U.S. Comprehensive Strategy Toward Russia
By James Jay Carafano, Ph.D., Ted R. Bromund, Ph.D., Dean Cheng, Luke Coffey, Lisa Curtis, Helle C. Dale, Michaela Dodge, David Inserra, Bruce Klingner, Daniel Kochis, Ryan Olson, James Phillips, Ana Quintana, Bryan Riley, Brian Slattery and William T. Wilson, Ph.D.
Asian Studies Center
Introduction
Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has not had a coherent, comprehensive strategy toward Russia. As the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrates, the U.S. has paid a price for this failure and, of course, many of Russia’s neighbors have paid far higher prices. At the core of the U.S. failure has been an unwillingness to assess the nature of the Russian regime realistically and to base its policy on that assessment. Too often, the U.S. has relied on wishful thinking.
Comprehensive strategy is commonly held to be a serious and ongoing effort to relate the means and ends of national policy and—within the limits of the U.S. system—to mobilize all national assets to achieve those ends. Yet it also requires something more fundamental: a sense of where you are.
U.S. comprehensive strategy toward Russia must be part of an even larger strategy and cannot be an end in itself because—unlike during the Cold War—Russia is not the U.S.’s primary opponent, even though Russia has defined itself as a geopolitical adversary to the U.S. But precisely because part of Russia’s strategy relies on returning to the Soviet approach of playing the spoiler, Russia is irresponsibly involved in many of the world’s problems, hot spots, and crises.
Within the overarching need for a U.S. comprehensive strategy, Russia poses four distinct, but related problems for U.S. policy:
First, Putin’s Russia is a regime that combines a lack of respect for political, civil, and economic rights with a dysfunctional economy.
Second and most dangerous for the United States, Russia poses a series of worldwide strategic and diplomatic challenges, including buildup of its nuclear arsenal and military.
Third, Russia poses threats to discrete U.S. friends, allies, and interests around the world.
Fourth, Russia’s cooperation with bad actors and its increasing tendency to play a spoiler role pose another set of threats.
This report addresses all four problems in turn after setting out the comprehensive strategy on which the U.S. should base its response.
Section One The Framework of U.S. Comprehensive Strategy Toward Russia
U.S. strategy toward Russia should begin with a basic point. Since 1991, U.S. policymakers, scholars, and journalists have largely operated under the assumption that post-Soviet Russia was on a bumpy and faltering, yet real road to democracy.[1] This assumption has blinded observers to the reality that Russia was on a successful road to becoming a kleptocratic autocracy. Of course, this regime has not succeeded in modernizing the Russian economy, reversing its catastrophic demographic collapse, or fostering the creation of widespread wealth. But since the mid-1990s, Russia has not been journeying haltingly toward freedom. Instead, its leaders, in particular Vladimir Putin, have intelligently and systemically directed it toward becoming what it now is: a functioning, well-developed tyranny.
The U.S. failure to recognize Russia’s direction of travel and its destination has led the U.S. to adopt a strategy based fundamentally on the belief that the best way to foster democracy in Russia was to engage with it. Russia was invited into international organizations that nominally required its members to be wealthy democracies, when in fact Russia was neither. The arrival of Dmitry Medvedev as Russia’s president in 2008 was taken as a serious advance of Russian democracy and a harbinger of better things to come, not as the head fake it actually was.
In 2001, President George W. Bush “looked the man [Putin] in the eye…[and] found him to be very straight forward and trustworthy.”[2] By late 2008, after Russia’s attack on Georgia, Bush’s error was obvious. In 2009, the Obama Administration launched its “reset” of relations with Russia, which was premised on the argument that the U.S., not Russia, was responsible for the post-Georgian deterioration of U.S.–Russian relations. By 2015, after Russia’s attack on Ukraine, President Barack Obama’s error was also obvious. U.S. concessions did not improve U.S.–Russian relations; instead, they convinced the Russians that the U.S. was willing to accord Russia an equality of status and a regional role that Russia’s actual achievements did not merit.
The engagement strategy sought to treat Russia as the U.S. hoped it would become, not as it actually was, in the belief that this was the best way to ensure that Russia made progress. In practice, all this strategy did was enable Russia’s move to autocracy and, far more importantly, encourage the U.S. to excuse Russia’s failures on the grounds that, because Russia was a developing democracy, the U.S. should expect less of it. By this way of thinking, pointing honestly to Russia’s human rights abuses or its wars in Chechnya and Georgia was an impediment to the development of democracy in Russia, because by pointing out the negative, the U.S. failed to accentuate the positive. This is a textbook example of the soft bigotry of low expectation.
