McCain, Obama and Russia

Comment
By Stephen F. Cohen

June 30, 2008

Neither of the two major American presidential candidates has
seriously addressed, or even seems fully aware of, what should be our
greatest foreign policy concern--Russia's singular capacity to
endanger or enhance our national security. Overshadowed by the US
disaster in Iraq, Moscow's importance will continue long after that
war ends.

Despite its diminished status following the Soviet breakup in 1991,
Russia alone possesses weapons that can destroy the United States, a
military-industrial complex nearly America's equal in exporting arms,
vast quantities of questionably secured nuclear materials sought by
terrorists and the planet's largest oil and natural gas reserves. It
also remains the world's largest territorial country, pivotally
situated in the West and the East, at the crossroads of colliding
civilizations, with strategic capabilities from Europe, Iran and other
Middle East nations to North Korea, China, India, Afghanistan and even
Latin America. All things considered, our national security may depend
more on Russia than Russia's does on us.

And yet US-Russian relations are worse today than they have been in
twenty years. The relationship includes almost as many serious
conflicts as it did during the cold war--among them, Kosovo, Iran, the
former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia, Venezuela, NATO
expansion, missile defense, access to oil and the Kremlin's internal
politics--and less actual cooperation, particularly in essential
matters involving nuclear weapons. Indeed, a growing number of
observers on both sides think the relationship is verging on a new
cold war, including another arms race.

Even the current cold peace could be more dangerous than its
predecessor, for three reasons: First, its front line is not in Berlin
or the Third World but on Russia's own borders, where US and NATO
military power is increasingly ensconced. Second, lethal dangers
inherent in Moscow's impaired controls over its vast stockpiles of
materials of mass destruction and thousands of missiles on hair-
trigger alert, a legacy of the state's disintegration in the 1990s,
exceed any such threats in the past. And third, also unlike before,
there is no effective domestic opposition to hawkish policies in
Washington or Moscow, only influential proponents and cheerleaders.

How did it come to this? Less than twenty years ago, in 1989-90, the
Soviet Russian and American leaders, Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W.
Bush, completing a process begun by Gorbachev and President Reagan,
agreed to end the cold war, with "no winners and no losers," as even
Condoleezza Rice once wrote, and begin a new era of "genuine
cooperation." In the US policy elite and media, the nearly unanimous
answer is that Russian President Vladimir Putin's antidemocratic
domestic policies and "neo-imperialism" destroyed that historic
opportunity.

You don't have to be a Putin apologist to understand that this is not
an adequate explanation. During the last eight years, Putin's foreign
policies have been largely a reaction to Washington's winner-take-all
approach to Moscow since the early 1990s, which resulted from a
revised US view of how the cold war ended [see Cohen, "The New
American Cold War," July 10, 2006]. In that new triumphalist
narrative, America "won" the forty-year conflict and post-Soviet
Russia was a defeated nation analogous to post-World War II Germany
and Japan--a nation without full sovereignty at home or autonomous
national interests abroad.

The policy implication of that bipartisan triumphalism, which persists
today, has been clear, certainly to Moscow. It meant that the United
States had the right to oversee Russia's post-Communist political and
economic development, as it tried to do directly in the 1990s, while
demanding that Moscow yield to US international interests. It meant
Washington could break strategic promises to Moscow, as when the
Clinton Administration began NATO's eastward expansion, and disregard
extraordinary Kremlin overtures, as when the Bush Administration
unilaterally withdrew from the ABM Treaty and granted NATO membership
to countries even closer to Russia--despite Putin's crucial assistance
to the US war effort in Afghanistan after September 11. It even meant
America was entitled to Russia's traditional sphere of security and
energy supplies, from the Baltics, Ukraine and Georgia to Central Asia
and the Caspian.

Such US behavior was bound to produce a Russian backlash. It came
under Putin, but it would have been the reaction of any strong Kremlin
leader, regardless of soaring world oil prices. And it can no longer
be otherwise. Those US policies--widely viewed in Moscow as an
"encirclement" designed to keep Russia weak and to control its
resources--have helped revive an assertive Russian nationalism,
destroy the once strong pro-American lobby and inspire widespread
charges that concessions to Washington are "appeasement," even
"capitulationism." The Kremlin may have overreacted, but the cause and
effect threatening a new cold war are clear.

Because the first steps in this direction were taken in Washington, so
must be initiatives to reverse it. Three are essential and urgent: a
US diplomacy that treats Russia as a sovereign great power with
commensurate national interests; an end to NATO expansion before it
reaches Ukraine, which would risk something worse than cold war; and a
full resumption of negotiations to sharply reduce and fully secure all
nuclear stockpiles and to prevent the impending arms race, which
requires ending or agreeing on US plans for a missile defense system
in Europe. My recent discussions with members of Moscow's policy elite
suggest, whether Russia's real leader is its new President Dmitri
Medvedev or Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, that there may still be
time for such initiatives to elicit Kremlin responses that would
enhance rather than further endanger our national security.

American presidential campaigns are supposed to discuss such vital
issues, but neither Senator McCain nor Senator Obama has done so.
Instead, in varying degrees, both have promised to be "tougher" on the
Kremlin than George W. Bush has allegedly been and to continue the
encirclement of Russia and the hectoring "democracy promotion" there,
which have only undermined US security and Russian democracy since the
1990s.

To be fair, no influential actors in American politics, including the
media, have asked the candidates about any of these crucial issues.
They should do so now before another chance is lost, in Washington and
in Moscow.