclusionary understands that maintaining a strong United States is necessary for both American and world security. But the great task of the next century will be to continue to enlist Russia in support of the American effort. This will include the augmentation of world security through tighter and tighter restrictions on nuclear weapons and their deployment, increased cooperation in training and eventually weapons procurement, and the development of more and more situations in which we can cooperatively work together for our common defense. Inclusionaries understand that U.S. and Russian interests will often diverge, just as our interests and those of our other allies have diverged (remembering the struggle with France and England as late as the 1950s over their Suez intervention). But they will see a major task of U.S. foreign policy to be the containment of inevitable policy clashes so that the main thrust of increasing cooperation is not knocked off track.
Politically, the inclusionary understands that the next few years may see the rise to power of persons and groups in Russia that we disapprove of, whose policies are anathema to much that we believe in, or that we believe are not good for the Russian people. Russia remains a proud country, likely to have its periods of Gaullism, of swings toward and away from market and other freedoms. At some point these swings may make further cooperation difficult if not impossible. Then we may need to think again, to structure an alliance of forces against, not with, Russia. But unless this point is reached, our policy must be to work through periods of tension and disagreement with as little pain and loss of face to either side as possible.
It is my judgment that the exclusionary understanding of events in Russia and of our proper response to them may lead to a safe policy and may reap many short-term benefits. But if in reaping these benefits, it leads us to miss the opportunity of extending the arena of modern democracy and freedom to include Russia as a full partner we will have made a major error that will haunt the next century.
If you wish to place this discussion within a larger framework, click on an earlier analysis of the future of world order.