Russia’s apologists argue, vociferously, that the U.S. was responsible for the deterioration in U.S.–Russian relations. They point to the NATO campaign in Kosovo in 1999, the U.S. missile defense program in Eastern Europe, U.S.-supported efforts to promote democracy and good governance in post-Soviet nations, and above all the expansion of NATO. This argument assumes that Russia has a right to exercise a neo-imperial control over its neighbors and that those neighbors have no corresponding right to determine their own destiny. What the Russian regime could not tolerate is quite simple: any independent sources of power on its borders or inside them that could resist the regime’s will.
The long-run history of Russia’s relations with the West raises a fundamental question for American comprehensive strategy. Since at least the 17th century, Russia has been torn—and has oscillated—between viewing itself as a basically Western nation or as a great and imperial power that embodies values apart from those of the West and has historical license to control its neighbors in the name of increasing its power and advancing its concept of civilization. It is possible to view the rise of the Putin regime as simply another moment in Russian history when the pendulum has swung away from the West.[3] If that is the case, Russia is a problem that will be with the West for a very long time, although its urgency will wax and wane.
If Russia was bound to swing toward autocracy regardless of the West’s actions, then the West—having won the Cold War—was wise to take chips off the table while it could. In other words, it was wise to lock in its gains in Eastern Europe before Russia’s belief in its imperial destiny revived. On the other hand, if a Russian transition to democracy was genuinely possible in the early 1990s, that would surely have entailed a recognition that its neighbors were not imperial possessions and a corresponding recognition that their membership in NATO posed no threat to Russia. In short, no matter what view one takes of the question of NATO enlargement, the problem ultimately comes back to Russia’s view of its own national identity and role in the world.
These questions are not answerable with any finality, but they are still vital. By the same token, it is important for U.S. policymakers to consider whether the Putin regime is fundamentally driven by ideology (i.e., regret at the collapse of the Soviet Union, hatred of the U.S. and the Western world order, and a desire to recover as much from the wreckage as possible) or more traditional Russian imperialism. This is not a new question: The U.S. had to consider it during the Cold War as well. It was possible to view the Soviet Union as being little more than Tsarist imperialism in a new guise. It was equally possible to view it, thanks to Communism, as far more ideological, aggressive, and expansive than Tsarist Russia ever was. If Putin is fundamentally motivated by ideology, he will go further and faster, and he will be less inclined to respect internal or external constraints than if he is motivated fundamentally by a desire for power.
In the end, during the Cold War, it was not an either/or question: Both ideology and power mattered, and their relationship was complex. The same is true today. Even historians will find it challenging to decide what motivated Putin, but that does not absolve U.S. policymakers from considering the question. If comprehensive strategy begins with knowing where you are, much of that, in turn, comes down to trying to understand other actors not as you wish to see them, but as they see themselves and as they actually are. For now, the U.S. can only observe that Putin’s Russia—and Putin himself—advance a harshly anti-American ideology and that his actions at home and abroad are those of a national leader who wishes to be as strong and as unopposed as he can be, and to appear even stronger than that.
Yet the gap between appearances and reality is large. While American policymakers need to recognize the reality of Russian autocracy and hostility, they should not give Russia too much credit. The fundamental reality is that time is not on Russia’s side. It has made a geopolitical splash for reasons that are as simple as they are fragile: Russia has many weak neighbors. It benefitted from the high price of oil. It faced little effective Western pushback, and as an autocracy it is capable of mobilizing force and subversion in ways that Western democracies find difficult. Yet none of its actions since the mid-1990s have added in any enduring way to its strength. The path to world power does not lie in crushing Chechnya, occupying slices of Georgia, or taking Crimea. These are not assets. They are liabilities.
Russia is a declining power with feet of clay in every way except for the size and geopolitical centrality of its territory, its energy resources, its nuclear arsenal, the modern portion of its conventional armed forces, and above all its willingness to attack, subvert, and play the spoiler. If not for these factors, Russia would be of only very limited significance to U.S. policy. It can play what is fundamentally a weak hand because it is regionally strong and acts stronger than it is, while the U.S. and Europe have cared little, done less, and shown less will. Russian weaknesses would come into play if the West pressed its advantages.
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http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2015/12/us-comprehensive-strategy-toward-russia
